“It‘s about a man attempting to flee his empty existence by accepting an offer to travel to the Amazon and seek out primitive communities to study their instruments. As he travels down the river, he kind of travels back in time, encountering communities more and more primitive/close to the origins of men. And all the duration of his trip, he reflects on questions regarding the nature of art and its meaning for the artist, and if humans have strayed too far from their origins, becoming empty worker bees roaming anonymous cities. The prose is mesmerising, and it‘s one of those books where I just want to have it tattoo‘d on me in its entirety to keep with me forever:
‘A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.’
Carpentier is also the man who coined the term magical realism, and this book is choke-full of its earlier form. An absolutely magnificent piece of literature.”
– Beiez
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