Vastlands - The Crossing Book Review and Summary

Author: João Guimarães Rosa
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL

Cousin Beatrice is currently explaining her sourdough starter’s lineage with the breathless intensity of a Hapsburg archduke mapping a disputed throne, right across a Formica table littered with crushed potato chips. One must simply endure this provincial auditory torture while evaluating João Guimarães Rosa’s Vastlands: The Crossing. The publishing house would have us swoon over Alison Entrekin’s brand-new translation as though a linguistic tour de force has never before graced the Anglophone market. Spare me. Mario Vargas Llosa bludgeons the reader with breathless praise, but what else is a Nobel laureate paid to do?

The Lawless Plateaus of Pretension

The sertão sounds dreadfully like the sort of pseudo-mythic landscape dreamed up by writers who find actual human geography too tedious to research. Feuding warlords and jagunços—oh, look, hired guns, how violently pedestrian—vie for political dominance in a single, searching monologue. Riobaldo goes from wayward youth to vigilante chief, wrestling with a possible encounter with the devil. Groundbreaking. One suspects Cormac McCarthy or even William Faulkner mapped this exact psychogeographical territory decades ago without needing an eighty-year-old Brazilian ghost whispering in their ear about metaphysical dirt. Yet, Colm Tóibín provides an introduction, lending a certain mahogany-paneled respectability to a text that otherwise smells faintly of roadside dust and sweaty horse saddles.

Wait. Let me retract that sweeping dismissal of the prose mechanics. Perhaps treating a stylistic monolith like Vastlands: The Crossing as mere cowboy posturing ignores the sheer audacity of a text that unfolds entirely in a single monologue.

Actually, no—who are we kidding? It’s giving unhinged stream-of-consciousness garbage fire, peak main character energy where a reformed thug whines about his obsessive devotion to an enigmatic figure named Diadorim while riding into battle. The eternal struggle of vengeance and power wrapped in lyrical wordplay. Utterly cooked. One shudders to imagine the sophomore English majors weaponizing these quotes on social media, completely missing the stylistic irony of a man chasing specters across high inland plateaus.

Entrekin no doubt labored mightily to capture the verbal acrobatics of the original Portuguese, but polishing a legendary linguistic boulder up a sheer cliff of untranslatable idiom is a mug’s game. Readers will buy it for the spine design and leave it unread on a credenza beside unlit taper candles.

Must dash now. I have to go coach a little league baseball game where none of the children understand the rules and they keep trying to eat the bases.

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