When Mountains Walked, by Kate Wheeler (Houghton Mifflin, $23). Deep in the bottom of the world's deepest canyon, so deep that rain evaporates before it hits the bottom, lies the fictional Peruvian village of Piedras. Idealistic Maggie Goodwin, an American who spent her childhood in South America, and her new husband,
veteran aid worker Carson Miller, come here to reopen an abandoned clinic, switchbacking down the canyon on a crowded, pitching bus. In the 1930s, Maggie's grandmother came to this same village, bucking headlong up the Rosario River on a wooden raft, accompanied by her seismologist husband and a tethered cow. The novel alternates between Maggie's life in
modern Piedras and flashbacks to her grandmother's sojourn there; each woman is indelibly changed by the Rosario, a torrent of "whirlpools and rapids and deceptive smooth spots where the surface roiled with deadly currents," where "people got sucked down, swept away." Maggie soon feels Piedras "inside her, full of magic, the canyon's sides her bones," and
falls in love with both the place and a charismatic revolutionary. Like the heroine of this first novel, acclaimed journalist and fiction writer Wheeler was raised in South America, and her portrayal of both locals and gringos is pitch perfect. As for the tale's abrupt conclusion, suffice it to say that Maggie wades in too far, and the river sweeps her
away.
Bruce Chatwin: A Biography, by Nicholas Shakespeare (Doubleday, $35). For legions of trekkers in South America and Australia, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and The Songlines are adventure bibles. And Chatwin himself, who died in 1989 at the age of 49, the classic literary traveler for a new generation, a romantic cross
between Lord Byron and T. E. Lawrence, a golden boy with eyes the color of the Aegean. The consummate nomad, he was also the consummate collector—of fine antiques, wealthy acquaintances, lovers of both sexes. British writer Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years uncovering the story of a man who constantly reinvented and fictionalized himself: The
middle-class boy from Birmingham, England, begat the dandified university fop, who begat the worldly Sotheby's art dealer—identities that spawned the generous-spirited writer few suspected he could be. Even as he lay dying of AIDS, Chatwin spun myths about himself, insisting that his illness was an exotic South Asian fungus. This casual disregard for
accuracy left a trail of resentment; especially in aboriginal Australia, the characters in his books were left feeling cheated, as if he had stolen something sacred and peddled it back home. But Chatwin's friends forgave him anything (having him around, one said, was like "having extra oxygen in the air"), and his biographer refuses easy judgment: "To call
him cold-hearted or snobbish or narcissistic—all of which he appeared on the surface—is to watch him fall between the floorboards."
Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend, by Patrick Symmes (Vintage Books, $13). In Cuba in 1991, freelance journalist and Outside contributor Symmes met a young man disillusioned with Castro's regime. Producing a wrinkled photograph of martyred revolutionary Che Guevara, the man declared, "If
he were alive, none of this would be happening." Thus was Symmes drawn into the myth of Che, and into an obsession that would result in this book's retracing of Guevara's pivotal 1952 motorcycle trip across South America, during which upper-class Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna became the guerrilla known simply as Che. Astride a
BMW motorcycle he called La Cucaracha, Symmes two-wheeled 10,000 miles in Guevara's ruts, from Córdoba, Argentina, to La Higuera, Bolivia, where Che was executed in 1967. The result is an exhilarating blend of travel, reportage, and history, a tale informed by people "who knew Che before Che was cool," and a narrative illuminating his political
conversion as he witnessed rural poverty. Today, writes Symmes, Che has been turned into a cliché—"an easy emblem of meaningless and unthreatening rebellion...educated violence and disheveled nobility, like Gandhi with a gun or John Lennon singing 'Give War a Chance.'" Happily, this book rescues the complex, living man from that fatuous icon.
Getting Back, by William Dietrich (Warner Books, $25). If this adventure thriller were a movie, it would go straight to video. But what a camp classic! The year is 2048, wilderness is a distant memory, the city a brown grid stretching to infinity. The life of Daniel Dyson (Cubicle 17, Level 31, Microcore Corporation) is
a programmed hell—until, that is, he meets a mysterious raven-haired beauty named Raven, and signs up with a secretive tour group called Outback Adventure, which plops clients down on survival treks across wildest Australia. But wait: The continent is now a wasteland swept free of humans by a genetically engineered virus run amok; and Outback
Adventure is a front for—gasp—the evil conglomerate United Corporations, whose clients never come back alive. (In a historical echo, it is also repopulating Australia with convicts.) The outdoor action never stops as Dyson and his comrades fend off marauding off-road warriors, dig for grubs, and unsuccessfully navigate a minefield of hackneyed
dialogue and plot. The most delectable set piece is a hilarious Mad MaxmeetsMonty Python siege of an abandoned office tower, complete with catapulted desks and chairs. The author, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, loads his Crichtonesque tale with heavy eco-messages, and our hero decides that getting back isn't the answer after
all—that maybe, just maybe, he can start a new civilization in Australia, living in harmony with the earth. A perfect addition to the post-Y2K bunker, good for plenty of escapist yuks. —ELIZABETH HIGHTOWER
