Vhere are two children. Two sisters: Bibiana and Belonisia, daughters of the depths of the Bahian Sertao. Their grandmother, Donana, has a closely guarded secret. A knife, hidden in a trunk. One day, they decide to find out more. But a terrible accident occurs. He will bind them for life. The start of Torto Arado, novel by Bahian writer Itamar Vieira Junior, is like the following pages: of incredible intensity and poetry. It is not for nothing that the book, an account of the life of a community in the interior of the North, has become one of the greatest literary successes of recent years in Brazil.
Published in Portugal in 2019 by LeYa editions, then in Brazil by Todavia, the work with the mysterious title (“twisted plow”) won in quick succession, in 2020, the prestigious Jabuti and Oceanos awards. Torto Arado, sold more than 100,000 copies, has become a “best-seller of the pandemic”, its author is compared to the greatest novelists of the Nordeste (Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Joao Guimaraes Rosa …) and the book recommended as reading by former left-wing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, also a native of Sertao.
Such a success can be explained first of all by the talent of the author, a geographer by profession, of whom it is the first novel. In a precise and sincere language, the latter depicts the too little-known fate of poor small farmers, descendants of slaves, victims of famines and tyrannical landowners, finding their dignity in the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian cult of Jarê, but also in contact with this bewitching nature of forests and savannahs, populated by ancient spirits and magical panthers.
“White bad conscience”
The poverty of the countryside, racism, preservation of the environment, respect for traditional cultures… These themes appeal to many readers and Torto Arado acts like a breath of fresh air in a country ruled by the far right. It even resonates beyond literature, Itamar Vieira Junior being invited to the most prestigious political programs in order to put national news into perspective.
This success was not without controversy, however. One of them pitted the author against journalist Fabiana Moraes, who is not much of a fan of President Jair Bolsonaro. In a tweet then a column published in February on the information site The Intercept, the latter broke the ambient unanimism, criticizing a book that she sometimes considers too well-meaning or didactic, having according to her primarily vocation to “Soothes[r] the white bad conscience ”.
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