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3.45 AVERAGE
3.45 AVERAGE
Travel writing is one of my favorite genres. It brings you to people and places you are unlikely ever to encounter, especially if done through the lens of time. For the first fifty or so pages of Ben Macintyre's Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, an intriguing journey into the hinterlands of Paraguay to a lost German colony seems to be where the book is taking us. Then . . . things completely fall apart. It becomes part history, then mostly biography, then a lot of allusion to Nazi Germany, and finally back to travel writing for the last sixteen pages. Meanwhile, the writer is busy applying barstool psychoanalysis to people he has never met and whose only contact with them is through letters and published books. In between playing Freud, Macintyre engages in a tidal wave of virtue signalling until his condemnations and historical judgments descend into hyperbole and hysteria.
This book lacks a central thesis. Why did an editor ever allow it to be published? The separate themes of travel writing, history, and biography simply don't mesh, here. And the writer does himself little favor in constantly tossing in quotes from Nietzsche, as if that replaces his shallow, superficial reading of the philosopher. Much of the history seems as if it is the work of a first year graduate student who doesn't quite know what to do with his material.
Macintyre should have stuck with travel writing. There were possibilities had he done so. That is revealed in the last chapter. Plenty of intriguing stories exist of the then (1991) modern day descendants of the original German colonists--or so it seems. The author was just too lazy to follow them up. Why did he bother to go to Paraguay in the first place, if this puny result is all he has to show for it?
This book lacks a central thesis. Why did an editor ever allow it to be published? The separate themes of travel writing, history, and biography simply don't mesh, here. And the writer does himself little favor in constantly tossing in quotes from Nietzsche, as if that replaces his shallow, superficial reading of the philosopher. Much of the history seems as if it is the work of a first year graduate student who doesn't quite know what to do with his material.
Macintyre should have stuck with travel writing. There were possibilities had he done so. That is revealed in the last chapter. Plenty of intriguing stories exist of the then (1991) modern day descendants of the original German colonists--or so it seems. The author was just too lazy to follow them up. Why did he bother to go to Paraguay in the first place, if this puny result is all he has to show for it?
informative
slow-paced
Crazy story of a forgotten colony of aryans in South America. Shadow people who never fit in. Ben Macintyre is great at taking historical research and creating a captivating read.
I remember reading this years ago, and I was reminded of it again after reading Fordlandia, which I reviewed here as well. This book does two things. It gives you a biography of Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher. Two, it gives you the story of the Aryan community her husband and her established in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle. The author went there to find the few remaining descendants of that community. I remember liking the book, and this was probably one of my first reading forays into that subgenre of books some people call micro-histories. This is one book I would recommend if you like the lesser known parts of history.