Green Mansions

In the forests of Venezuela a fugitive from a failed revolution hears a voice in the trees — a girl the Indians will not go near and mean to kill, who speaks a language nobody knows and moves through the canopy like something the forest made. Hudson was born on the Argentine pampas to American settlers, came to England at thirty-three and lived years in poverty; he was a naturalist first, and the forest here is real even when Rima is not. Thirty paintings by Frederic Edwin Church and Edvard Munch, from forest streams to autumn showers, carry the wilderness that surrounds Rima.