In Jorge Amado’s oeuvre, the book belongs amongst those written in Romanesque tone in which the author chronicles the epoch and its manners without losing sight of the social and political dimensions. It is this combination that makes Tieta an experimental and innovative narrative.īegun at Buraquinho beach, near Salvador, and completed in London in mid 1977, Tieta holds true to its full title: Tieta: the Goat Girl, or, The return of the prodigal daughter, a melodramatic feuilleton in five sensational episodes and moving epilogue: emotion and suspense! The novel is one of the author’s longest works, and accompanies its protagonist over the course of three decades. Power relations and corruption, religiosity, sexual liberation, fashion and consumption, the conflict between progress and environmental preservation are all issues that are woven into the novel’s plot, where they receive good-humoured critical treatment. The narrative includes interventions by the author, spicy dialogues that capture the register of the local speech and descriptions of traditional habits and tales. In this vast panorama of manners and accelerated change, many stories lived by a host of secondary characters flow into the main plot. In the meantime, Tieta once again stirs the fantasies of the menfolk and has an incestuous relationship with her nephew, the seminarist Ricardo. Thanks to her influence, the electricity generated by the Paulo Afonso dam arrives at Sant’Ana do Agreste, attracting the attentions of a highly pollutant industry that is interested in setting up there, with potentially disastrous consequences for the local ecology.

The return of the prodigal daughter revolutionizes life in the small Bahian town. Twenty-five years after her departure, Tieta decides to go home.

When the correspondence stops, Tieta assumes that her sister is dead. Though she sends money back to her family, nobody knows of her whereabouts. After a good caning from her father, Tieta is run out of the house.Īfter a time roaming the nearby towns, prostituting herself to scrape a living, Tieta heads for São Paulo, where she becomes a panderess. The pious Perpétua denounces her sister’s adventures to their father, Zé Esteves, and the town of Sant’Ana do Agreste is scandalized by the girl’s libertine ways.

Antonieta is a goat shepherdess in Mangue Seco, where she surrenders to a string of lovers in the dunes.

Novela tieta do agreste 1989