Volume 32, Number 3 · February 28, 1985
The Backlands Rebellion
By Michael Wood
The War of the End of the World
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 568 pp., $18.95
The facts are simple and strange. At the end of the last century, on a scrubland plateau in northeastern Brazil, a raggletaggle band of vagrants, robbers, and ascetics rebelled against the very idea of modern progress. They rejected the recently proclaimed Brazilian republic, and refused to pay taxes or to recognize civil marriages—all of which seemed to them the work of the Antichrist. They were sure the last days of the world were at hand, when the rivers would run with milk, the earth would change places with the sea, and Dom Sebastian, the legendary, long-vanished king of Portugal, would come again to announce the new heaven and to save the just.
Review, 2612 words
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