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ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1929 Henry Ford, aged but still presiding with divine authority over his automobile empire, has grown tired of the British monopoly on rubber and so has decided to produce his own. Certain of the infallibility of his own mechanical genius, Ford sets about colonising the Amazon in the name of rubber, investing millions and founding an entire town around his plantation. The name of the town is Fordlandia. While Ford dreams of the jungle from docile, mechanised Detroit, Horacio, a man who has come to Fordlandia to escape his past, is charged with the task of recruiting labour from the surrounding native villages. The rubber plantation is run by ineffectual, disgraced Ford executives, whose impossible mission is to impose the industrialist's will on the resilient, menacing Amazon. Doomed to follow Ford's flawed plan, Horacio attempts to stave off the jungle's ultimate victory and comes face-to-face with the true futility at the heart of man's struggle for mastery over nature.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eduardo Sguigla is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a noted Argentine writer and novelist. Two of his essays on Argentine society have become best-sellers. Fordlandia is his first novel.

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