da Cunha

[Steelhead]

Terry asks, in a minor key:
>       I've been reading along about V. but not rereading the novel. If so
>many responses can occur over the question of a minor fourth, how about a
>couple
>about a minor character: da Cunha? I've always wondered, why is he a Brazilian?
>
>      I mean, Brazilians are hardly ever characters in American fiction.
>Offhand
>I can't think of another (if one sets aside books by Peter Matthiessen & Updike
>actually set in Brazil). So why Brazilian? Is it true--as a Brazilian once told
>me--that da Cunha isn't even a Brazilian name?
>
>      Would it make any difference is the guy was Colombian or Albanian or Ni-
>gerian?

Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) was one of Brazil's greatest writers and thinkers.
His bizarre book Rebellion in the Backlands, about a strange religious cult's
millenialist revolution against the Brazillian government, was shamelessly
plagarized by Mario Vargas Llosa for his The War of the End of the World.
da Cunha was killed in a duel with his wife's lover. And thus the revelance
to V. The name is Portuguese, of which, Brazil was a colony.

Steely