This one of the best travel books I have ever read. Of course, it's so much more than a travel book. It's about life, written by someone nearing the end of it. :: There’s a movement afoot (led in part by Mark Walker, see the interview below) to elevate Moritz Thomsen to the status of a Very Important Writer, someone whose books stay in print for generations and get assigned in college literature classes, someone whose name every well-read person should know. And we here at BookMarks are happy to do our part. We briefly mentioned Thomsen in one of our previous columns (where we reviewed two Peace Corps memoirs), and now the time has come to bring him front and center.

Living Poor: An American’s Encounter with Ecuador (image is the cover second edition) is widely considered the quintessential Peace Corps memoir. With deepest apologies to all my Peace Corps friends, that’s damning with faint praise; Living Poor is a great memoir, period, and easily transcends both the Peace Corps and the memoir genres. It is the story of Thomsen’s close to four years as an agricultural development volunteer in Rioverde, an exceptionally poor village on Ecuador’s southern coast, but at a deeper level it’s the slowly unfolding story of a middle class, middle-aged American’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to understand poverty—or at least poor people. That Thomsen fails, or at least believes he has failed, does not detract from the power of the story, since in the end it is about his relationships with a handful of people, characters so beautifully drawn, so alive, that you care about them every bit as much as Thomsen. (If one is a writer or has any writing aspirations whatsoever, these characters are what might be called heartbreakingly alive, as in it breaks one’s heart to realize one could never create characters so real oneself).

But I digress. Living Poor is mainly about chickens, eggs, pigs, corn, bananas, and the jungle. Thomsen’s Peace Corps assignment is to help poor farmers raise chickens and pigs, plant kitchen gardens, clear land so they can plant corn and coconuts—and assorted other first-world schemes not designed with dirt-poor farmers living at the edge of equatorial rainforests uppermost in mind. There are setbacks: the people are way too poor to afford chicken feed; the chickens die of cholera; the pigs break through weak fences and wander off; one good rain washes away everyone’s kitchen garden; corn stalks wither and die. The second half of the book deals with Thomsen’s attempts to start a farmers’ co-op whereby people for whom a stick of sugar cane is on occasion their only meal will learn to temporarily sacrifice immediate personal and family welfare for the slightly delayed promise of improved living standards for all. More setbacks follow.

Above all Living Poor is the story of Ramon Prado and his wife Ester and, later, their little daughter Martita (destined to be Martin until she turned out to be a girl). Thomsen ends up caring so deeply about this family it hurts. And their love for him is total. The last paragraph of the book, as Thomsen comes to say good bye at the end of his time in Rioverde, a paragraph so lovely it would stand out by a mile in any other book, is pure Thomsen:

So I drank the coffee, and Ramon told Martita to say good-by, pretending outrage because she was smiling, and then I said good-by to Ester, and everything was under control, everything like a dream. But as I stepped down off the porch to leave, Ester screamed, and I turned to see her, her face contorted with tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged each other, and Ramon rushed from the house and stood on the brow of the hill, looking down intently into the town.

Where else can you read anything as beautiful as that?

You have to be in the mood for travel books; even the best ones are necessarily episodic, a series of vignettes, each delightful in itself, to be sure, but with the parts not always adding up to any particular whole, and the book, as a result, not building to the kind of climax readers expect as their reward for sticking with the author. For this reason, although I deeply admired Living Poor and its stunning sequel A Farm on the River of Emeralds, I’ve always been wary of The Saddest Pleasure, as I understood it to be mostly a travel book, meaning that I’d have to be in the mood. So, I have only read it just now so I could write this review.

I should have known better; it’s Moritz, after all, who just can’t write a book that doesn’t cast a spell early on and grip you till the end. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers is ostensibly the story of a trip Thomsen takes from his home in Quito to Rio and then up the Amazon from Belem to Manaus. But the book is mostly a journey into Thomsen’s past, specifically the story of his relationship with his father, a monster whom he loathed and in reacting to whom, he now realizes, he became the man we meet in the pages of his books, and the story of the final chapter of Thomsen’s relationship with Ramon Prado and his family, the hero of Living Poor and of A Farm on the River of Emeralds. In between these two gripping narratives, we get beautifully written glimpses of Brazil and the Amazon and marvelous character sketches of Thomsen’s travelling companions. It is a credit to Thomsen’s powers that although the journey is more or less a complete bust—he never even arrives in Manaus before the book ends—the reader hardly notices because the real journey here is almost entirely internal and completely compelling.