Andes Rising - Hardcover

Munves, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811214079 ISBN 13: 9780811214070

Publisher: New Directions, 1999

Synopsis

A new American novel-about an ornothologist, a physicist, and a rabbi-that takes us deep into the heart of the Colombian Andes. In Andes Rising the reader is confronted with a mystery. What happened to Thomas Cooper? A scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and attended the disarmament conference following World War II, he had quit his job, left his family, and gone off to Colombia, South America, on an ornothological project undertaken by the Peace Corps. His family and friends have lost all trace of him. Finally his mother persuades her rabbi to go down to Colombia and find out if Thomas is dead or alive. What the rabbi eventually finds is Thomas's journal filled with notes about his bird studies, ruminations about life (to which the rabbi sometimes responds), and pages from the work of Chapman, the early 20th-century ornothologist who collected specimens for the Museum of Natural History. Flashing through all is a rare tanager with turquoise markings. The director of the project wants Thomas to bring in specimens of this bird. "If what is being prepared is another extermination," Thomas writes, "I am not going to abet it by pushing another bird to extinction." But is he slowly going mad? Does he die in the avalanche, or is he somewhere among the birds of the Andes?

About this title

About the Author

The author James Munves (1922–2018) obtained his degree in English from Brown University. From 1970 to 1973 he lived in Colombia, home to more bird species than anywhere else in the world, where he wrote his manuscript of Andes Rising. Although the manuscript was finished in the 70s it was not published until 1998 when Munves stumbled upon it in his old files. Author of a number of books on history and contemporary issues, he has published short stories in various magazines including Confrontation and The New Yorker.

Reviews

The 1971 diary of what may be the last months in the life of a vanished Manhattan Project scientist, Thomas Cooper, constitute this whimsical but flawed first novel. Its entries are full of natural fact, philosophical musings and historical notes. Sent by Thomas's aging mother, Sadie, from California to Colombia to find her missing son, Rabbi Teitelbaum gets his hands on the journal and converts it to a palimpsest. His footnotes, which he affectionately calls the "Teitelbaum midrash," are rendered in a sometimes difficult to read though quite realistic handwriting. Teitelbaum, an unappealingly intrusive character whose concern over the probably dead Thomas's spiritual growth and religious neglect is nevertheless touching, contradicts, calls into question and pokes fun at many of Thomas's private thoughts. He is more reverent of Thomas's relationship to nature, however, and gives background to Thomas's obsession with the rare blue-and-black tanagerAthe ostensible reason Thomas left his family and took off for Colombia on a Peace Corps ornithology mission. Reading the diary, Teitelbaum looks for clues that might indicate whether the lost Thomas is dead or alive; there are suggestions that he has fallen in with or prey to tropical bird smugglers, kidnappers, drug dealers or atomic age spies. Most satisfying in this otherwise loose novel is Thomas's relationship with the work of 19th-century ornithologist F.M. Chapman, whose study of the tanager helped him develop a quasi-Darwinian theory about the environmental roots of speciation. The scrapbook effect diverts the eyeAclippings from newspapers, field guides, Manhattan Project memos, letters from abandoned loved onesAbut cannot bear the weight of narrative responsibility Munves gives it.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An often forbiddingly technical and discursive first novel by a veteran nonfiction writer (The Treasure of Diogenes Sampuez, 1979, etc.). Munvess subject is Thomas Cooper, an American scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was present at the A-bomb test in Los Alamos; after that, he left his government job, joined a Peace Corps effort to preserve endangered species of birds in the Colombian forests, and presumably perished in an avalanche. The story of Cooper's ordeal is framed by prefatory and concluding remarks from Rabbi Sherman Teitelbaum, who has been enlisted by Cooper's mother to investigate whether Thomas is indeed dead and who, with handwritten comments lamenting the adventurer's increasing distance from his family's Jewish beliefs, annotates the notebooks Cooper left behind. Whats revealed by these notebooks is Thomas Cooper's willed separation from his wife and children, the moneymaking urgency of his go-getter brother-in-law, and, especially, the machinations of a government that simultaneously seeks disarmament and ultimate destructive capability (I came to Colombia to do work that did not put one in the position of using one's brains for what others might misuse). The notebooks are further dominated by Cooper's observations on climate, weather, and bird life, with emphasis on the phenomenon of speciation studied by his great predecessor, ornithologist Frank Chapman, who, decades earlier, had roamed South America collecting museum specimensand whose unsentimental understanding of nature's morality painfully influenced Cooper's love-hate relationships with the sciences he has mastered. A compelling themethat professional and political necessity precludes simple appreciation for the visible world's plenitude and integrityis expressed here with considerable passion. But the story suffers from information overload, and even readers perfectly attuned to its ethos may find it heavy going. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In 1980 Rabbi Sherman Teitelbaum reluctantly agrees to look into the reported reappearance of Thomas Cooper, an acquaintance thought long dead. His misgivings only intensify after discovering and reading the missing man's journal. Its contents, and the rabbi's commentary on them, make up most of this richly textured short narrative. Cooper's writings inspire more questions than answers: Could he have engineered a "fatal" avalanche? To what purpose? Why did this former Manhattan Project scientist desert job and family for a Peace Corps bird observation assignment in Colombia? What was really behind his refusal to collect a rare specimen? Are his philosophical musings evidence of self-absorption, or do they imply a miraculous spiritual revelation? Disturbing yet exhilarating reflections haunt the rabbi for decades after his search for Cooper. Readers may find similar intellectual stimulation in this challenging debut novel. Recommended for most fiction collections.AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214079
• ISBN 13: 9780811214070
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 189