Eland Classics: Saddest Pleasure, The: A Journey through Brazil

- Blurb -

Travel book as memoir, memoir as novel, novelas polemic: that was how Moritz Thomsen described The Saddest Pleasure. He threadstogether a journey to and down the Amazon with a series of crystalline recollectionsof the events that have shaped him: a privileged childhood presided over by a bullyingpatriarch, combat missions in World War Two and a life-changing Peace Corps experiencein Ecuador, from which he never went back to the US.Unflinchingly honest abouthis family, his failures, his already broken health at the age of sixty--threeand the loss of the hopes he once had for himself, Thomsen is also sickened by thecorruption and rapacity of our societies, the inequality and the economic destitution.What starts as an almost reluctant concatenation of memory and poignant, limpiddescriptions of Brazil, grows into a shattering romantic symphony on human miseryand life's small but exquisite transcendent pleasures. He spares the reader nothing.`A man capable of breaking your heart ina single sentence and making you laugh out loud in the next.' - Tim Cahill`A travelbook that makes most other current examples...seem hopelessly shallow and insipid.' - Richard Lipez, Washington Post`A travel book may be many things, and Moritz Thomsen'sThe Saddest Pleasure seems to be most of them - not just a report of a journey,but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray into South American topographyand history, a travel narrative, with observations of books, music, and life ingeneral; in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.' - Paul Theroux