Bolivàr has lived with a tribe of Shuar Indios during his younger years, becoming just like them, learning how to live in the Forest, how to to feed off it respectfully and how to love it unconditionally .
We find him in his old age reading beautiful love stories in his hut peacefully.
Bolivà has lost his wife, with whom he shared a difficult, simple but loving life.
Their story is sketched with some elegantly succinct flashbacks.
Conciseness and clarity are a gift Sepùlveda has as a writer.
I absolutely love that.
White men come, and with them, they bring, as always, destruction and abuse.
They manage to anger the "Tigrillo": a beautifully scary feline whose cubs have been needlessly killed by gringoes and whose mate has been wounded.
She is now mad with pain and desperation and she will have her revenge.
Only Bolivàr, will be knowledgeable and courageous enough to meet her head on.
But what does this Tigrillo represent? I've been left wondering.
Perhaps, fear of the unknown: gringoes are scared stiff of it and respond to it with violence and abuse (all the white men who came as hunters to kill and pilage are brutally killed themselves); perhaps it's the fear that inept leaders often have(we meet a mère who is a coward, an aggressively mean person who cannot be respected by anyone and who literally runs away from the tigrillo); or perhaps it's the last challenge the Amazon Forest, and by extent, life itself, throws at Bolivàr.
That same forest that has taught him so much, with those Shuar Indios that always used to tell him that he was like them not them.
Perhaps this last challenge will raise Bolivàr to the status of a real man: someone who has always respected and loved the Forest with Humility and now the Forest itself allows him to win.
Who knows?
This was truly a beautiful book.
I highly reccommend it.
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