In 1973, the Brazilian writer Raduan Nassar quit his job. After six years as editor-in-chief at the Jornal do Bairro, an influential left-wing newspaper that opposed Brazil’s military regime, he had reached an impasse with one of the co-founders, who was also his older brother. The paper had until then been distributed for free, and the brothers couldn’t agree on whether to charge subscribers. Nassar, then thirty-seven, left the paper, and spent a year in his São Paulo apartment, working twelve hours a day on a book, “crying the whole time.” In “Ancient Tillage,” the strange, short novel he wrote, a young man flees his rural home and family, only to return, chastened and a little humiliated, to the place of his childhood.

“Ancient Tillage” was published in 1975, to immediate critical acclaim. It won the best-début category of the Jabuti prize, Brazil’s main literary honor, and another prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 1978, a second novel appeared in print; Nassar had written the first draft of “A Cup of Rage” in 1970, while living in Granja Viana, a bucolic neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It, too, was received euphorically, winning the São Paulo Art Critics’ Association Prize (ACPA). “Those two books had a very strong impact,” Antonio Fernando de Franceschi, a poet and critic who became a close friend of Nassar’s, told me. “They are small, hard rocks. Everything is concentrated there.” Last year, Nassar’s two novels were translated into English for the first time, for the Penguin Modern Classics Series—New Directions will publish them this month in the U.S.—and “A Cup of Rage,” translated by Stefan Tobler, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

Nassar’s novels quickly caught the eye of publishers in France and Germany and, by the early nineteen-eighties, with two short books that together amounted to fewer than three hundred pages, he was already being hailed as one of Brazil’s greatest writers, mentioned in the same breath as Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa. On visits to Paris, he was invited to speak at the Sorbonne, and doted on by the publishing heir Claude Gallimard and the famous Catalan literary agent Carmen Balcells. A close friend to Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Pablo Neruda, whose estates she looked after, Balcells is often thought to have been responsible for the vaguely defined but highly marketable concept of the Latin American Boom, a growth in the global appetite for the region’s literature during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Back then, she sought out Nassar to join the club. “She expected something big,” he told me last year, when we met for the first time, at his home in São Paulo. “She was a very generous person.”

Nassar was forty-eight and at the height of his literary fame when, in 1984, he gave an interview with Folha de São Paulo, the country’s biggest daily newspaper, in which he announced his retirement. He wanted to become a farmer. “My mind is lit up with other things now; I’m looking into agriculture and stockbreeding,” he told the interviewer. Many were baffled. Nassar kept his word. The following year, he bought a property of roughly sixteen hundred acres and began to plant soy, corn, beans, and wheat.

“I gave up a lot of things then, you have no idea,” he told me that afternoon. Nassar, who is now eighty-one years old, lives alone in a discreet, red-brick building in one of the quieter parts of Vila Madalena, a bohemian neighborhood on the city’s west side. In 2011, after almost three decades spent tending to crops, Nassar donated his land to the Federal University of São Carlos, on the condition that they build an extra campus to give better access to rural communities. The campus is now up and running; Nassar spoke of a former farm employee whose daughter was studying there.

Nassar’s living room is sparsely furnished, with an old, yellowing clock on the wall and a black-and-white portrait of his parents above his desk. There are no bookshelves in the living room, but there was a short row of books on the mantelpiece: André Gide, Dostoevsky (a writer he especially loves), and many old volumes of Caldas Aulete, a Portuguese dictionary. I noticed haphazard piles of crisp new books on his side tables and couch. “Those are gifts,” he said. “I tell people I don’t read anymore, but they never believe me.”

Writers who choose not to exercise their talents can provoke a range of reactions in readers and fellow-writers, from envy to exasperation to awe. Nassar’s early retirement was received in Brazil with a sort of fascination tinged by a hint of offense. In deciding to become a farmer—not an idle dweller but the owner of a productive, medium-sized fazenda—he had downgraded the status of literature.

Publishers suspected he hadn’t entirely stopped. “One of the great obsessions of our press over these past decades has been to discover whether he has any hidden poems or stories in his drawers,” Luiz Schwarcz, the editor-in-chief of Companhia das Letras, the country’s main publishing house, told me. Schwarcz was talking in part about himself. When he founded his publishing house, in the late eighties, he called Nassar. “I told him, ‘Luiz, look, I have no book for you,’ ” Nassar told me. “By then I was already deep into rural life.”

Nassar’s interest in farming goes back to his childhood. His parents emigrated from Lebanon to Brazil in the twenties, settling in Pindorama, a tiny rural town in the state of São Paulo. Nassar and his nine siblings were raised on a small plot of land where his father grew orange, cherry, and jabuticaba trees, and reared birds and rabbits. His mother was a superb chicken breeder, he told me, but her specialty was turkeys. “Once my father gave me two guinea fowls,” he said, the lines of his face crinkling with the pleasing memory. “I was so damn excited about that.”

His father was an Orthodox Christian, and his mother a Protestant, but the children were raised Catholic to stave off discrimination. Nassar, an altar boy, used to wake up every day at 5 A.M. to take communion. When Nassar was sixteen, he moved to São Paulo, the capital, where he studied language and law, before switching to philosophy at the University of São Paulo. In 1967, he and four of his brothers founded the Jornal do Bairro.

“Ancient Tillage,” a version of the prodigal-son parable, is both a celebration of André’s ties to the land and his family and an almost nihilistic condemnation of these ties. The son of a rural patriarch, André is tormented by incestuous feelings toward his sister. He flees the family to wallow in a lodging, drinking and visiting prostitutes; his brother Pedro attempts to bring him back home. The story’s biblical language manages to be simultaneously sincere and mocking; Nassar is particularly good at casting a dark, troubling shadow over his nostalgic vision of rural life. In one scene, André remembers the experience of gathering up “the wrinkled sleep of the nightgowns and pyjamas” belonging to the family and discovering, “lost in their folds, the coiled, repressed energy of the most tender pubic hair.”

In “A Cup of Rage,” the unnamed narrator is a reclusive farmer living in the Brazilian backlands. One morning, he receives a visit from his lover, a journalist. The two spend the morning having sex in the farmhouse, then taking a bath together. Almost no words are exchanged. Then, while getting ready for breakfast, the farmer, stepping out to smoke a cigarette, glimpses a colony of ants destroying the farm’s hedge. There is a sudden mood shift, and the couple begins an argument—or, more precisely, the exchange of a series of rants—that gains in intensity as the story progresses. The reader’s impression of the farmer is of someone with experience of the world who has not liked what he’s seen. Nassar wrote the first draft over two feverish weeks in 1970, he told me. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” he said, comparing this to the way he felt while writing “Ancient Tillage.”