Description

Bonpland had a significant influence on the Enlightenment during the French Revolution and was later Napoleon's botanist and intendant of his castle in Malmaison. Together with Humboldt he explored tropical South America and towards the end of his life spent many years in the south of this continent, first honored and then neglected in Buenos Aires, many years as a prisoner by the dictator of Paraguay and finally as the owner of mate plantations in Brazil and Argentina. Sensitively and with a sense of drama, the author describes the fate of this extraordinary person in a novel that is equally gripping in terms of content and literature. In cultivated poetic language, the novel, which was published in Brazil in its second edition a few months after its publication, combines a carefully researched and factual narrative with thoughtful, almost philosophical reflections on life.

reading sample

That afternoon they made plans to publish all their observations. It would be several volumes, each on a particular aspect of the New World: geography, botany, zoology.
Humboldt would write the first volume, an account of the voyage and all the measurements they had taken. Aimé Bonpland was to write the volume about the plants.
It was then that Aimé Bonpland understood that these observations, written in several volumes, were only preparation for the great work that Humboldt dreamed of.
The title would be a single word, sublime, majestic.
It would sum up everything that existed on earth and in space.
This title would be: Cosmos.
Aimé Bonpland looked at Humboldt. He realized that he was standing next to the greatest, most accomplished scientist that human civilization had ever produced. But at the same time he became aware of what his own role would be from now on in the light that emanated from Humboldt.

reviews

"Gestalt im Schatten" gives the reader a kind of belonging to the closed and impenetrable time of the past, which he could never attain except through the paths of literature and the imagination.

 - Prof. dr. Deborah Mutter

When an author knows how to combine text and material, the reader falls into a state of limbo, falls into a reinvented life, and wants to stay longer than the book's page count allows.

– Vamberto Freitas, East Azorean

Assil Brasil is a real writer: nobody would dare to ask him if what he tells is true. The question doesn't make sense. How can compelling fiction be wrong? Impossible.

– Juremir Machado da Silva, Correio do Povo