View from the Fazenda: A Tale of the Brazilian Heartlands

by Ellen Bromfield Geld

Overview

“I imagine everyone has a center of gravity,” says Ellen Bromfield Geld. “Something which binds one to the earth and gives sense and direction to what one does.” For Ellen, this center is a writing table before a window that looks out upon groves of pecan trees and mahogany-colored cattle in seas of grass. The place is Fazenda Pau D’Alho, Brazil, where she and her husband, Carson, have lived and farmed since 1961.

Healing the ravaged coffee plantation, rearing five children, exploring the outposts, the Gelds have created a dynamic yet peaceful life far from Ellen’s native Ohio. Their practice of sustainable agriculture, and Ellen’s plea for the preservation of Brazil’s remaining wilderness areas, reflect the legacy of her father, the novelist and farm visionary Louis Bromfield. Their shared vision is crystallized in her account of a cattle drive across the Pantanal, the vast flood plain on Brazil’s side of the Paraguay River. She describes a two-hundred year symbiosis between ranchers and a fragile ecosystem that is being threatened by development.

View from the Fazenda is distilled from fifty years of living in Brazil, weaving daily life on the farm into her quest to understand a nation. It portrays a true melting pot of people who—as conquerers, immigrants, or slaves, their blood and history mingled with those of native Indians—have created the character of Brazil. This huge, diverse county, living in several eras at the same time, is ever changing through its people’s amazing ability to “find a way.”

Ellen Bromfield Geld evokes the land and people of Brazil and offers readers an invigorating glimpse into a soulful life. “It seems to me that being a bit of a poet is perhaps the only way one can survive as a farmer,” she explains. “For in the end, more than anything, farming is a way of life you either love or become bitter enduring.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821420317
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2003
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.55(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Writer, farmer, and conservationist Ellen Bromfield Geld lives in Brazil. She has long written for Brazil's leading newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo, and is the author of nine books, including The Heritage, The Garlic Tree, and A Timeless Place for which she won an Ohioana Book Award.

Table of Contents

1	Of Gravity and Distance	1
2	A Place of Learning	6
3	The Frontier's Edge	11
4	A Frontier Town	21
5	A Quest for Land	33
6	The Incorrigible Pioneers	40
7	Of Chance and Circumstance and Juca de Botucatu	48
8	Fazenda Pau D'Alho	54
9	The Casa da Fazenda	62
10	A Step into the Past	67
11	Of the Passage of Days and the Meaning of Trees	79
12	While Politicians Sleep, Brazil Grows	86
13	John the Bull and His Harem	91
14	Of Cattle and Men	100
15	"Resting Our Idea"	105
16	Of Cattle Shows, Writers, and Sculptors	117
17	Of Italian Immigrants and "Clubes 4-S"	125
18	Coming of Age in the Valley of the Tiete	140
19	Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon	153
20	The Worlds of Aparecido and Jose	167
21	Gold in the Rivers	184
22	The Trees of the Future	192
23	A Wedding of Two Worlds	201
24	A Handful of Grass	209
25	The Man in the Bell Jar	220
26	A Timeless Place	231
27	The Meaning of a Way of Life	247
28	The One Who Knows...	260
29	The Ohioans and Parana	273
30	The Heifer of the Future	291
31	Dona Zeze and the Schoolhouse by the Road	308
32	The Heart of Brazil	315
33	Of Roots and Ideas	337
	Glossary of Portuguese and Indian Terms	345

Editorial Reviews

Ellen Bromfield Geld couldn’t have had a better teacher in all the world than her father. Her writing and her life in Brazil vividly reflect the strength of Louis Bromfield’s convictions, his love of the land and the enduring importance of his legacy.”—Lauren Bacall


“This is the story of an amazing American couple who with courage and wit but little money, start a homestead adventure in a foreign land and, against all odds, turn it into a successful farm.”—Gene Logsdon, author of The Man Who Created Paradise


“In oftentimes poetic language, she paints a portrait as diverse as the country itself as she traverses to its far corners over the ensuing years. Whether riding a vintage paddle-wheel steamer down the Sao Francisco River, taking a group of visiting U.S. farmers on tour, attending Carnaval, or traveling deep into a mountainside where garimpeiros search for diamonds, Geld discusses history, politics and culture.”—ForeWord

From the Publisher

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.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly