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Land of Black Clay
by Jose Louzeiro, Translated by Ted Stroll
Price: $7.50
ISBN: 0-917990-13-7
LAND OF BLACK CLAY takes place largely in the rural township of Sapé, a town in the northeast Brazilian state of Paraíba, many hundreds of miles north-northeast of Rio de Janeiro. The main character, Jorge Elias, is a newspaper reporter from Rio de Janeiro who is assigned to cover a news story in Sapé. A judge, Odilon Fernandes, has reopened the case of a farmworker union organizer whose murder local landowners ordered in the 1960s. The initial investigation into the murder was perfunctory, but now, in the 1980s when the novel takes place, the possibility of justice is given a second chance. Land of Black Clay is a political-adventure novel reminiscent of the material from which such Costa-Gavras movies as Z and Missing were made.

Though this is a work of fiction, such union leaders as João Pedro Teixeira and Margarida Maria Alves actually lived. The land barons and their friends are fictional, as are the events themselves.

BOSON BOOKS also offers a translated version of Childhood of the Dead
by Jost Louzeio.

About the Author

The author, José Louzeiro, was born in São Luís, the capital of the far-northern Brazilian state of Maranhão, in 1932. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1954, and in 1958 published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Depois da luta (After the Struggle). In 1975 he published Lúcio Flávio, o passageiro da agonia (Lúcio Flávio, Passenger of Agony), and his career as a screenwriter began when the renowned director Hector Babenco asked him to write a movie script based on the novel.

Louzeiro may be best known for his work on the motion picture Pixote, a lei do mais fraco (Pixote: the Law of the Weakest), also directed by Babenco. Infância dos Mortos (Childhood of the Dead), which Louzeiro published in 1977, gave rise to Pixote, which has won international acclaim.

The translator, Ted Stroll, has been a lawyer on the judicial staff of the California Supreme Court since 1989. Before that he practiced law at Stoel Rives, a firm in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He studied Portuguese at Williams College, and he has traveled in Brazil and Portugal. He lives in Oakland, California.