The New Captains of the Sands

Os Novos Capitães de Areia, 72 anos depois e pouca coisa mudou.

Captains of the Sands
Novel by Jorge Amado (1937)

The ``captains'' of the title are a gang of abandoned children who live in a waterfront warehouse and survive by robbing the rich. The novel is clearly an early effort for Amado, with self-conscious effects (such as an imagined dialogue between a gang member and an icon he wants to steal) and a tendency to romanticize the young thieves and to telegraph their destinies. But Amado's vivid descriptions of Bahia, his strong social conscience (``The problem of abandoned and delinquent children that worried almost no one in the whole city was Father Jose Pedro's greatest worry'') and his moving characterizations carry the reader along to the inevitable denouementwhich, despite its predictability, is both stirring and poignant. Seventy two years later very little was made and the problem persists in Brazil.