A certain Miguilim lived with his mother, his father, and his siblings, very far from here, (...) in the Mutùm. In the middle of the Campo Gerais, but in a hollow within forest country, black earth, at the foot of the mountains. Miguilim was eight years old

. With this fairy-tale incipit, Guimarães Rosa narrates an extended peasant family through the eyes of a child.

Miguilim had no desire to grow up, to become a grown-up; grown-ups' talk was always the same dry things, with that need to be violent, frightened things

. In a family plunged into poverty (the father

shouted that he was poor, on the verge of becoming destitute, of having to beg for alms

), Miguilim lives at the heart of a complex social nucleus made of people and animals: the violent father, the uncle carrying on an affair with the mother, the eccentric grandmother possessing a severe and atavistic wisdom, the witch-servant, "so pitch-black, as Death must be," the cowherds and the village folk, the farmyard animals, and so much more; yet none is like his brother Dito—self-assured, protective, capable of standing up to their father.

All at once, it burst. (...) And then came the thunder! It thundered tremendously, again and again; everyone covered their ears, closed their eyes. Then Dito held Miguilim close. Dito wasn't trembling, only he was more serious. (...) Dito was clever and peaceful. (...) Dito never truly quarreled with anyone, (...) Miguilim always wanted not to quarrel, yet ended up quarreling with everyone. How wonderful to be like Dito: suited to all people's hours...

. Miguilim is fragile, unsuited to peasant labor, afraid to venture alone into the forest to bring lunch to his father working in the fields; nothing comes of the cowherd's reassuring words when Miguilim asks if he is deformed, nor of the hugs and kisses of the witch-servant, nor even of the purring rubs of the cat Sossoe,

eyes of a green so much less empty --- it was a light inside another inside another, inside another, without end

. It is as though Miguilim lived in a world of his own: magical, incomprehensible, wondrous, and terrifying. It is no wonder that Dito's death shatters the boy; he nearly loses his mind, can no longer hide behind his brother's reassuring certainty, and must himself go to work in the fields, grueling hoeing beneath the sun. As in an exquisite fairy tale, a knight on horseback arrives to save him; he addresses little Miguilim directly and hands him a pair of spectacles.

And Miguilim looked at everyone, with such intensity. (...) He looked at the dark forests on the mountain crest, here the house, the hedge of wild beans and sao-caetano; the sky, the cattle pen, the yard, the round eyes and the high windowpanes of the morning. (...) The Mutùm was beautiful. Now he knew it.

If in Anna Maria Ortese's Il mare non bagna Napoli (see the review on this site), eyeglasses unleash an unbearable reality upon an impoverished girl from the slums, here, instead, the lenses possess a salvific power, as though only the true knowledge of reality could make it bearable. A fairy-tale ending brings little Miguilim's childhood to a splendid close, foreshadowing the great social narrative of João Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece (see the review of Grande Sertao on this site).

The extended peasant family characterized the social fabric of our country until the 1950s. And yet there are no great novels chronicling the sharecropping and tenant-farming world. Pinocchio is the son of an artisan, the Malavoglias in I Malavoglia are fishermen, Giannino in Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca is the quintessential bourgeois lad, the stories in Cuore are too edifying to mirror a social reality; perhaps only the splendid chapter "The Four Seasons" in Il mulino del Po investigates the dynamics typical of the peasant world (for Pinocchio, I Malavoglia, Il mulino del Po, and Il giornalino, see the reviews on this site). Here, however, Guimarães Rosa retraces a child's early years within the intricate web of relationships of an impoverished reality, entirely geared toward survival, yet one in which emotions churn and dreams remain possible. The relationship between Miguilim and Dito denotes an informal hierarchy in which the more fragile child seeks the support of the stronger personality, forging a privileged and steadfast bond that offers security—one that only the fairy-tale conclusion can replace.

In his intense preface, Antonio Tabucchi defines the novella

an operetta with a Mozartian timbre, performed on the magic flute of an uncommon narrator

. It is a particularly apt definition: it is the fluctuating cadence between hyperrealistic moments and fantastic ones, of "non-story," that imparts the sense of ambiguous allure that characterizes the narrative. Behind the easy screen of the fairy tale (but is it truly one?), the story

stirs unease and always retains an unattributable valence, on the margins of (or beyond) speculative formulation. Something reminiscent of the savage mind, bound to the mystery of Being

. (Tabucchi's Preface).

Why read it? Magnificent!