POSSIBLE TRAVELS

For my first CoronaVac (Sinovac) shot, a month ago, I was flustered and apprehensive. I had not left the house to spend time in a public place for more than a year and dressed in the Danish red and white colors for good luck. We had arrived 40 minutes early fearful they’d run out of vaccines and the whole undertaking was stressful, from the waiting in a socially distant line 

-– to the slow shuffling in line through a darkened Planetarium, the local vaccination venue. The shot itself was over in a minute, but it took a while to settle down from the experience, spraying everything with alcohol and washing hands, whilst waiting for after-effects that never manifested. By contrast, my second shot was a breeze, we arrived later, stood only briefly in line and made the time to take a decent photo of this rather momentous event.

 

The organization by SUS, the Brazilian public health care system was exemplary – friendly, objective and efficient – organizing on one side the elderly returnees for the second shot, and, on the other, the younger 60something group coming in for their first. As we drove away, grateful for the SUS, I thought how different it could have been in Brazil had the president not fired Luiz Mandetta, the health minister, who at the onset of the pandemic would give daily briefings with his colleagues from SUS, and who seemed to have a serious grasp of the situation. He became enormously popular and was fired about one month into the pandemic. His replacement, another medical doctor, lasted a month before he resigned “for personal reasons,” and a disastrous general, with no medical experience, was put in his place. The President reluctantly had to let this third Minister of Health go after the Manaus disaster, where in the first days of January 1654 died when the oxygen ran out. A fourth Minister, a medical doctor, at least wears a mask and mutters about social distancing.

 

Now, in Brazil, it is hard to get really excited about the second vaccine dose. The pandemic rages on pretty much unchecked and there is little hope of a return to a less anxious life anytime soon. Certainly, there will be no trips in the near future, and I am left to travel through the books I’ve been reading.

I went to Patagonia, a place I had always wanted to see, with Bruce Chatwin in his extraordinary book from 1977 “In Patagonia” - reading with Google Maps open on the region and marveling at his observational skills, making me feel I was seeing everything through his eyes.

 

Next, I went to Madagascar with Andrea Lee in her fascinating new novel “Red Island House,”. Told in episodes centered around personages from the island, with the narrator’s own life playing out in the background, the novel is particularly interesting to a reader from Brazil, familiar with the tropical beaches and the influence of an ancient occult tradition. 

 

Finally, I went all the way to Norrland, in the far north of Sweden, to read a dark debut thriller by Stina Jackson, “The Silver Road,” Set in the land of the midnight sun surrounded by vast forests, humming with mosquitos in the summer when it is always light, and, by contrast, dark, snowy and bitterly cold throughout the long winter months, the author brings to life a small, isolated community where the inhabitants survive in different ways, some secret and not always legal. 

 

Here are the links to the books mentioned and which I recommend:

In Patagonia: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0142437190/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_TNSG9KS2Q3X23TXMTW45

Red Island House:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08BZY623M/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_J5AJZ5RJ3M41XHJ6X2F1

The Silver Road:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1786497336/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_5G0NA0ED7E37Z2M84R62