O Amazonas Escuro, second in Eugene K. Garber’s Eroica Trilogy, has earned the praise of noted anthropologist Gary Gossen: Fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride! In this extraordinary book, Eugene Garber juxtaposes a parody version of an Indiana Jones-type adventure among Amazonian Indians (the Other) with a profound reflection on several great themes in Western philosophy (Ourselves).

Exactly. Who would have expected to hear the voices of such as Jung, Luce Irigaray and Nietzsche resounding with those of howler monkeys in the forests of Amazonia?

Myth, botany, theology, sexual shapeshifting, all jostle against each other in this wildly imaginative novel. K, the hero of the novel, a scientific anthropologist, is hell bent on bringing rational order to his descriptions of the culture of a tribe of Amazonian indigenes. But the tribe will not have it so, persisting in its mythological treatments of sky, river, animals and self. Nor will outside visitors to the tribal compound, bringing with them botanical passions, wounds of war, erotic obsession, and cinematographic exploitation. Meanwhile, looming over the entire enterprise are spirits of clashing ideals, resonant voices of western thinkers from Plato to Derrida. And if these disruptions were not enough to shatter K’s project, there is Korakama, the tribal magus, master of enchantments, curses, spellbinding rhetoric and potent violence.

And so the novel plays out its intense conflicts, K doggedly rational, the world around him rife with irrationality. Inevitably there comes in the final chapter an eruption as memorable as any in recent fiction.