Purchased during a Wednesday afternoon book binge at MacLeod's, following a visit to David Blue.

Ecologist Hope Clearwater has "washed up" -- as she tells it -- on the shores of a place recently renamed "Brazzaville Beach" in an unnamed country on the coast of Africa (the beach is related to Brazzaville, largest city in the Republic of the Congo, only in that it was named for a historic conference held in the Republic of the Congo in 1964). There she lives in a refurbished beach house and works as a commercial translator for her boyfriend, Gunter Neuffer, a sales director at a local bauxite mine. What has brought Hope to Brazzaville Beach, a place largely populated by itinerants and tourists? All we know is that she is licking some old wounds ("I have to make sense of what has taken place before I can restart my life in the world"), and has two stories to tell.

The primary tale told in Brazzaville Beach (which is told in the third person to set it apart from the second story, which is told in the third person) is set in a national park and game preserve called Grosso Arvore, where Hope is employed by Eugene Mallabar, a Louis Leakey-like character who began the Grosso Arvore Research Project in the 1950s, observing and noting the activities of a group of chimpanzees. The back story -- which I found less interesting than the parts of the novel set in Grosso Arvore -- is a Beautiful Mind like account of her failed marriage to mathematician John Clearwater.

Brazzaville Beach was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990. You can read reviews of the novel in the New York Times here and here (free subscription required).

(Top left: the chimpanzee Jane Goodall called "Old Flo", who lived from approximately 1929 until 1972, courtesy the website of the Jane Goodall Institute.)

RELEASE NOTES:

I'll be leaving this book on one of the tables outside Naturally Yours Esthetic Studio, around noon on Tuesday, October 3rd. Best wishes and happy reading to whomever finds it!