Peruvian Pastiche

I spent the last two weeks in Peru, doing delightfully little other than exploring ancient cultures, eating ceviche, becoming one with the sand, and reading.  Sadly, the pride of the Peruvian alcoholic ouvre, Pisco, was not something I could fully appreciate.  Nor was the cuy (grilled guinea pig- and I was too much of a wimp to get beyond the concept and try it).  The seafood on the other hand, was most excellent.  Simple, delicious ceviche.  There were pirate proportions of rum around and Argentinian Malbec to savor, so my culinary/literary twin lusts were satisfied.

My reading list for the trip was not well thought out or organized.  I don't think 'Lonely Planet Peru' counts as a real book, but their sections on Pre-Columbian history were well written and helpful for the places we visited.  I generally try to bring books relevant to the places I'm going, but the literary stars of South America, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are not Peruvian and are wildly over-read on the backpacker circuit, so I pretended to eschew both in a highbrow maneuver and wound up with a short-sighted and not-so-relevant reading list.  I brought 'Atonement' by Ian McEwan, in an attempt to read something weighty and literary.  My other reading selections were filched from various hostels.


Atonement by Ian McEwan

I was late to the punch on this one, published in 2003 and conveyed into film in 2007.  When traveling, I like to bring a book that I think will advance my literary prowess (instead of escaping into guilty pleasures and beach reads like I usually do at home).  This book was more accessible than I anticipated.  It begins in Pre-WWII England and details a 13-year-old wealthy British girl's brilliant fantasy mind gone catastrophically astray, forever shattering the threads of her tenuous family.  I was taken with McEwan's facility in imaging the hummingbird flutterings of a young girl's creative mind.  Short, elegant, and definitely readable.


La Doctura by Linnea Smith

I picked this up in a lodge on the way to Machu Picchu, as it stared down at me from a bookshelf while I was waiting out a nosebleed.  Smith tells the story of how she left her successful internal medicine practice in Wisconsin to live in the very remote Amazon basin of Peru, tending to the medical needs of a community without any prior access to medical care. Obviously, it caught my interest given my current traveling circumstances and impending career direction, and it held my attention enough to forgive her not-particularly-great writing style and occasionally self-aggrandizing anecdotes.  I would probably be aggrandizing too had I been saving locals from leprosy, leishmaniasis and Dengue fever with expired antibiotics and intra-auricular jungle prayers.  My medical friends will particularly enjoy this internal medicine doctor's foibles with obstetrics- including a wildly lucky (and grossly unsterile) first-time C-section.  Borrow it from me if you want to read it.


The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin is one of those travel writing greats, pioneering the genre and remaining unchallenged by the deluge of travel writers in his wake.  He wrote 'The Songlines' about Aboriginal Australia.  He delves into the unique way of understanding the earth, the universe and our place in it that the Aboriginal people have. This web of understanding is charted by Songlines, which are physical, psychological, musical and universal navigational tools.  A Songline denotes a physical route across the land, and a person is connected to his or her other 'dreaming' relatives along this Songline by a melody signified by their shared 'dreaming' animal.  'Dreaming' animals are assigned after birth, depending on the place of birth and significant geologic features in that area.  The Songlines not only represent a physical map connecting members of certain 'dreaming' group, but delineate their place on the earth and their connection to all other creatures. Anecdotes abound throughout this book, some delightful, some horrifying, all a glance into the miraculous world of the Australian Aborigines that outsiders continually fail to understand, and sadly often denigrate. The middle of the book contains a transcendental collection of thoughts and quotes related to nomadic life throughout the ages- enthralling to any reader with wandering feet.  Reading Chatwin's careful, sparse prose, I had a brilliant glimpse into how the Aborigines likely have the most advanced philosophy or religion of any culture.


People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Mrs. Brooks designs a wonderful story about the Sarajevo Haggadah.  This is a real book which is famed for its color illustrations that were rendered at a time when uncommon in Jewish texts, and it is a book admired for it's survival throughout multiple centuries of political strife, often protected by Muslims and Christians.  Brooks writes a fictional account of the possible life of the Sarajevo Haggadah.  She begins with a young, socially aloof book restorer in modern day Australia, who is sent by the UN to restore the Haggadah, which was long thought burned in the Bosnian war, but turned up in a forgotten library corner.  As the restorer works through the pages, she picks up clues- a partial butterfly wing, a wine stain, a cat hair, a salt water stain, and with each discovery the author transports us back in time to the people wielding the instruments to create the book or providing the necessary tools to hide the book from the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany, and the Bosnian war.  I enjoyed the mystery of the book, as well as the segues back in time.  There was an astute political plot twist near the end that polished the book off well.