cover image VIEW FROM THE FAZENDA: A Tale of the Brazilian Heartlands

VIEW FROM THE FAZENDA: A Tale of the Brazilian Heartlands

Ellen Bromfield Geld, . . Ohio Univ./ Swallow Press, $26.95 (350pp) ISBN 978-0-8214-1474-3

In 1952, Geld, the daughter of an Ohio agrarian scholar, moved to Brazil with her farmer husband in search of land to cultivate. After several years of managing other people's fazendas (plantations), the two (with their children) finally bought their own land. While her husband managed their fazenda, Geld wrote cultural columns for a Brazilian newspaper and raised their children. Her descriptions of native workers can be condescending; her references to the "flatheaded, jugeared, earth-colored" men and the repeated use of the terms "ignorance" and "passivity" lend an air of anachronistic ethnocentrism. In counterpoint, she offers depictions of the cultured and intellectual upper- and middle-class hosts she and her husband met, along with a dismissal of the onerous nature of Brazilian politics. Geld simply ignores the political complexities of land ownership by foreigners as Brazilians work land they will never own. Though attentive to some ecological details, such as the runoff from sugar mills and the perils of topsoiling, Geld's ignorance of other ecological perils in the country on which so much of the planet is dependent for oxygen (Brazil has the world's largest rainforest) is troubling. Her attempts to draw parallels between the rich Ohio agrarian society of her youth and the subtropical poverty of a Brazilian farm economy in the midst of shifting political fortunes is strained as well. Geld's work is full of vivid memoir and storytelling, but devoid of any political consciousness regarding her role as an expatriate landowner in a nation rife with economic and class strife. Photos, maps. (Feb.)