Amazon Rainforest Tours and Travel | Reading Fiction in the Amazon
"…she felt a very strong attraction to the river, she wanted to see the alligators sunning themselves on the sandy banks, she wanted to be awakened in the middle of the night by the woman's cry of the manatees…"
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
All Amazon tours include hammock time. While rainforest dozing is a supreme pleasure, this respite from the intense midday sun also offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in fiction that evokes the exotic landscape. Here are some suggestions for whiling away a literary Amazon afternoon.
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Among the best known Amazonian novelists are Brazilian writers Marcio Souza of Manaus and Milton Hatoum. Souza's most famous works are The Emperor of the Amazon and Mad Maria. His latest work in progress is a tetralogy about the Amazon's turbulent history following Brazil's independence from Portugal. Of Lebanese descent, Hatoum writes about the immigrant Amazonian experience, including Two Brothers and Ashes of the North. Dalcidio Jurandir is considered the master of contemporary Amazon writers. Unfortunately, few of his works have been translated into English and are difficult to find.
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Those who like shorter works may prefer Literary Amazonia: Modern Writing by Amazonian Authors, edited by Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz. It contains poetry and prose pieces by contemporary indigenous and mestizo writers.
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Though set north of the Amazon on Colombia's Magdalena River, the last twenty-three pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novel of love postponed and finally requited, Love in the Time of Cholera, makes perfect Amazon reading. If you bring along headphones and appreciate opera, you may also want to pack a CD of Mexican composer Daniel Catan's melodious homage to this final chapter, Florencia en El Amazonas.
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Peruvian writer, Santiago Roncagliolo, set his acclaimed travel novel, The Alligator Prince, in the Amazon, basing it on stories of explorers and other writers. Cellophane is a new work of literary fiction by Peruvian/American writer Marie Arana. It tells the story of an eccentric engineer with dreams of founding a paper factory in the Peruvian Amazon, who discovers the formula for cellophane, with magical consequences.
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Two noteworthy novels about renouncing destiny are set in the rainforests of South America: The Lost Steps, by the father of magical realism, Cuban novelist, Alejo Carpentier, is the fictionalized diary of a Cuban musician who journeys into the Orinoco jungle in search of life's meaning. The work was published in 1953 and is still in print. A narrative told from different perspectives of Peru culture, The Storyteller, is about an ethnologist who goes to live among the Machiguenga tribesmen, by Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's most famous writer. He also set his Captain Pantoja and the Special Service in the Amazon. Mario Vargas Llosa also wrote an epic tale about a jungle brothel, The Green House, which is set in Peru, partly in the Amazon.
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Classics by foreign novelists include Arthur Conan Doyle's popular 1912 novel, The Lost World, about dinosaurs in the Guyana rainforest which was inspired by Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in eastern Bolivia Amazon. Another is W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions. Written in 1904, it is a romantic tale set in the Venezuela Amazon about a young man who leaves a life of wealth in the capital to settle in the rainforest and falls in love with an indigenous woman. A naturalist, ornithologist and writer, Hudson was of American descent and born in Argentina.
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For lighter reading, there is The Sunflower, by Richard Paul Evans, a romantic triangle set in the Amazon and around Cusco about two women who fall in love with an American doctor working with an Amazonian orphanage.
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For more books about the Amazon, go to www.longitudebooks.com.
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