The Andes: A Cultural HistoryBy Jason Wilson Signal Books, £12
This book explores the 8,000km chain of the Andes through the mountain range’s history, art and literature.
Where most mountainscapes bring out the romantic in writers, the Andes provoke terror; their scale and jagged indifference are almost unbearable – which makes this all the more worthwhile a read.
Wilson opens his account at Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, and drives south through Argentina and Chile and into the mythical lands of Patagonia. Then it’s north through Quito and Colombia before ending up in Caracas.
This is an epic amount of space and travel, and the pages are suitably packed with anecdote and rich cultural pickings. Given the source material, though, Wilson’s biggest problem could well have been choosing which tales to tell.
The pages are stalked by long-haired pishtacos, who haunt lonely mountain roads looking for victims whom they trap "with powder from a dead man's bones and suck out their fat to leave them empty"; the Incas roam the borders of the pages, thirsty for vengeance and the blood of the illiterate swineherd Pizarro, who ripped their complex society asunder in his gold lust; Che Guevara seeks worldwide revolution in the jungles of Bolivia; and then there are the cultural icons who grapple with the scale of this awesome range, such as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the excitable Charles Darwin and José María Arguedas, who is all wide-eyed wonder.
Wilson might wallow a little in the bloodier parts of the stories, but the level of research is exhaustive, and this is a terrifically rich exploration of a truly wild region, told with scholarly authority and the instincts of a strong storyteller.