'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mario de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world.

Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

About the Author

Mario de Andrade (Author)
Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) was a Brazilian writer, born in Sao Paulo, best known for the gleefully anarchic rhapsody Macunaima, the Hero with No Character (1928). A polymath of his era, he was trained as a musician but became equally influential in fiction, poetry, photography, and art criticism. He served as the founding director of Sao Paulo's Department of Culture and helped organize and participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in 1922, an event that would be central to the birth of modernism in Brazil. A key thread of Andrade's work involved the recognition and preservation of Afro-Brazilian cultures and traditions.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (Translator)
Flora Thomson-DeVeaux is a translator, writer, and researcher who studied Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and earned a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University. She lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Reviews
Extraordinary encounters with indigenous communities, some partially real and others completely falsified, yet always well and truly beyond belief . . . in the process of mythmaking . . . the country of Andrade's imagination became more vivid, more alive -- David McAllister * Prospect *
The Apprentice Tourist shows Andrade's fascination with Amazonian cultures - and his utter boredom with the government officials and elites who welcomed the group of travelers along the way . . . it offers an important corrective in bringing canonical Brazilian works into English -- Lucas Iberico Lozada * The New York Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9780143137351
Author Mario de Andrade
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 180g
Dimensions(mm) 194mm * 126mm * 18mm