Populist preaching

Patrick Marnham visits Brazil’s annual festival of literature

Many years ago a wild-eyed Englishman hacked his way into the Amazon rain forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. Since then the fate of Percy Fawcett, known as ‘the Colonel’, has remained a mystery.

Fawcett, a heavily bearded pipe-smoker in a deerstalker hat, was a figure of fun to the bright young things of England in the 1920s. This was unfair since he was engaged in work of some importance; he was mapping the Brazilian frontier with Bolivia and Peru. Colonel Fawcett returned to the Amazon many times and over the years, distracted from his science, he became convinced of the existence of a Lost World in the heart of the forest. It was a land of fabulous wealth and mythical beasts and he yearned for it. Fawcett was notorious for his bullying manner and his contemptuous dismissal of those who disagreed with his views and nothing would deflect him from his delusion. In the search for his non-existent paradise the Colonel eventually met his end — possibly the victim of hostile Indians.

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Paraty is a small stone town trapped between the South Atlantic and the Brazilian rainforest that was founded by the Portuguese 200 years ago and designed for the discreet export of gold and coffee. It stands today — to all appearances little changed since the day when Colonel Fawcett disappeared. For most of the year it remains a community of fishermen and artists, rather as one imagines a tropical St Ives might have been 90 years ago. But for one week in July it becomes the focus of Brazilian cultural life and the site of the FLIP, Brazil’s annual festival of literature.

The festival, devised over a good lunch in 2002 by Liz Calder, the founder of Bloomsbury Publishers, and Mauro Munhoz, a Brazilian architect, was always intended to have two identities.