Product Description
Paperback. Pub Date: 2000 09 Pages: 419 in Publisher: Transworld Publishers For 4 years Keenan and McCarthy were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon From the blank Outlook of a tiny cell with only each other and a few volumes. the of an withancient American encyclopedia to sustain them. they could only wander the wide open spaces of their imagination. To displace the ugly confines of their existence. they envisaged walking in the Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia. Five years after their release. they travel together through Chile . journeying by every means available through vast empty deserts. verdant plains and barren tundra. Between Extremes is the story of that journey which once more found them far from home. in an unfamiliar landscape. but which for the first time allowed them to live by their own rules.
Amazon Review
Throughout their long captivity in Beirut, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan would often retreat to the lost paradises of their imagination, and particularly to the Chile of Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits, a land of and between extremes. Five years after their return from Beirut, Keenan and McCarthy travelled along South America's backbone, from the parched and scorching Atacama desert in the north to freezing, wind-torn Patagonia 3000 miles south, to realise their dream.
In addition to the two northern voices writing in unison is the continuous presence of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The Latin voice provides a delicate counterpoint to the prose, which is both fluid and humorous. Between Extremes contains excellent descriptions of an awesome landscape and it guides the reader towards a penetrating and often surprising vision of the collective psychology of a society seeking to rediscover itself following the traumatic period of the Pinochet regime. At the same time, the two travellers seek to redefine their own friendship--this time in open spaces. --Philippa West
|
