THE AMAZONIAN CHRONICLES

A hyperbolic paean to the Amazon rain forest: said to be a 1991 French bestseller. Meunier (a poet and traveler) and Savarin (a social scientist) seem so intoxicated by Amazonian verdancy that their prose itself becomes a jungle in which it's often hard to discern direction or sense. The text caroms through history, ethnography, and natural history, touching briefly on colonialist horrors; local flora and fauna; legends of El Dorado; rubber plantations; Indian myths, mores, and kinship systems—whatever momentarily catches the authors' eyes. Grotesqueries abound: shrunken heads and cannibalism, piranhas and curare, polygamy and social oppression. Meanwhile, narrative clarity falls victim to weird epigrams (``to travel is to refuse to sit and think'') and mind- benders (``a power wishing to colonize and control will go to any lengths to justify illegitimate acts, including the act of sequestering the savages in their savagery''). Whenever a gorgeous image blossoms (``seen from the air, Brasilia looks like a beautiful bird with its wings outstretched on the red laterite of the Mato Grosso''), it's undercut by racial and cultural clichÇs (the Indians' ``existence provides a security...that is infinitely superior to anything we feel in our civilization''; Europeans constitute ``the white menace, with its naked lies and its murders that are never avenged''). Overall, the authors seem intent on seeing the green Amazon world through rose-colored glasses and, while their enthusiasm for native life is admirable and their rejection of linear prose provocative, readers may well depart with one question: Is this a new species of postmodern avant-gardism—or simply bad writing? As lush and deadly as the Amazon it maps.