The Lost City of Z - David Grann

Published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd: London, 2017 (2009).

 I've been wanting to read this book for quite some time, ever since I heard about the movie being made back in 2016. It tells the true story of explorer Percy Fawcett, who believed that the Amazon jungle contained the ruins of a massive city, which he nicknamed Z. In 1925 Fawcett, along with his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh, entered the jungle to discover the city and never returned.

The book tells us all of this in the first few pages, but then goes on to fill us in on Fawcett's life, along with telling the "present day" journey of author David Grann to find out about Fawcett. Grann eventually goes to the Amazon himself, although not going as deep into the Amazon as his subject.

For a book that has no tidy resolution, and lets us know this from the word go (we're not going to discover for sure what happened to Fawcett when no-one else has managed to do so), The Lost City of Z is gripping. Not only do we as the reader learn intense amounts of information regarding the dangers of the Amazon, but in Fawcett, in Grann and in the numerous others mentioned in the book who sought Fawcett following his disappearance, we get to see a powerful look at obsession, and how dangerous it can become to a person. And even in doing so, we are exposed to the allure of the mystery, and how easy it would be to become drawn into it ourselves.

I found myself pondering the Amazon during the time reading the book, asking myself what my beliefs about Z are, and even wondering what it would be like to go and look for it myself.

That is the power of the unknown.

Completed 19 March 2020.

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