These are the recollections of Alexandre--of his life, his
death-in-life, and his ultimate death, as they are played out
against the mobile tapestry of the valley where he was born. The
valley itself, in the backlands of the state of Bahia, Brazil,
alternates at different stages in Alexandre's consciousness between
reality and symbol. It swings from a harsh regional specificity to
become the panorama of all human life, its endless, eroding wind
the devouring hostility of all environments and its pain the pain
of every human being in the face of his own brutality and that of
others.
Throughout the novel Alexandre's mind ranges from sharp
awareness, through hallucination, to oblivion ("a man dies while
alive," says Jeronimo, his mentor), and back again as he
experiences the violent, obtuse phenomena of life in the
valley--his universe and ours. This latter-day Lazarus leaves the
resisting hills and black sky once only, hounded by the valley
dwellers who believe he has murdered his wife, her father, and her
brother. Yet despite his awareness of the horror of the valley and
his intuition of something beyond it, it is precisely his contact
with the gentler existence to which he escapes that forces
Alexandre to recognize his nature for what it is. Turning his back
on a greater and more varied range of feeling and experience, he
chooses the narrow ferocity of the valley, to which he returns to
die the final death for which the earlier deaths have prepared
him.
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