Sergeant Getulio

London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1980. Hardcover. very good. 18 cm. xii, [2], 146 pages. Introduction by Jorge Amado. Minor edge soiling. João Ubaldo Ribeiro (January 23, 1941 - July 18, 2014) was a Brazilian writer, journalist, screenwriter and professor. Several of his books and short tales have been turned into movies and TV series in Brazil. Ribeiro was member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, being elected in 1994. At the time of his death many considered him to be Brazil's greatest contemporary novelist. In 1964 Ribeiro left the country for political reasons and went to the United States to study economics. But in 1965 he returned to Brazil and lectured in political science at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. After six years, he was, however, back on his academic career and went back to journalism. In 1971 his novel Sargento Getúlio was published, with which he made his breakthrough as a writer. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado calls this book by his countryman ""a great novel"". There's no denying, even from a translation (by the author himself), that this is a muscular, unyielding, and significant work. Sergeant Getulio is a killer but not a death machine of the modern style. Sent into the Brazilian backwater to escort a political prisoner to jail, Getulio, accompanied by only a driver named Amaro, gets and brutalizes his man, beating all the while through the brush and stopping overnight at a farmer's house where troops aligned with the prisoner try, unsuccessfully, to effect a liberation. The carnage throughout is unremittingly gory--the prisoner is tortured gruesomely. The threesome of Getulio, Amaro, and the prisoner become the hunted--and the book begins to have a Godot-like feel, a wasteland with morals compromised beyond horror. Getulio is clearly a monster and hero at the same time, and Ribeiro's large achievement is to keep us wondering how can this be.