ungodly brutal military campaign in the name of Brazilian national unity. At the end of the nineteenth century a rebellion broke out in the backlands of Bahia. The rebels, poor people, alienated from the new Republic, inspired by the hope that Dom Sebastian the portuguese King who had died in Morocco in the sixteenth century would like a King Arthur return to rule over them, were eventually utterly crushed after years of resistance. The novel tracks the rebellion from its inception to its aftermath through a variety of point of view characters. One is a revolutionary an ...more At the end of the nineteenth century a rebellion broke out in the backlands of Bahia. The rebels, poor people, alienated from the new Republic, inspired by the hope that Dom Sebastian the portuguese King who had died in Morocco in the sixteenth century would like a King Arthur return to rule over them, were eventually utterly crushed after years of resistance. The novel tracks the rebellion from its inception to its aftermath through a variety of point of view characters. One is a revolutionary and phrenologist, another a rationalist journalist (based on an actual gentlemen who wrote an account of the war) symbolically his glasses are broken and he becomes dependant on other to get about. The characters then allow the conflict to be seen as a conflict, or at least the testing ground of the different types of ideas (scientific, pseudo-scientific, pre-scientific) common in the world of the late nineteenth