When I first set eyes on the cover for Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Profile Books), I did a double-take.I thought I saw the decapitated head of Mr. Everett floating in the water beside the Amazonian in the canoe. Thankfully I was mistaken, because on the back cover is a series of shots which show the author emerging from the water, with body well and truly attached. Phew!
Other than the ‘mistaken for decapitation’ feature on the cover (no doubt unintentional, and probably only interpreted as that by me), the cover is a bit bland, unlike the book’s superb cover blurb, which sets the book up with a lot of promise:
A Christian missionary, Daniel Everett arrived in remotest Brazil with his wife and young family in 1977, intending to convert a small tribe of Amazonians called the Pirahá. Instead, he found a language that defies Chomsky’s linguistic theory and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: the Pirahá have no counting system and no fixed terms for colour. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present.
Everett is the first outsider to learn their language. Over time, he came to understand the remarkable contentment with which they live: so much so that he eventually lost his faith.
What I find most interesting about this blurb is the fact that Everett lost his faith in favour of the simpler, less complicated way of life led by the Pirahá. I can’t wait to find out how simple and uncomplicated that life must be.
Profile Books | August 2009 | £8.99 | PAPERBACK | 320 PP | ISBN: 9781846680403
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