January 9th7pm
We will discuss audience - was this a work intended to be read? To what extent is the author performing for an imagined future readership? Is that a wink at us buried in a book from decades ago? We will discuss self-knowledge - do we trust the account as given? What are they hiding from us? Have they completely lost the plot of their life and the lives around them? And of course, we will discuss what thrills - cameos from notables? Salacious asides? That single sentence from 1935 which you still hear ringing in your ears, weeks after reading it?
This month we'll discuss Mário de Andrade's playfully profound chronicle of an urban sophisticate’s misadventures in the Amazon, The Apprentice Tourist, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux.
“The Apprentice Tourist shows Andrade’s fascination with Amazonian cultures—and his utter boredom with the government officials and elites who welcomed the group of travelers along the way. . . . [It] offer[s] an important corrective in bringing canonical Brazilian works into English.” —The New York Times
“A playful romp . . . The translator ha[s] done remarkable work, approaching the unruly text with joy and scholarship . . . fascination and care.” —Joy Williams, Book Post
“My life’s done a somersault,” wrote Mário de Andrade in a letter, on the verge of taking a leap. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, and almost fifty years before Bruce Chatwin ventured into one of the most remote regions of South America in In Patagonia, Andrade, the queer mixed-race “pope” of Brazilian modernism and author of the epic novel Macunaíma, finally embarks on a three-month steamboat voyage up the great river and into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, and featuring more than a dozen photographs, The Apprentice Tourist not only offers an awed and awe-inspiring fish-out-of-water account of the Indigenous peoples and now-endangered landscapes of Brazil that he encounters (and, comically, sometimes fails to reach), but also traces his internal metamorphosis: The trip prompts him to rethink his ingrained Eurocentrism, challenges his received narratives about the Amazon, and alters the way he understands his motherland and the vast diversity of cultures found within it.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.