Books: Macho Days on the Cacao Frontier SHOWDOWN

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Throughout his picaresque, Amado displays an acute sense of place and a profound social conscience. These attributes have characterized his work since its beginnings in the early '30s, when the author, the son of a prosperous cacao plantation owner, broke from his family traditions and became a radical. But if his humane ideals are unchanged, so, alas, is his approach to fiction. Between the soft-core interludes and the bloody skirmishes, men grunt portentous lines ("Anything can be done this side of death") and women entice them with dialogue right out of a Dolores Del Rio movie: "If I lose my head, what will become of me later? Poor me, even in love I have to control myself."

The cacao people may be new to U.S. readers, but the language that describes them is not. Showdown's translator, Gregory Rabassa, who is also the premier translator of Latin American literature, has remarked that to convey Amado's original intent he had to find as many as a dozen synonyms for sexual organs. He was unable to enliven the rest of the author's narrative. Fadul finds that a prostitute "cost him a pretty penny"; a woman, "body and heart well- hardened . . . had the ways of a child, full of laughter and fantasy." It may be that these bromides exert the hoped-for appeal; after all, Westerns are not famous for fresh rhetoric. But it seems fair for consumers to receive accuracy in advertising. The awestruck promotion implies that Showdown is the work of a potential Nobel laureate. The book itself suggests Louis L'Amour with a Portuguese accent.