The Wikipedia article about Jorge Amado's Home Is the Sailor / Os velhos marinheiros ou o capitão de longo curso describes this work as a "Brazilian modernist novel". The corresponding Portugese and Italian Wikipedia articles contain no similar claims. The novel was written in 1961, long after what I know as the heyday of literary modernism, which I associate with the period from around 1900 (or a bit later) until about 1940.
Many resources about modernism in literature focus exclusively on European and North-American authors. See for example the list of authors in Modernism Lab (Notehosted at Yale). A similar focus can be seen in the following passage from "Modernism and the Modern Novel" at The Electronic Library (emphasis mine): I listed a few differences between realism
The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
Brazil was never part of the British Empire and modernism inby the questiontime In what way is Jorge Amado's novel Jubiabá a modernist novel?.Home Is the Sailor was published (1961), the Victorian era was probably a distant memory even in what was left of the British Empire, let alone in South America. For these reasons, the definition of modernism in Brazilian literature would probably be based on somewhat different characteristics than in Europe.
What characteristics of Home Is the Sailor make this work a modernist novel? Or is the claim incorrect?
Note: I listed a few differences between realism and modernism in the question In what way is Jorge Amado's novel Jubiabá a modernist novel?. I did not wish to repeat them here.