Nights of Song & Stars

SHEPHERDS OF THE NIGHT by Jorge Amado. 364 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

"Open the jug of rum and give me a swallow to clear my throat." That is the way tales are begun in northeastern Brazil. And when the storyteller is Jorge Amado, it is well to take another swallow and settle back for an epic journey into passion, music, gambling, a bit of fighting and all manner of discursive side trips; Amado holds that there is "nothing worse than telling a story hurry-scurry, slipshod, without carefully analyzing everything."

In this new novel, his fifth to be issued in the U.S., Amado, 54, tells tall tales of Bahia, the great, sun-drenched seaport that the Brazilian government calls Salvador. The first of his three themes deals with the astonishing marriage of Corporal Martim--a cardsharp and famed capoeria* fighter--to Marialva, who is as beautiful as a saint in a procession but as dark and devious as Lilith. This story soon blends with one about Negro Massu and the christening of his blue-eyed son. There are problems here, since Ogun, the Voodoo god of iron, has been named godfather. The priest is puzzled by the throng crowding his church for the baptism, but it goes off well since everyone knows that "Catholicism and Voodoo blend with and understand one another." The final theme describes how the people of a new favela stave off the combined power of the city, state and police.

Shepherds of the Night does not quite reach the superb level of such earlier Amado classics as The Violent Land or Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, but it ripples with the special inner music that has made Amado's work popular the world over. Like all Amado's novels, this one is filled with the coppery women of Bahia and the men who chase them through nights of song and stars. They can all say with Amado, "What I tell I know because I lived it, not because I heard it told."

* An all-out style of brawling brought by slaves from Angola and involving hands, feet, head butting and, if available, a knife or razor.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.