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What the Desert Takes: A Novel of Timbuktu - Tapa blanda

Lorenzen, P. Jess

 
9798171977566: What the Desert Takes: A Novel of Timbuktu

Sinopsis

In 1850 three men walk south out of Tripoli. Five years later one of them comes back.



Heinrich Barth is twenty-nine, a Hamburg scholar with a doctorate nobody wanted and a talent for being right. He joins a British mission to end the slave trade by treaty, and he goes for his own reasons: south of the last oasis lies a country the size of Europe about which Europe knows nothing exact, and exact is the only word he has ever loved.



What follows is five years of walking. He is robbed at the wells, held in irons in Bagirmi, lost on a mountain the Tuareg ride around, where he opens a vein in his own arm and drinks. He buries both his companions. He rides with a slave-raiding army because it is the only road into the country he wants to see, and he writes down what it does. And in September 1853 he becomes the first European in a generation to walk into Timbuktu and live — protected for eight months by a scholar who argues theology with him, feeds him, and keeps a city from cutting his throat.



A thousand miles south, a boy named Dorugu is minding guinea fowl when riders come out of the dust. He is taken, yoked, marched, sold at Zinder, sold again to Kukawa, and given a new name each time. He will be bought out of slavery by a German with shaking hands, and he will end up in a Berlin drawing room while a professor measures his skull with calipers, being asked by a king what has struck him most about Europe.



He says: the stairs.



Two men crossing in opposite directions, and a third — a young astronomer sent east because Europe assumed Barth was dead — riding toward a town where a story is still being told about a stranger who would eat nothing but eggs.



Based on the documentary record of one of the great journeys of the nineteenth century, What the Desert Takes is a novel about knowledge and what it costs — told with the hard eye and the black comedy of T. C. Boyle's Water Music and the propulsion of Buddy Levy's survival narratives.



Nearly all of this happened.

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