The Apprentice Tourist

Extraordinary encounters with indigenous communities, some partially real and others completely falsified, yet always well and truly beyond belief … in the process of mythmaking … the country of Andrade’s imagination became more vivid, more alive – David McAllister * Prospect *The Apprentice Tourist shows Andrade’s fascination with Amazonian cultures — and his utter boredom with the government officials and elites who welcomed the group of travelers along the way … it offers an important corrective in bringing canonical Brazilian works into English – Lucas Iberico Lozada * The New York Times *

Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) was a Brazilian writer, born in S o Paulo, best known for the gleefully anarchic rhapsody Macunaima, the Hero with No Character (1928). A polymath of his era, he was trained as a musician but became equally influential in fiction, poetry, photography, and art criticism. He served as the founding director of S o Paulo’s Department of Culture and helped organize and participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in 1922, an event that would be central to the birth of modernism in Brazil. A key thread of Andrade’s work involved the recognition and preservation of Afro-Brazilian cultures and traditions.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (translator/introducer) is a translator, writer, and researcher whose translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis was acclaimed as “a gift to scholars” by The New York Times. She studied Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and earned a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University. She lives in Rio de Janeiro, where she is the research director of the podcast series Radio Novelo.