Upriver by Barry Yourgrau

Move over Joseph Conrad and Álvaro Mutis, here comes Barry Yourgrau with his tale of adventure up a jungle river. He’s on a mongrel steamer and the humidity and heat are brutal. There are a couple of seedy business types and an old lawyer. There’s also a woman. Here’s how Barry describes her:

“a virginal young woman in a high-throated dowdy frock, no doubt going out to be a governess. . . . She sits staring straight ahead in her torn chair, in an eerie rigid manner, without a word – without even, as far as I can tell, the slightest action of her frail breast. The behavior and the pallor of her skin, make certain extravagant rumors I’ve heard play about my mind.”

Barry speaks to one of the business types about all of this. Almost predictably, the cigar chomping crudester makes an off-color remark. The tale concludes with a touch of Conrad and a pinch of Mutis:

“Around us the engine throbs, and groans, and drags us along deeper into the dark, choking walls of the wilderness, bearing in our midst the pale cargo of the governess, inert and transfixed in her cracked chair, like a feeble, desiccated figurehead, or a blighted icon, of our enterprise.”