Volume 50, Number 18 · November 20, 2003
Snakes in Paradise
By J.H. Elliott
Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues
by Kenneth Maxwell
Routledge, 336 pp., $85.00; $22.95 (paper)
Ever since the Huguenot pastor Jean de Léry recorded his impressions of the Tupinamba Indians in 1578,[1] Brazil has proved to be a source of wonder and fascination to foreign observers. A land of captivating beauty and baffling contradictions, it has always eluded simple classification. Tropical paradise or the tristes tropiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1934 with a copy of Léry in his pocket only to discover that all too few remnants of the Garden of Eden had in fact survived? In any event, admission to the paradise, if it ever existed, was never universal. Already by the later seventeenth century Brazil was described in a popular Portuguese refrain as 'a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattoes.'[2] Tickets for entry may have been reallocated since then, but, as Kenneth Maxwell reminds us in his Naked Tropics, the income disparities in modern Brazil are among the worst in the world, with perhaps some 40 million of its 160 million inhabitants living in poverty on incomes of below $50 a month. For all the advances of the 1990s, the cherubim—in whose employ?—still guard the gates, flaming sword in hand.
Review, 3185 words
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