ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It’s taken me ages to read this book, nearly three weeks, and it’s only 390 pages long.  It’s partly because I’m also reading other things as well but it’s also I kept getting distracted by the other issues the book raises. It’s not just a memoir of an eccentric adventurer who was murdered in a remote area of Pakistan, and it’s not just a travel book.  It’s also a book that plays with the conventions of these genres.

Jordi Magraner was an adventurer who fell in love with the Hindu Kush, and, it seems to me, at different times varied his reasons for being there.  He was a student of the natural world, and heard stories about the legendary barmanu – known to most of us as the yeti – and he set off to see if he could find it.  But for quite long periods of time, he got involved in other quests as well…

The author would have his readers believe that the quest for the barmanu/yeti is not as crazy as it seems.

One day in 1949, a doctor of zoology called Bernard Houvelmans opens the Saturday Evening Post and reads an article entitled ‘There May Be Dinosaurs’.  He’s wary when he sees that it’s signed by a writer he trusts.  Then, amid the claims made in the text, he reads the names of researchers he also considers serious, and by the end he has found that he needs to look into the information.

Seven years later, he publishes On the Track of Unknown Animals, introducing a series of animals discovered to date in the twentieth century.  Most of them are pretty big.  There you’ll find the okapi, the coelacanth, the Paraguayan peccary, the pygmy hippopotamus, the Cambodian wild ox, and the Komodo dragon.

Heuvelmans is a scientist, he considers himself a scientist, the animals he writes about exist ‘in reality’, but he has demonstrated that many of them were only located after conversations with indigenous people who gave assurances of their existences by recounting stories, describing them.  Before they were discovered, these animals were no more than legends to westerners, or the victims of extinction.  In which case why should we not believe other stories told about fugitive beings? (p.32)

I was immediately distracted by the thought that in this era of fake news, would we believe it if there were reports of a yeti being found in the mountains of the Hindu Kush?  Perhaps that would depend on where the reports came from.  If trusted sources like the ABC and the BBC reported it, would we believe it?  Or would we think that they were sincere but had been hoodwinked? Would we disbelieve it altogether or would we accept the revelation that the mythical creature had turned out to be real?

How you respond to this idea depends on whether you think we have mapped our world fully or whether you think that just as other species have been found in remote uncharted places, a yeti might possibly exist.

Well, Jordi Magraner did believe it could be real, and with extraordinary determination he set out to harvest the stories, disprove the reports of mysterious groanings that turned out to be the movement of rocks, and to hunt out every bit of evidence he could find.  The difficulties he faced – funding his project, learning the languages and finding trusted translators, living a simple life in the mountains and so on – are the stuff you might expect in a memoir such as this.  But what complicated everything he did was the contemporaneous rise of the Taliban and the distrust of strangers, the paranoia and the religious extremism that arose from that.  Because the area where he was hunting was where the Kalash lived, a people who were not Muslim and who were at risk of having their culture obliterated by the Taliban’s determination to enforce their religious rule.  Over the long period of time that Jordi was on his quest, he vacillated between finding his barmanu and saving the Kalash, a project which got him into trouble in more ways than one.

Amongst other risky things, he took on the care and education of a boy called Shamsur, which led to suspicions about Jordi’s sexuality and possibly predatory behaviour towards the boy.  These were exacerbated when Shamsur rejected study and in adolescence became an ungrateful hash-smoking layabout.  The suspicions hardened when Jordi then took on another young boy as a replacement.  The author, who admired Jordi for his adventurous spirit but is not writing a hagiography, presents conflicting statements from numerous people who knew Jordi, leading to the reader’s conclusion that nobody knows for sure, but that rumours were rife… and under the encroaching rule of the Taliban this was a risky situation indeed.

The story begins with Jordi’s death, which was obviously an execution by a skilled professional.  The book ends with the author’s inconclusive efforts to find out what really happened and why the police investigation went nowhere.  But in between the quest to find a lost paradise gets bogged down in numerous examples of Jordi’s intemperate nature, his impatience with authorities who try to warn him about the dangers of his project, and his financial difficulties which lead to debts – a very risky situation to be in when, after 9/11 tourism dries up and everyone is short of money.

The book also plays with the conventions of life stories by including imagined sequences which offer an intimate insight into Jordi’s thoughts, his conversations and his behaviours.  This is what the author says about that on the last page:

There is a first version of this book in which everything is described exactly as it happened.  In the one you have just read, I preferred to change a few names so as not to injure any sensibilities and, as far as possible, to protect those involved.  Occasionally I have also recreated the unfolding of episodes that had only been conveyed to me in the barest facts.  I put in some details, atmosphere, tension, colour… without ever distorting the ultimate meaning of the message I received.  These minimal recreations are what make this book a non-fiction novel.

I have dedicated nearly three years to a story in which, as you have seen, I ended up risking my own life.  None of my literary ‘interventions’ detract from the ultimate truth of everything I have written here.  I would have been the greatest of fools if I had done anything to jeopardise so much effort, so much reality.  (p. 389)

A non-fiction novel… a semi-fictional memoir… the boundaries are blurred much more than ‘occasionally’, I thought.  It’s definitely a book for our times.

Author: Gabi Martinez
Title: In the Land of the Giants, Hunting Monsters in the Hindu Kush
Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn
Publisher: Scribe Publications, 2017, first published in 2011 as Sólo para gigantes
ISBN: 9781925321630
Review copy courtesy of Scribe Publications

Available from Fishpond: In the Land of Giants: hunting monsters in the Hindu Kush