My journey “Around the World in 80 Books” continues.
Entering SOUTH AMERICA (boat from Cape Town to Sao Paulo):
37: Brazil
*** Gustavo Ferreira, The Ritual. The Ritual. Set in a seedy, chaotic city where dead bodies keep turning up in churches. An uncomfortable occult flavour, but the ending is apt!
38: Uruguay
***** Eduardo Strauch, Out of the Silence: After the Crash. A survivor’s account of the 1972 air crash and how it changed his life.
39: Argentina
**** Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia. A journey in search of family history – a grandmother’s cousin who sent home a small portion of prehistoric animal skin – but so much more, at Chatwin meets so many fascinating people in his travels. Like the English horticulturalist in Tierra del Fuego, travelling in pursuit of flowering shrubs: “‘It is beautiful,’ she said … ‘But I wouldn’t want to come back.’ ‘Neither would I,’ I said.”
Unusually, I supplemented my “visit” by watching a short video from a couple of tourists in Tierra del Fuego, and found myself looking up walking holidays in Patagonia. Maybe October 2021?
40: ANTARCTICA: Antarctica
**** Pete Wilkinson, From Deptford to Antarctica: The Long Way Home. What an appropriate title for my half-way point in this journey ATW! Deptford is just upstream from Greenwich, where I live, and the author was born in the same year as me, 1946. After dipping in an out of a number of jobs, he discovered a passion for the environment, which led him first to Friends of the Earth, and then to Greenpeace. The core of this book is taken from the logs of the five Greenpeace missions to Antarctica which he led, and the last one, two years later, where he helped to demolish the over-wintering base.
His voyages began and ended in New Zealand, and I was tempted to pop over there and tick off OCEANIA. But I have two more regions of America to “visit”, so it’s back to Tierra del Fuego, hoping I can be dropped off in the Chilean part.
41: SOUTH AMERICA AGAIN: Chile
**** Pablo Neruda, Grapes And The Wind. A very helpful introduction and translator’s note accompany one of Neruda’s less well-known books. The translator describes the collection as “a love song to his native land, written from afar during his wandering exile.” This is movingly expressed in the short poem “When, Chile?” which looks forward to his return. Many poems are addressed to countries he visited, but whatever country is the subject, his Chilean perspective shines through. I found the poems very readable: short lines, simple language, and a deep appreciation of the natural world.
Note that Isabel Allende’s prize-winnng novel A Long Petal of the Sea is based on Neruda’s return to Chile. I look forward to reading that in a future project.
42: Bolivia
*** Beatrice Brusic, Beyond the Snows of the Andes. The author describes this book as a memoir, so I was expecting it to be autobiographical. However, about half way through, we are told of the death of Che Guevara in 1967, so I don’t think it is. A teenager breaks free from an unhappy childhood – but only after her mother’s death does she come to realize that it wasn’t all bad.
43: Peru
***** Diane Esguerra, Junkie Buddha: A Journey of Discovery in Peru. A journey of homage, a year after the death of the author’s son Sacha, to scatter his ashes at Machu Picchu, becomes a journey of reconciliation, as well as an exploration of the country he loved. “I’d found … much of what I’d seen in Peru awe-inspiring, but the country had also, at times, frustrated and scared me. Overall I had mixed feelings about Peru – and Peru, I felt, had mixed feelings about itself. The same could be said of Sacha …”
44: Ecuador
**** Becca Bloom, Cabs, Cakes, and Corpses, After two stories of suffering, this offered some light relief, An unwilling vacationer arrives in a small town to stay with her moher’s friend Sylvia and Sylvia’s amazing family. Trying to retrieve her Kindle after a scary cab ride, she becomes embroiled in a murder investigation…
45: Colombia
***** Caroline Doherty de Novoa et al., eds, Was Gabo an Irishman?. A delightful collection of essays and stories compiled from writers of nine different countries, living in Colombia, in memory of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo). Many show a great love of one or more of his books; others draw parallels between his plots and life in Colombia today. One writer found herself teaching English in the room that had been his study; another attends the ceremonial funeral interrupted by a cloudburst. The title essay is particularly rich in satire.
