One of Rosa's great contributions to Brazilian literature was to broaden the horizons of the language to a degree never seen before, not even during the inventive years of the great baroque writers like Padre Antônio Vieira or in the natural-flowing prose of Euclides da Cunha and the experiments of Mário de Andrade in the twentieth century. It is interesting that Rosa, in an introduction to an anthology of Hungarian short stories, comments on the malleability of that language, for that is what he did for Portuguese; he rediscovered its essential malleability, especially as it might be spoken by the sertanejo…. Rosa does not necessarily use the language of the sertão as it exists, rather he creates a language along the lines of that form of speech, arriving at that third form of reality described by Kenneth Burke, the essence of creative language as apart from nonevocative reality and objective description. Thus we have a combination of the archaisms that have survived in the backlands along with so much folklore and legendary material from medieval Portugal, as well as neologisms that are invented with great care in order to enhance the description of objects and states of mind…. There is a touch of Joyce in almost all of Rosa's work, although it is more likely a coincidence of motives rather than a direct influence. The care with which his books must be read from a linguistic point of view makes them quite difficult, even for Brazilians, and the translations, no matter how fine, have been unable to put across the effect of this manipulation, like listening to a stereophonic recording on a monaural phonograph as it were.

Grande Sertão: Veredas, the modern Brazilian masterpiece, shows better than any other work both the style and the themes of Rosa's work and it clearly places him alongside the great and complex writers of his time. As Joyce did in Ulysses and later with greater breadth in Finnegans Wake, Rosa has taken a limited locale and transformed it into the macrocosm….

The title is significant. It must be remembered that it is the "grande" sertão, which could mean the whole world as sertão with all that it implies. The word vereda has several meanings, but here most often it refers to the small rivers that cross the backlands providing communication and a clearing in the selva oscura.

The novel is a dense picture of reality in the sertão and in the agonic human psyche. It is not realism, but fits rather the dictum laid down by Machado de Assis when he made a clear distinction between realism and reality and strongly rejected the former as unreal. It is that reality which the writer must create with his imagination …, the true reality that most often lies beyond human comprehension and conception, and can only be felt in the work of a master artist. It is a return to the medieval tradition, both as maintained alive in the interior and as we know it from the literature of the time. In many respects the novel is a book of chivalry. Those novels which gave rise to Don Quixote are thought by many to have had their origins in Portugal, and along with the ancient ballads, the first settlers of the interior of Brazil brought along the Arthurian and Carolingian legends as part of their cultural baggage. (pp. 33-4)

[There] is a whole mood of ambiguity in the novel, right down to some of the language and the geographical description. This is Cervantine and we must remember that Cervantes also went back to the books of chivalry and all of their magic for a source. The beginning and the end of Grande Sertão: Veredas are amazingly close to Don Quixote in tone. We can see that Riobaldo too is an existential hero in an ambiguous environment. Also there is the figure of Diadorim, the most important character in the book after Riobaldo. Supposedly a young and particularly handsome boy who joins the band, at death it is revealed that Diadorim is really a young girl who had joined the band seeking vengeance for her father, a leader who had been murdered. Riobaldo has a strange attraction toward the young jagunço and this too gives him the feeling of some mysterious bewitchment. The idea of metamorphosis, so prevalent in medieval tales, is present here as the young paladin becomes the beautiful princess upon his death. There is also a kind of Manichaean division in the book which fits the concept of the jagunço, who is both a bandit and a noble knight in the same person…. The São Francisco river, which has its headwaters in the interior of Minas Gerais and runs down through the state of Bahia and is the great avenue of communication within the sertão, has a special significance for Riobaldo. Just as in the case of many rivers of mythology, there are two different worlds on opposite banks. Riobaldo feels that one side is evil and the other good. (pp. 34-5)

Guimarães Rosa is the natural and perfect culmination of Brazilian literary development. He is the end product of Modernism…. He has also brought the Brazilian novel out of the stagnation of repetitive regionalism where it had lain for so long and brings it "into the mainstream."… João Guimarães Rosa is without a doubt the greatest Brazilian novelist since Machado de Assis, and a good case can be made for him as the finest writer of fiction to have appeared in all of Latin America during the twentieth century…. (p. 35)