Two republished titles sharing the same cover – one a Brazilian classic, the other a philosophical blurring of genres – deliver head-spinning insights into life in the rainforest
In this book … Already, three words into my review, this most straightforward way of beginning seems inaccurate, ham-fisted. Is this a book? Verdant Inferno/A Scabby Black Brazilian is published by Urbanomic, whose stated aim is “to act as an advocate for philosophical thinking as a creative practice”. It is among the first titles in a new series, K-Pulp Switch, which borrows the format and the look of the popular Ace Doubles books, launched in 1952, in which two works would be published together, back-to-back and top-to-toe, so that the reader could hold the volume either way up. These two titles are published in this same format, with a pleasingly lurid cover design that recalls the garish frontispieces of the sci-fi and western novels that made up the original series, by authors including Philip K Dick and Ursula K Le Guin.
The contents of this new volume are, however, very different from these classics of genre fiction. Verdant Inferno is a collection of short pieces by the Brazilian writer Alberto Rangel, published in 1908 and translated into English here for the first time, with a preface by the renowned journalist Euclides da Cunha; it comprises a series of overwhelmingly intense, captivating and often horrifying snapshots of Amazonian life, human and non-human. A Scabby Black Brazilian is harder to characterise. Originally written in 2017 by the French philosopher Jean-Christophe Goddard, it is a dense and impish blurring of fiction, alternative history and high literary theory. He brings in and weaves together a head-spinning range of times, places and names: Brazilian novelists, anthropologists and shamans, and European philosophers who visited or wrote about Brazil. Real and fictional figures rub shoulders; languages and worlds swallow and regurgitate one another, producing what Goddard calls “a swarm of polyglot… words, names and phrases”.