46: NORTH AMERICA: Panama
*** C S Boyack, Panama. A ghost story set in 1903-4. Can our heroes protect the building and security of the Panama Canal from political and supernatural opposition? A bit outside my comfort zone.
47: Costa Rica
**** Colleen Carew, Past Present: An offbeat novel of rediscovery. By Chapter 7, I thought I’d missed something, and went paging back. Why was Mira in Costa Rica? It turned out that this was one of many things the other characters were keeping secret from her. An idyllic location, moving gently towards eco-tourism, and a fundamental question: “Do you want to be happy or right?”
48: Nicaragua
***** Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. Rushdie’s first non-fiction book is based on a three-week visit to Nicaragua in July 1986, as the new democracy struggled to define itself and survive against enemies within and without. A sympathetic portrayal, presnting many of the major and minor players. “For the first time in my life, I realized with surprise, I had come across a government I could support, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its efforts … to succeed.” The preface, written ten years later, admits that the book “now reads like … a fairy tale”.
49: Honduras
**** Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story. A story of archaeology aided by “space-age technology”, rain-forest adventure, and history of medicine – both an account of the epidemics brought by the European explorers in the 16th century, and the treatment of the tropical disease leishmaniasis with which many of the group were infected by sandflies. The author manages to make the medical history as readable as the scenes in the rain forest.
50: Guatemala
**** Bear Grylls, Mission Jaguar. One of a series about teenagers and survival skills. A nice light read, and a good complement to the previous book.
51:Mexico
*** Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North. I loved the description of the small town in Mexico, the sparky young woman Nayeli and her formidable aunt, the Mayor. Nayeli and her friends set out on a quest to smuggle themselves into the USA and recruit able-bodied Mexican men to return home and defend the town against the bandits. I wish them well.
CARIBBEAN
52: Jamaica
*** Andrea Levy, Fruit of the Lemon. A young woman travels to Jamaica to visit her mother’s sister. As her aunt helps her to unravel the family tree, she discovers herself to be “the bastard child of Empire – and I will have my day.”
53: Montserrat
**** Lally Brown, The Volcano, Montserrat and Me: Twenty years with an active volcano. Lally Brown arrived in Montserrat with her husband, Deputy Director of the Public Works Department, in July 1995. In the same month, a smell of sulphur marked the beginning of a period of seismic activity, leading to major eruptions and programmes of evacuation over the following years. She and her husband left the island in 1998. Her journal gives a detailed picture of life in a time of crisis and uncertainty.
She has added a chapter taking the story up to 2015: further major eruptions up to 2010, and continued monitoring. “Slowly a sense of optimism has returned to Montserrat. Living with an active volcano is now part of normal life for the 5,000 residents.” I should like to know more about how this happened.
I chose this book because I was ordained in the summer of 2017, within days of the first major eruption, and worked in an East London parish where there were some Montserratian families in the congregation. I wish I had asked them more about their stories.
54: Cuba
***** Edward Wilson, The Midnight Swimmer. A spy story, one of a series of seven following the main character, William Catesby, from the Second World War (in a prequel) to the Falklands. This one deals with spies and politicians at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The general tone reminds me of John Le Carre, but there is a much closer link with real life politics: Catesby meets Che Guevara, Bobby Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, and his boss even meets Nikita Krushchev. There is a full bibliography. The author’s disclaimer states, “A few real names are used, but no real people are portrayed.” Catesby’s reflections are fascinating: “The thing, thought Catesby, that made the Cold War so dangerous was that the Russians were playing chess and the Americans poker.” I’d like to read more of the series, perhaps The Whitehall Mandarin when I get to Vietnam.
BACK TO NORTH AMERICA
55: USA
**** Laila Ibrahim, Golden Poppies.Another historical novel. This one is set in the last decade of the 19th century, and deals with race relations and the campaign for women’s suffrage. I didn’t realize until I finished it that this is the last of a series of three about the same two families. Almost all the characters are really engaging; the exception is Sadie’s abusive husband Heinrich, for whose behaviour the only excuse suggest is that he is German. There is a set of discussion questions at the back.
I enjoyed the description of train rides from Oakland to Chicago and back, as I took the same train westbound as part of my “real” ATW journey in 2016.
emeritablog: life after work 