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THE TEAM
CONTACT
Planned and written between 1930 and 1933, with the author travelling in a somewhat errant way and not without difficulties between America and Europe, between Rio de Janeiro and Recife, he did not seem to be very enthusiastic about the essay on the eve of its launch. In a letter to his friend Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, his representative in Rio with the publisher Augusto Frederico Schmidt, Freyre said: “this book has already given me quite enough work and trouble – and my role now is to take care of life, and hand over the book to its true and legitimate owners – the editor and any who might be curious enough to go to the trouble of buying and reading it. I really do need to look after my own life” (À sombra das palmeiras [In the shade of the palm trees], 2010, p. 131-132). Once in the bookshops, however, the more than three hundred pages caused a huge immediate impact, with practically all the important critics praising him over and over again on the excellence of his text, the analyses he presented and the theoretical and documental foundations that supported it.
There were criticisms too, for example, about the language he used, which some saw as being “not very serious” for a “scientific” approach, or about the absence of a clear common thread, which others demanded, that led to specific conclusions about the subject under study; even so, it can be said that there was unanimous recognition of the value and importance of the work. One of these critics, Yan de Almeida Prado, wrote in some detail in January 1934 that “he [Freyre] is going to suffer more bitter and less sincere criticism for the imprudent act he has committed amongst us, moving towards terrain that is slippery and irritating for the indigenous scientist when modern methods are applied to sociology. All the insignificant trifles and flaws in the revision, done in the author’s absence, will be collected to punish him for the crime of having shown such a rare talent. It seems to me that Gilberto Freyre’s book will be the last clash between modern minds and the old, between the old generation and the new” (Casa-grande & senzala e a crítica brasileira de 1933 a 1944 [The Masters and the Slaves and Brazilian criticism from 1933 to 1944], 1985, p. 55). The members of the prestigious Sociedade Fellipe de Oliveira certainly felt the same as one year later they awarded Casa-grande & senzala the “Book of the Year” award, a decision that was hailed by another critic, Saul Borges Carneiro, as rewarding with well-deserved glory a work that would not be “merely the best book of 1934. It is the best book of an age” (idem, p. 159).
