Magdalena, River of Dreams, by Wade Davis, reviewed

Available from Penguin UK here. Wade Davis’s latest book, a poetic musing on the Magdalena River in Columbia, an important inspiration and influence for the irreplaceable chronologer of his country  Gabriel Garcia Marquez among many others. 

Imprint: Bodley Head Published: 20/08/2020
ISBN: 9781847926104 Length: 432  Pages

A captivating new book – from the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Into the Silence – that illuminates Colombia’s complex past, present, and future through the story of the great Río Magdalena.

Travellers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. In this masterful new book, he revisits the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet.

Only in Colombia can a traveller wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits.

Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life. At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace.

Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country’s most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.

Magdalena, River of Dreams, by Wade Davis, reviewed

First up it is a gorgeous image for the cover of the book taken on the Magdalena river. In many ways this is a complete eulogy by Davis of the river, the country, the person he was when he first experienced it all, but then blended with a time traveling narrative.  The Magdalena is the channel through which so much of what is essentially Columbian is captured.

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez the river is so influential it is often an actual character in his fiction. Similarly, the story is Simon Bolivar, El Libertador, is seen as an almost historical piece as it so closely tries to follow Bolivar’s goal to secure the Magdalena as part of his campaign of liberation. Davis’s interweaving of present, recent past, memoir and history is a joyous book to read, though he does not duck the tough issues of just how bloody, vindictive and almost never ending the decades of civil war were.

This does make for tough reading at times, especially as the Magdalena itself was used, repeatedly as the place where the murderers threw the bodies of those massacred during the bloody years of violence. At the same time Davis does evoke the biological richness of the river and the country as a whole. Reading the book made us want to reread Marquez, listen to more Columbian musica and visit Mompox, the hidden island jewel as soon as possible. One River was a previous classic by Davis, and Magdalena is making its case to be included at the fore of Davis’s work too.

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