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The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers (A Graywolf Memoir) |  | Author: Moritz Thomsen
Creator: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $1.49
as of 7/29/2010 09:13 CDT details
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Seller: oncesoldtales
Rating:  13 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st PAPERBACK
Pages: 284
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 1555971245
Dewey Decimal Number: 918.10463
EAN: 9781555971243
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Saddest Pleasure
The Saddest Pleasure is a deeply personal look at the people, poverty, beauty, art, music, literature, and passion of South America by an American who has spent most of his life there.
Moritz Thomsen was one of the early Peace Corps volunteers. Through his skill as a writer he vividly brings to life the people and landscapes he loves. The Saddest Pleasure tells the story of Thomsen's desperate departure from Ecuador at the age of sixty-three and his soul-searching journey through Brazil and the Amazon River. Along the way the author reflects on the meaning of his own life and the world around him, his friendships, and on the distances between people and cultures.
Thomsen's spirited observations are tinged with irascibility, as he moves from city to feudal countryside, from primitive conditions to the startlingly contemporary details of a culture in transition.
Paul Theroux's introduction to this book is a testament to Mr. Thomsen's remarkable life.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
 a beautifully sensitive author discovered. September 19, 1998
erieman@mail.coin.missouri.edu (Columbia, MO, USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Thomsen writes of traveling through Brazil and on the Amazon while remembering his unrecon-ciled struggle with his father and his hard ten years living poor on a farm in Ecuador. This is one of the very best books I have read, and I am 78! That Paul Theroux is his friend and wrote the Inro is one more recommendation.
A writer faces down both his own past and unavoidable death. February 7, 1999
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Having read Living Poor, Farm on the River of Emeralds and Journey of Two Rivers, I savored every line, every word of Thomsen's last work. What beautiful insight, honesty, and soul. My favorite narrative, perhaps ever.
Startling epiphanies August 2, 1997
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is the kind of book one is reluctant to continue reading, because each session brings one closer to the end, and thus closer to the end of its startling epiphanies and immeasurable riches. A sad pleasure indeed
Amazing journey within these pages... October 11, 2006
duneshack (Maryland, North America, Planet Earth)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I had this book for over ten years before I finally sat down to read it recently, at home from work with a cold. I quickly became engrossed in it to the point where I had a hard time putting it down. Thomsen's writing is superb. He weaves his personal story of early psychic hurt at the hands of his father and eccentric family into an exploration of global woes and human suffering, all the while with truly beautiful language. Alternately funny, gross, awful and awe-inspiring, you will come away dazzled, moved and yes, shaken by the vividness of his images and the depth of his understanding of the human condition. It is one of those rare books that transcends its own story line to show you a window onto our world of great clarity and understanding on issues like the economics of class, the gulfs between cultures, exploitation and poverty, the meaning of beauty, and the individual's struggle to find meaning in a chaotic world. In the end, you're not sure where you have gone, whether to Ecuador, Brazil, or on your own inner journey of discovery that you've unsuspectingly embarked on without ever leaving your room.
A Masterpiece Memoir October 11, 2007
Brian Allen (Manistee, MI USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There are many reasons why I loved this book. There were sentences that astonished me, word-craft simple precise and searing. Paragraphs of description that somehow tied in a view, a history, and a personality with succinct power. Moritz did have a somewhat dour outlook on life and plenty of reason for it. His gift was to write of it with his personal life journey and to embilish his world view with the great connections of history,literature, music and a empathy for the poor, disadvantaged, and struggling people of South America.
He also is able to write of situations that leave me laughing hysterically as in the "despidida", the family ritual of mourning the departing traveler where the "male members of this tragic group, the uncles, the brothers, the godfathers, stand at the fringes. They stare at the floor, take deep drags on their cigarettes, and clench and unclench the muscles in their jaws. They are just a few seconds away from a total breakdown that would destroy forever the macho image they have spent a lifetime cultivating". I read another scene to my son about Moritz's avoidance of foods from the roadside stall that had me laughing so hard that I struggled to continue reading.
Moritz's first two books, "Living Poor" and "Farm on the River of Emeralds" also great books, were rooted in place in Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador. In "The Saddest Pleasure" he has left that place, left poverty in the village of his Peace Corps service and the farm he started with his Ecuadorian partner. In this book he faces the end of his life, returning to a "bourgeois" fate and begins this journey not knowing that it will redefine his life.
It may be helpful but not necessary to read Moritz's first two books before this. In the "Saddest Pleasure" Moritz expounds not only on poverty and place but more on what life is for, what life has become. I found the first two books to be much easier to assimilate than this but this again is richer and I will be sure to read it again.
I highly recommend this book to all avid readers I know.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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