Wild Coast

July 11, 2011
Travel writer Gimlette offers a rare glimpse of a forgotten region: the formerly European colonies of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, commonly known as the Guianas. As he describes his travels from coast to forest, through what he depicts as a muddy, rotting, stinking, stagnant landscape, he quickly realizes that Sir Walter Raleigh's 1596 account of bountiful riches might have bent the truth. The first quarter of the book reads like a Devil in the White City-style true crime account as he searches for the ghosts of the Reverend Jim Jones' Jamestown massacre of 1977. Gimlette then follows the footsteps of such notables as novelist Evelyn Waugh and V.S. Naipul, encountering natives as well as a sociologically-intriguing population "descended from people who'd rather have been somewhere else." Turning his attention to linguistics, Gimlette discuses certain humorous facts about the Surinamese language, "Talkie-talkie," in which "I love you" translates as "Mi lobi yu." Though Gimlette provides occasional humor, he lacks Bill Bryson's ability to provoke a belly laugh. The balance between history and travelogue would be an asset to curious travelers, but doesn't make a good case as to the appeal of doing so.

Starred review from June 15, 2011

A wonderfully entertaining account of a journey through one of the world's least-known places.

Located in the northeast corner of South America and known collectively as Guiana, the nations of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana are cut off from the rest of the continent by language and dense forests. With its history of slavery and civil wars, the region has left travelers from Evelyn Waugh to V.S. Naipaul unimpressed. Gimlette (Panther Soup: A European Journey in War and Peace, 2008, etc.), an insatiably curious storyteller, revels in the strange mix of people and traditions present in this "luminously lush and drenchingly fecund" world. Beginning in the 15th century, England, Holland, and France fought for more than 200 years over the sugar grown along the region's 900-mile coast, leaving indelible imprints on these former colonies. Amid vivid descriptions of torrential rivers and golden grasslands that are home to some of the planet's largest ants, otters and fish, the author recalls encounters with a stunning variety of intriguing characters: descendants of Scottish outlaws, Irish adventurers, Dutch conquerors and African-American slaves; miners, monks, rebels, sorcerers and pirates. Gimlette began his three-month trip in Georgetown, a slave-built city of canals, then headed into the bush and explored the remains of Guyana's chief claim to fame, Jonestown, where 900 members of a religious cult committed suicide in 1978. The government has considered reopening the site to promote "dark tourism," he writes. Pushing on by foot, boat and air, the author discovered strange forts, slave hideouts, remote Amerindian villages and French prisons that once held Captain Alfred Dreyfus and Henri Charrière (author of Papillon). All the while, he writes, creatures of the impenetrable forest sing, copulate, stink, glow and eat each other.

Colorful and immensely readable.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
Keen-eyed travel writer Gimlette garnered acclaim for depicting sojourns in Newfoundland (Theatre of Fish, 2005) and Paraguay (At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, 2008). A similar reception well may greet this observant chronicle of his latest adventure, a tour through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Blending depictions of their present-day appearances and recursions into the history of these former English, Dutch, and French colonies, Gimlette seasons the account with his signature element of pithy portraiture of his hosts, guides, and inhabitants. Most people in these lands between the deltas of the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers live in the coastal strip, but there ends the generality among the three places. Gimlette sorts through a succession of recent events, languages, and ethnicities in discussions that tend to spring from the region's seventeenth-century origins as sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, and various slave revolts echo in Gimlette's considerations of, for example, violent strife in 1980s Suriname. Displaying open-minded curiosity, Gimlette's marvelous depiction of the tropics ranges far from the tourist track.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)