‘Backlands,’ by Victoria Shorr
By ANDREA WULF Usually when reviewing a novel, you must be careful not to give away too much plot. But in the case of Victoria Shorr’s “Backlands,” there’s no such danger: Shorr herself reveals the bare bones of the story in the first few pages. Put simply, “Backlands” is the fictionalized account of a real-life one-eyed bandit called Lampião and his lover, Maria Bonita — famous Brazilian outlaws who took from the rich and gave to the poor. From the early 1920s to his capture in 1938, Lampião and his gang controlled much of the Sertão, a huge and dusty swath of land in the northeast of the country, “almost the size of Spain.” More than once, they were cornered but managed to escape. For a long time, Lampião seemed invincible and his life, as Shorr puts it, “was a tango, full of beauty and danger, mixed.” The novel’s heroine, Maria Bonita, grows up hearing the tales and singing the folk songs about this legendary bandit and his companions. Married off to the local shoemaker wh...