One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights

by Christopher Bigsby (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.34

  'Sail down through the southern ocean, towards the blue-green ice of Antarctica, and to the west, where the sky and the sea meet as one, is the green mystery of a land whose history enfold myths and whose myths contain history.' So begins Christopher Bigsby's extraordinary and enchanting novel about a fictional South American country where nothing is quite what it seems. Welcome to Sagrado Dios, whose history, we enter in 1944 with a miracle, the beaching of a lost Nazi U-Boat, and the murder of its captain, mistaken for a devil by the inhabitants of a fishing-village. This is the precursor to a wild, luxurious assault on the senses. Here is a fictional history blended with elements of magic, sex, comedy and bizarre violence, woven into stories gathered by a mad professor exiled to his library where, he is compiling a history of the novel in a country where the genre has been banned by the church for the last three centuries. With a conscious nod towards Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier, Bigsby guides us skilfully through journeys down impossible rivers by young men in search of love, encounters with fabulous beasts, dyspeptic dictators, mad generals, and impossibly lovely Indian girls, and introduces us in his luminous prose to a land whose history is inextricably bound up with its myths. One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights is a tour-de-force of imaginative prose writing.