NONFICTION
The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon, by Monte Reel, $26 In the early fall of 1996, a team of Brazilian government workers descended into the jungle of the Guapore River Valley, a tangled tract of Amazonia known to locals as the “Green Hell.” They eventually emerged with photographic evidence of a lean, mustachioed Indian man who lived alone on the valley floor, apparently the only remaining member of a vanquished jungle tribe.
As Monte Reel notes in his gripping new book, “The Last of the Tribe,” this “spectral wild man” was one of the few modern examples of a human being “existing within a vacuum of complete solitude, day after day, week after week, year after year, without the companionship of another soul, without any communication whatsoever.”
The bulk of “Tribe” follows the efforts of a hardy group of conservationists who fight to protect the Indian from the incursions of loggers.
Reel, a former South America correspondent for The Washington Post, is good with the context — the section on official Brazilian policy toward indigenous people is powerful and sad — but he’s best when he’s indulging in good old-fashioned adventure writing: Arrows fly, poisonous snakes writhe through the undergrowth and sinister ranchers lord over the boomtowns of Brazil’s Wild West.
The real star here turns out to be the Amazon itself, a place thick with “irrepressible” flora and a “gaudy display” of fauna — a place, in short, that is “neither paradise nor perdition.”
FICTION
Corduroy Mansions, by Alexander McCall Smith, $24.95 “Corduroy Mansions” is like the cloth of its title — comfortable, easy, homey. Illustrated whimsically by Iain McIntosh, these short chapters or vignettes by Alexander McCall Smith evoke the serial magazine writing of another era.
Character names, too, seem to pay homage to British writers of the past — Swift, Fielding, Dickens — who were fond of descriptive appellations, such as Roger Thwackum, the nasty tutor in “Tom Jones.”
In “Corduroy Mansions,” an “oleaginous MP” is named Oedipus Snark; his putative girlfriend is Barbara Ragg; there’s a writer named Errol Greatorex; and a neighbor, Miss Oiseau, who has “a thin, reedy voice.”
The story begins with William Edward French, a widower, 51, self-described as “average height, very slightly overweight … no distinguishing features. Not dangerous, but approach with caution.”
A wine dealer, William lives in Corduroy Mansions with Eddie, the adult slacker son he dearly wishes to offload. Marcia, a caterer, has an unrequited taste for William and therefore also wishes to remove Eddie from the scene. She has a key to William’s flat and tries to entice him with her cooking. Sometimes he comes home to discover “a plate of only-the-tiniest- bit-soggy chicken vol-au-vents, or cocktail sausages impaled on little sticks, like pupae in a butterfly collection.”
Filled with charming eccentrics, “Corduroy Mansions” is like a small 18th-century village with big 21st-century angst and insecurities. Thrown into this mix are a vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, a former “sniffer dog at Heathrow Airport,” who is brought in by William to scare off his canine-phobic son.
Berthea Snark, Oedipus’ psychoanalyst mother, who hates her son (“I’ve been visited by dreams in which I have done something terrible to him”), features importantly, as does her brother, the ditzy Terence Moongrove.
The discovery of a possibly stolen Poussin painting provides a McGuffin, as does a manuscript written by a yeti (a.k.a. the abominable snowman).
Smith, a master of weaving the many strands of his complex stories together, does so here with supreme virtuosity. He satirizes the manners and mores of his characters and their society but, as always, remains deeply affectionate toward his flawed cast. And so, Dear Reader, will you.
