Book description
These nine spellbinding stories of adventure, exploration and
voyage are peopled with ravenous explorers, fortune hunters, foreign
revolutionaries, ill-fated seafarers, intrepid ship's captains, and
ruthless smugglers. But the undeniable protagonist around which these
characters gravitate is nature itself. Southern Chile, the world's
end, with its severe beautyÂ-cold, inhospitable, treacherous,
desolateÂ-finds its ideal poet in Francisco Coloane. In his stories,
this stern landscape rises like a definitive symbol of the elementary
and ceaseless drama of human passions. Coloane is a master
storyteller, deftly distilling the universal from the particular and
the extreme. But no abstraction of this kind can do these tales
justice. Their enduring beauty lies in the forceful, gripping
narrative and the elements that principally comprise this narrative:
men, their crimes and their passions: and the land itself in all its
breathtaking glory and its murderous wrath.
