jdglasgow's review against another edition
3.0
I happened across Uwe Timm’s SNAKE TREE at Half Price Books—in the clearance section, no less—and was struck by both its title and its somewhat minimalist cover. The brief synopsis said it was about a man who runs over a snake in South America and is cursed because of it, which sounded interesting enough. What really encouraged me to plunge into buying it was seeing that there were only 87 ratings and 9 reviews for the book on Goodreads. Could it be possible I has stumbled upon an undiscovered gem? What if it turned out that this book was excellent? It seemed worth the $3 to see.
SNAKE TREE centers on a German structural engineer, last name Wagner, who accepts a position overseeing the construction of a pair of anonymous factories in an ambiguous South American country despite knowing in advance that the previous two managers were (a) kidnapped by either left-wing guerrillas or the right-wing military police and (b) had a nervous breakdown, respectively. Wagner takes the job immediately and without second thoughts, in part because it offers him a way out of his dull marriage for a year; he believes both he and his wife Suzann have been feeling the inevitability of their relationship‘s demise for some time, though he can’t really explain why. Something just feels… unexciting between them. Her quick acceptance of his plan to leave the country—to move to a new hemisphere twice over (trading the northern for the southern and eastern for western)—read to Wagner as proof of his assumptions.
Almost immediately after beginning the job, he runs over the emerald Acaray snake as prophesied, and the locals murmur that he’s now destined to die by drowning. The remainder of the book is coated in suspense because of this occurrence, less for awaiting the foretold drowning itself than the calamitous sequence of events which will necessarily precipitate (no pun intended) his eventual fate. Partly the sense of gloom that overhangs the narrative comes from the oppressive world Wagner inhabits. It’s a jungle country so decimated by logging and paper mills that its landscape is red dirt resembling the moon. At one point Wagner defends this desecration by commenting that he always wanted to go to the moon.
SNAKE TREE centers on a German structural engineer, last name Wagner, who accepts a position overseeing the construction of a pair of anonymous factories in an ambiguous South American country despite knowing in advance that the previous two managers were (a) kidnapped by either left-wing guerrillas or the right-wing military police and (b) had a nervous breakdown, respectively. Wagner takes the job immediately and without second thoughts, in part because it offers him a way out of his dull marriage for a year; he believes both he and his wife Suzann have been feeling the inevitability of their relationship‘s demise for some time, though he can’t really explain why. Something just feels… unexciting between them. Her quick acceptance of his plan to leave the country—to move to a new hemisphere twice over (trading the northern for the southern and eastern for western)—read to Wagner as proof of his assumptions.
Almost immediately after beginning the job, he runs over the emerald Acaray snake as prophesied, and the locals murmur that he’s now destined to die by drowning. The remainder of the book is coated in suspense because of this occurrence, less for awaiting the foretold drowning itself than the calamitous sequence of events which will necessarily precipitate (no pun intended) his eventual fate. Partly the sense of gloom that overhangs the narrative comes from the oppressive world Wagner inhabits. It’s a jungle country so decimated by logging and paper mills that its landscape is red dirt resembling the moon. At one point Wagner defends this desecration by commenting that he always wanted to go to the moon.
More...