The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers

by Moritz Thomsen

Overview

Abruptly expelled from his farm in Ecuador at the age of sixty-two, Moritz Thomsen indulges in that saddest of pleasures – travel – taking a trip to Brazil and ultimately a journey up the great Amazon River by boat.

Assaulted by ghosts and memories at every turn, as his journey unfolds he reexamines his life to understand how he came to be living a life of self-imposed poverty and hardship. Outwardly he sails up the Amazon towards Manaus, giving us poignant and limpid descriptions of the river, yet inwardly a shattering romantic symphony rages, running from the depths of human misery to life’s small but exquisite transcendent pleasures. He spares the reader nothing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780601038
Publisher:	Eland Publishing
Publication date:	06/20/2019
Series:	Eland Classics
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Moritz Thomsen, born in 1915, lives now in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He served as a bombardier in the eighth Air Force During World War II. At the age of 48 he became one of the early Peace Corps volunteers. His first book, Living Poor, chronicles his four-year Peace Corps experience of living in a small fishing village in Ecuador in the 1960s. He returned to Ecuador after leaving the Peace Corps to become a farmer on the Esmeraldas River, an experience he describes in The Farm on the River of Emeralds. He continues to travel and live in South America.

Editorial Reviews

All travel narratives are self-revealing to some extent, but few go as far as this one. The author was a 1960s Peace Corp Volunteer in Ecuador who stayed on in an attempt to farm. (His account of his farming experience appeared in The Farm on the River of Emeralds, LJ 7/78). When that eventually fell through, Thomsen took a trip to Rio and up the Amazon River, which is the backdrop for this book. The author is an introspective, tormented, and bitter man, and he tells us much more about his failures and his struggles to face old age (he was 63 at the time of writing this) and death than many readers will want to know. Nonetheless, he is a brilliant writer, and in the process he gives us a view of South America that balances the more conventional travel writing and political commentary generally available.-- Harold M. Otness, Southern Oregon State Coll. Lib., Ashland

Library Journal