BRAZILIAN ADVENTURE—Peter Fleming Scribner ($2.75). The tales of returned explorers range in tone all the way from the symphonies of Charles Montagu Doughty to the popular ditties of Richard Halliburton, but invariably they harmonize on taking their travels seriously. Against this impressive but monotonous harmony Explorer-Author Fleming raises a delightfully discordant note. In spite of all temptation to add a glamorous paragraph to adventure’s annals he remains the up-to-date young Englishman, telling of his hairbreadth adventurings in the jungles of Brazil as a harebrained joke. Though he takes his stand as a modern member of an unromantic generation, his typical English understatement serves to underline many a tense scene’s awkward moment. Thus he remains true to the old flag after all. For anyone who likes travel books and for many who do not, Brazilian Adventure will be a refreshingly new departure. Author Fleming admits in his foreword that his book differs “from most books about expeditions . . . also from most books about the interior of Brazil. It differs in being throughout strictly truthful. . . . The hardships and privations which we were called on to endure were of a very minor order, the dangers which we ran were considerably less than those to be encountered on any arterial road during a heat wave. … It is probably the most veracious travel book ever written; and it is certainly the least instructive.” Young Peter Fleming gave up a good job as literary editor of London’s weekly Spectator when he saw a notice in the Times’s “agony column” about a forthcoming expedition to central Brazil for which he volunteered and was accepted. Avowed purpose of the expedition was to ascertain the mysterious fate of Colonel Fawcett, British explorer lost in the Matto Grosso with two other men in 1925. Leader of the party was one Major “George Lewy Pingle” (Fleming does not give his right name), U. S. resident of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and reputedly an experienced explorer. Fleming’s early suspicions of Pingle were confirmed when, at the journey’s halfway point, Pingle announced that it was foolish to look farther for traces of Fawcett. Fleming and two companions went on alone. Lack of supplies and guides, hostile Indians and physical weakness forced them back eventually, but they thought they came within 100 miles of Fawcett’s finish. When they met Pingle again he refused to give them money or transportation back to civilization, on the ground that they had resigned from his expedition. The last chapters, which tell of their barely successful race against Pingle and his party back to Para, are the most exciting and amusing part of the book. Author Fleming minimizes the discomforts of Matto Grosso insects, the dangers from wild beasts and sunstroke (he says he never wore a hat in the sun). He and his two companions waded all one day among shoals of the dreaded piranhas (little man-eating fish), though he admits it might not have been so safe if one of them had had an open cut on his body. The attitude of the whole anti-Pingle faction was one of defensive parody: “If Indians approached us, we referred to them as the Oncoming Savages. We never said, ‘Was that a shot?’ but always ‘Was that the well-known bark of a Mauser?’ All insects of harmless nature and ridiculous appearance we pointed out to each other as creatures ‘whose slightest glance spelt Death.’ . . . We spoke of water always as the ‘Precious Fluid.’ ”
The Author. From Eton, where he was Head of the School and editor of the school paper, and Oxford, where he was president of the University Dramatic Society and editor of the Isis (under graduate weekly), Peter Fleming got a formal education that well fitted him for a literary editor’s desk. But. instead, after leaving Oxford he went to Manhattan, worked in Wall Street for several months during the summer of 1929. He disliked it, went to Guatemala as a railway in spector, then back to London to work for a Cabinet committee, “writing monumental treatises on the tsetse fly and the trawler fleet.” He joined the staff of the London Spectator, became literary editor, eight months later went to China. Five months after he got back he was off again to Brazil. After finishing Brazilian Adventure he went to Manchuria as correspondent for the London Times, returned to London to find the town talking about his book. First-rate journalist, Peter Fleming at 26 has no illusions of grandeur about what he writes, obviously enjoys writing it. Typical of him is the cable he sent home from Pará, at the end of his Brazilian adventure: ARRIVE ENGLAND TWENTY-THIRD NO MAIL MONEY LUGGAGE OR REGRETS. Brazilian Adventure is the January choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
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