UBC: Grann, The Lost City of Z

[truepenny]

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is amazing. Grann is a superb writer, and his subject--the explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett and the archaeology of the Amazon (two subjects, but so inextricably intertwined that there is no sense of bifurcation between Fawcett's biography and the history of archaeology in the Amazon)--is the kind of thing that you couldn't make up if you tried. The epigraph from Italo Calvino is spot on, because the book, for all that it is nonfiction, in some ways reads like Calvino or Miéville or even Kafka: the quest for an ancient city in the depths of the Amazon, a city that shimmers and vanishes like a mirage every time you get close to it, a city that is as much allegory as reality (a city that, it turns out, was exactly where Fawcett was trying to find it, but because of his Victorian ideas about what he was looking for, he was never going to be able to see it), and a quest that has taken the lives of (Grann estimates) at least 100 people.

This is also a book about obsession: Fawcett's obsession, Grann's obsession, the obsessions of the people, both living and dead, whom he encounters as he tries to trace Fawcett's trajectory through the world. In that way it reminds me a little of Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster: Fawcett's obsession killed him and his 22-year-old son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell just as surely as the obsession with Everest killed Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and the others lost on the mountain. And this, like Into Thin Air, is very much about the descent of the journalist reporting on the obsession into the belly of the obsession itself.



View all my reviews