War of the Saints     by Jorge Amado, Translated by Gregory Rabassa Original title: O Sumiço da Santa Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.04 x 8.98 x 5.99 ISBN: 0553374400 List Price: $15.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.17 Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £9.99 Not available for ordering Published by Bantam: NY Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: USA,UK List Price: £9.99 Not available for ordering

The writer amused himself with The War of the Saints, as he says in the preface: ‘It’s been fun to write; if someone else has fun reading it, I’ll consider myself satisfied’. It’s hard not to enjoy reading this breathless narration of the events which took place — at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil and of revolutionary fervour around the world — during forty-eight hours sometime in the late 60s or early 70s in Bahia.

The disappearance of the sculpture of Saint Barbara, in transit to an exhibition of sacred art, doesn’t provide the reader with a detective story — we know from the beginning who is responsible for the theft — but with entangled stories of love, religion and politics.

In a very relaxed way Jorge Amado writes about the famous Brazilian ‘syncretism’; the blending of Roman Catholicism with African religions, about high art and popular art, national politics and local ‘arrangements’, about deep-rooted prejudices and familiar racial intermingling, blending his fictional characters with real celebrities of Bahian society and real history with a well-written plot that joins together reality, invention and the supernatural.

The land of Bahia, where fate had led him to live and work, a land where everything is intermixed and commingled, where no one can separate virtue from sin, or distinguish the certain from the absurd, or draw the line between truth and trickery, between reality and dream. In this land of Bahia, saints and enchanted ones make miracles and sorcery, and not even Marxist ethnologists are surprised to see a carving from a Catholic altar turn into a bewitching mulatto woman at the hour of dusk. 23-4