Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians - Softcover

Clastres, Pierre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571193986 ISBN 13: 9780571193981

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1998

Synopsis

Chronicle of the Guyaki Indians is an unsentimental, yet sympathetic, depiction of the year anthropologist Pierre Clastres spent with a so-called 'savage' tribe of Indians in Paraguay in 1963. It describes the everyday life and habits, ritual and cosmology of these Indians. It makes compelling, sometimes shocking reading - when, for instance, the Indians' anger at the fate they have to suffer causes them to start murdering their own children. But Clastres's book - in Paul Auster's marvellous translation - brings this alien world close to our own.

About this title

Review:

" It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion--all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. . . . It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist." -- "From Paul Auster's Foreword"

& quot; It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion--all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. . . . It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist.& quot; -- From Paul Auster's Foreword

"It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion--all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. . . . It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist."--"From Paul Auster's Foreword"

About the Author:

Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0571193986
• ISBN 13: 9780571193981
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256