Captains of the Sands

by Jorge Amado, Gregory Rabassa (Translator), Colm Tóibín (Introduction)

Overview

A Brazilian Lord of the Flies, about a group of boys who live by their wits and daring in the slums of Bahia

A Penguin Classics

They call themselves “Captains of the Sands,” a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old “Bullet,” the band—including a crafty liar named “Legless,” the intellectual “Professor,” and the sexually precocious “Cat”—pulls off heists and escapades against the right and privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the “little criminals,” the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land.

Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil’s most acclaimed author.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143106357
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/25/2013
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	435,580
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) was born in the state of Bahia, Brazil, whose society he portrays in such acclaimed novels as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.

Gregory Rabassa (translator; 1922–2016) was a National Book Award–winning translator whose English-language versions of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado have become classics in their own right.

Colm Tóibín (introduction) is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including the Costa Award–winning Brooklyn and the Pulitzer Prize and Booker Prize finalist The Master.

What People are Saying About This

Colm Toibin

Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.—Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist.—The New York Times

“Brazil’s leading man of letters . . .  Amado is adored around the world!—Newsweek

 

From the Publisher

“Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.” —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist."—The New York Times

“Brazil’s leading man of letters . . .  Amado is adored around the world!” —Newsweek
 

Editorial Reviews

Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.” —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

“Indispensable . . . if you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador.” —Itamar Vieira Junior, The New York Times

"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist."—The New York Times

“Brazil’s leading man of letters . . .  Amado is adored around the world!” —Newsweek

From the Publisher

This first English-language edition of a 50-year-old novel by the popular Brazilian author of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands et al. is the last of a series of six he wrote about his native Bahia, which is a Brazilian state. The ``captains'' of the title are a gang of abandoned children who live in a waterfront warehouse and survive by robbing the rich. The novel is clearly an early effort for Amado, with self-conscious effects (such as an imagined dialogue between a gang member and an icon he wants to steal) and a tendency to romanticize the young thieves and to telegraph their destinies. But Amado's vivid descriptions of Bahia, his strong social conscience (``The problem of abandoned and delinquent children that worried almost no one in the whole city was Father Jose Pedro's greatest worry'') and his moving characterizations carry the reader along to the inevitable denouementwhich, despite its predictability, is both stirring and poignant. This edition also includes a self-righteous ``postface'' penned in 1937, in which Amado claims that ``no one until today has dared look face to face with so much love at Bahian humanity and its problems.'' (March)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly