Another Bone-Swapping Event
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru.
"Brad Fox has traveled to the center of many worlds and here records a visit to the 'passionate nada' in his disarming, beautifully natural style. Stranded in a powerful landscape, a clear voice renders human situations in elegant sentences that build to animate profound heartache and self-discovery. Read Another Bone-Swapping Event and witness what transforms."
—Eugene Lim, author of Search History and Fog & Car
In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world.
Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we’re able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mind-blowing ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian jungle help tourists weather the Covid pandemic and their confused lives in this haphazard account from journalist Fox (The Bathysphere Book). After the author and his wife Eszter traveled to Tarapoto, Peru, in March 2020 to partake of psychoactive potions made by local curandero (healer) Miguel Tapullima Cachique, lockdowns canceled their return flight and they ended up staying for months. Ensconced in a jungle compound, Fox and other participants ingested brews of ayahuasca and other native plants, occasioning drug trips filled with vomiting, moaning, coughing, ranting, and ecstatic or bleak visionary trances ("All of us are dead," chanted Eszter during one such episode). Fox also explored the region's flora and fauna, interacted with a rotating cast of "shamanic tourists," and wrestled with his own demons, including alcohol abuse, the couple's fertility problems, and an apocalyptic mood induced by the pandemic. He provides some gorgeous landscape descriptions and piquant sketches of the eccentrics he encounters, but his attempts to extract meaning from his hallucinogenic trips are bogged down in turgid psychedelia—"A sleepy hiccup from the mouth of a great frog, bubbles popping out of simmering glue, with a filter shift the background replaced the foreground"—or rambling mysticism. As cathartic as the experience may have been for Fox, it makes for baffling, tiresome reading.
