The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (, "Great Backlands: Paths"; also translated as The Great Backlands and Their Paths) is a novel published in 1956 by the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. The original title refers to the veredas - small paths through wetlands usually located at higher altitudes characterized by the presence of grasses and buritizais, groups of the buriti palm-tree (Mauritia flexuosa), that criss-cross the Sertão region in northern Minas Gerais as a labyrinthine net where an outsider can easily get lost, and where there is no single way to a certain place, since all paths interconnect in such a way that any road can lead anywhere. The English title refers to a later episode in the book involving an attempt to make a deal with the Devil. Most of the book's spirit is however lost in translation, as the Portuguese original is written in a register that is both archaic and colloquial, as well as full of the author's remarkable neologisms, which makes the aesthetics of the book a challenging task to transpose to other languages. The combination of its size, linguistic oddness and polemic themes caused a shock when it was published, but now it is widely regarded as the greatest work of Brazilian literature and one of the most important novels of Portuguese language literature and South American literature. In a 2002 poll of 100 noted writers conducted by the Bokklubben World Library, the book was named among the top 100 books of all time. Plot Grande Sertão: Veredas is the complex story of Riobaldo, a former jagunço (mercenary or bandit) of the poor and steppe-like inland of the Rio São Francisco, known as Sertão, of the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia in the dawn of the 20th century. Now an old man and a rancher, Riobaldo tells his long story to an anonymous and silent listener coming from the city. The book is written in one long section, with no section or chapter breaks. Riobaldo is born into a middle-class family and, unlike most of his contemporaries, receives an education. This enables him to begin his career as a tutor to a prominent local rancher, Zé Bebelo, and he watches as Zé Bebelo raises an army of his own jagunços to stamp out several of the local bandit gangs. Instead, for reasons that are never fully clear—apparently a desire for adventure—he disappears