Shepherds of the Night

Synopsis

"This work can be described tersely but not unfairly as a contribution to the debate on Brazilian self-definition, rendered ineffective by being cast in the form of pastoral. Amado's theme is the life of the Bahian poor: not the whole of their lives, for we seldom glimpse them at the back-breaking work that must occupy some of their waking hours, but their leisure life. His scene is laid in cheap brothels, alleys, shanties on the beaches, and in those hidden shrines on the mountainsides where the priests and priestesses of Ogun or Oxala exact their rites...