An Immortal's Parting Reverie

THE THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER AND OTHER STORIES by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. 238 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

In 1967, four years after he was judged an "immortal" worthy of being seated by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Joao Guimaraes Rosa donned the official gold-braided uniform and formally took his chair. Publicly, he explained the delay by saying he had been too busy to write his acceptance speech. Privately, he feared that becoming an "immortal" was an unnecessary challenge to his own mortality. Seventy-two hours after the ceremony, his seven-year-old niece went into his study to offer him some popcorn and found him dead of a heart attack.

In the Heartland. Not many men have lived as fully and as widely as Guimaraes Rosa did in his 59 years. Born in the feral heartland state of Minas Gerais, he was a physician, veterinarian, herbist, linguist, diplomat and government official in charge of border affairs. Writing fiction was just another way of annexing experience, and he occupied his territory thoroughly and imaginatively. His novel Grande Sert`ao: Veredas, published in the U.S. in 1963 as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, is encyclopedic in its embrace of Minas Gerais ecology. Yet it is as exciting as a North American western:

The same is true of Sagarana (U.S. edition: 1966), a cycle of stories in which Guimaraes Rosa's Joycean prose turns the folklore and rough-and-tumble of backwoods life into a fresh order of experience. Unfortunately, much of the wordplay, coinages, dialect and rhythms are lost in the passage from Portuguese to English.

Doing Nothing. The style of many regionalist writers generates inward pressures that condense the atmosphere of a time and place -- for example, the palpable Dixie gothic of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Guimaraes Rosa's style is centrifugal. Shooting out to ignite the familiar details of the author's vigorous humanism, it transcends particulars and turns events into allegory. In The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories,* many of the particulars dissolve, leaving the author's metaphysical core standing alone. It is as Guimaraes Rosa intended. The book is his Tempest, the parting reverie, the mystical indulgence after the hurlyburly, the lightening of the load for a final assault on the summit.

The aging Uncle Man'Antonio in Nothingness and the Human Condition gives away all that he has accumulated during an eventful, prosperous life. "He no longer questioned anything -- horizon or eternity -- peak or zenith. And so he lived, carrying the burden of years, erect, serene, and doing a doing-nothing with all his might, in acceptance of the emptiness, the ever-repeated inconsequence, of his life."

The well-dressed man in Much Ado escapes a band of small-town hecklers by clambering to the top of a palm tree. There he turns himself into the latter-day equivalent of a 5th century pillar hermit. He promptly sheds all his clothes, capers among the fronds, and calls down unintelligible holy statements. Comments the narrator: "I could not resist a vague intellectual empathy toward the man who was now an abstraction -- who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs all his responsibilities to live adrift on a river in an open boat. There, fading from the reader's view, he seeks the spiritual dimension: the third bank of the river.

Not all the stories in the collection are as ethereal. Many abound with typical Guimaraes Rosa characters-robust, self-reliant, as tough and conspicuous as knots in sawn planks. But the ones that matter most are those whose concentric fibers appear to loosen until, stubborn obstructions no longer, they begin to flow with the grain.

* The Brazilian edition, published in 1962, was titled Primeiras Estorias (First Stories). The index was illustrated with pictograms representing the themes of the tales; the drawings are reprinted on the dust jacket of the U.S. edition.

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