Ashes of the Amazon

by Milton Hatoum (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.42

  Ashes of the Amazon is the story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it. The rebel is Mundo, the embittered offshoot of a family split down the middle, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father's plans; the attempt to understand him falls to Lavo, a hard-working orphan who betters himself - if that's the word - under the influence of Mundo's father, a rich businessman with friends in the military. However, the symbolic heart of the book lies not so much in Manaus and the final years of a boom produced by the merciless exploitation of the forest, but further down the great river, in Vila Amazonia, a palatial villa near Parintins, the centre of a jute plantation and Mundo's worst nightmare. In his lifelong struggle to escape from his father's dynastic ambitions, Mundo distances himself as much as possible from this dead-centre of the novel, taking the plot to Rio de Janeiro and the effervescent worlds of Berlin and London in the 1970s. In Ashes of the Amazon, Hatoum expands and deepens his fictional world, taking seriously Flaubert's injunction to write 'the moral history of his generation'. This beautiful, mature and bitter novel is the extraordinary result.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.42

  Mundo is a rebel - the embittered offshoot of a rich family, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father's dynastic plans. Ashes of the Amazon charts his determined flight from the fraught centre of his family's wealth - the Vila Amazonia plantation - through Rio de Janeiro, and then to the effervescent worlds of 1970s Berlin and London. In Ashes of the Amazon, Hatoum takes to heart Flaubert's injunction to write 'the moral history of his generation', with extraordinary results. This is a beautiful, mature and involving novel from one of the most important South American writers of his time.