NP R.I.P magical-realist pioneer Jorge Amado

[Doug Millison]

Jorge Amado, perhaps Brazil's best-known author and a perennial nominee
for the Nobel Prize, died in El Salvador yesterday at the age of 88. A
fervent communist for most of his life, Amado fell in and out of favor
with various Brazilian government administrations and spent much of his
time in exile. As his political point of view mellowed, a quality that
was reflected in his writing, Amado grew in popularity and achieved
bestseller status with the 1958 novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
(Morrow, $6.99), the story of a bar owner in Bahia, Brazil's cocoa belt,
and his primitive lover.

Readers abroad first took notice with 1970 movie adaptation of his 1966
novel, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (Morrow, $6.99). The lusty story
centers around a remarried widow whose philandering first husband, a
drinker and gambler, who reappears from beyond-the-grave for even more
sexual escapades.

An early exemplar of the "magic-realist" school of writing, Amado took
his mysticism to heart and worked surrounded by monkeys, birds and
statues of deities of Candomble, a spirit religion brought by African
slaves, of which he was a high official. He once said, "In Bahia, magic
is a powerful facet of reality. Here we are all spellbinders of sorts."
Nonetheless, his favorite writers remained Mark Twain and Charles
Dickens, whose books he felt were "full of the smell, taste and blood of
my country."

His latest work to be translated into English and published in the U.S.
is the novel The War of the Saints (Bantam, $14.95).--Edward Nawotka

--PW Daily for Booksellers August 7, 2001