The Lost City of Z

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.* What can I say? I loved it and, of course, I recommend it. It's really two stories, or even three: 1) David Grann's personal account of his motivation, research and travels in pursuit of the story surrounding a legendary explorer who went missing in the 1920s. 2) The legendary explorer himself, Percy Harrison Fawcett, an oh so British gent--chin up, carry on, and what not-- who was gist for many a heroic tale during an era of the hero-explorer. 3) The city of Z itself, along with some consideration of the Amazon. Story line number 3 is what most interested me, and even though it receives the least attention, the treatment is still very satisfying.

David Grann's own story was least appealing to me - but it serves a purpose. Grann perhaps thought he was using it to tie together different elements of the book. For me, it works well to introduce the modern Amazon, but I could have lived with a little less of his own narrative.

The heart of the book is Fawcett's own life. Wow. I finished the book two days ago and I still have to pause to let it all sink in. This was a remarkable man, no doubt; just read the chapter on his work marking the border between Bolivia and Brazil (chapter 8, if you really want to read it). There's also an admirable open-mindedness regarding the indigenous he came to know, given the fact that he lived in a time in which English expansion was justified by ideas of racial superiority that must have been held very dear by British gentlemen like Fawcett. So, I read about him with keen interest. Yet, in the end, I'm left admiring his wife even more - what gave her the fortitude to live with this man who, in the final analysis, offered her so little and took so much? Fawcett traveled with his oldest son on his final voyage into the Amazon, and neither was ever seen again.

That the book leaves me asking about Nina Paterson, Fawcett's wife, is a credit to the author. It's impossible to think only of Fawcett the explorer, I'll always have Fawcett the business enterprise in my mind. His was a mythical one-man enterprise that depended, to a suprising degree, on the home he constantly abandoned.

Finally, at the risk of adding that one last idea that takes this review from boring to tedious, it seems to call for a reflection also of a certain type of blindness. Neither Nina nor Fawcett seemed to recognize that the era they grew up in had ended. Maybe that's what they offered each other, a willingness to suspend the present. Since this book was a Mother's Day present to me, there's even more pathetic irony in Nina's proud words about how her eldest son had the makers of an explorer just like his father.

* My edition of this book is First Vintage Departures Edition, January 2010, but the book's first copyright is 2005.