THE CURVE OF THE WORLD

Commercial-director Stevens wades into fiction with the story of an American businessman lost in the heart of Africa’s darkness.

Lewis is an international sales rep for Coca-Cola when the plane he’s on is forced to make an emergency landing at an abandoned wartime airstrip in the middle of the jungle: while the party lands well enough, it seems that the rebel militia who discover them may kill them all anyway. In fear, Lewis runs off into the forest (he should have just stayed on the plane, since everyone was released), where he learns firsthand of the wilderness by witnessing the brutality of a chimp murder, then by his own killing of a species of dwarf antelope. He contracts malaria and is found by a young African boy named Kofi (wearing a Pepsi shirt), who provides medicine and becomes Lewis’s sidekick as Lewis has phantom sex with a ndoki, a witch, and dines on monkey. Meanwhile, Lewis’s estranged wife, Helen, packs up their blind-from-birth son and heads to Africa to find the father of her child. Lewis eventually makes his way to civilization but leaves Kofi behind once he gets there—then soon braves the rifles of border guards to go back to find the boy who saved him, with the result that they’re both again in the jungle, running with pygmies and participating in gun battles. Helen, meanwhile, has given up searching for her husband and gone home, only to find this decision unbearable, so now she too must go to Africa with the blind boy all over again. Will she find her husband, and will their love be renewed? Do the blind boy’s visions suggest magic like the ndoki’s? Will Lewis survive this thinly veiled tour of modern Africa?

Already optioned for film. The camera work on Africa, applied to a lush subject, should be better than Stevens’s competent but dry prose.