Showdown: A Novel

A classic Brazilian “Western” full of romance and adventure, violence and courage, and peopled with wonderfully earthy characters from the legendary author’s childhood.
 
“Set in Bahia at the turn of the century, Showdown is brimming with the gunmen, fugitives, prostitutes and other characters who settled that sunbaked northeastern state.”—The New York Times
 
“[Jorge] Amado has returned to some of his earliest, most radical concerns, confronting Brazilian society, memory, and mythmaking, and aiming to show, by anecdote, how the Brazil of the modernizing present has buried its (criminal) past.”—Commentary
 
“The Brazil [Amado] writes about in Showdown shares many of the traditions of the American frontier, and that is something Americans can relate to.”—Linda Grey, former Bantam president and publisher
 
“Showdown is a combination of the old Amado, who wrote Bahian historical novels, and the new Amado, with the spirit of Gabriela.”—Gregory Rabassa, National Book Award–winning translator of Showdown

Jorge Amado—novelist, journalist, lawyer—was born in 1912, the son of a cacao planter, in Ilheus, south of Salvador, the provincial capital of Gabriela, clavo y canela. His first novel, Cacao, was published when he was 19. It was an impassioned plea for social justice for the workers on Bahian cacao plantations; and his novels of the ’30s and ’40s would continue to dramatize class struggle. Not until the 1950s did he write his great literary comic novels—Gabriela, clavo y canela and Doña Flor y sus dos maridos—which take aim at the full spectrum of society even as they pay ebullient tribute to the region of his birth. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the ’60s, Amado has been translated into more than 35 languages. A highly successful film version of Doña Flor was produced in Brazil in 1976. He died in 2001.