Nothing better than traveling to cure your depression. The hero of the novel published by Tristan Savin this spring offers us a brilliant demonstration of this. Double of the author, the narrator is a melancholy adventurer who had a very bad experience of the Covid-19 pandemic that we have just gone through. This writer-traveler, who has not stopped traveling the world for thirty years, sank into neurasthenia as soon as he found himself becalmed in France at the time of confinement.
The health protocol barely lifted, he jumps on a plane for Mexico and heads for the Yucatan. His first stop is in Cancun, where students get drunk on boozy vacations they call “Spring Breaks.” Bad idea. In addition to the malaise of the jet lag, there is also that of the generational gap. So here is our 50-year-old back on the road…
From Valladolid to Tulum, it is by visiting the pre-Columbian sites of the region that this explorer will regain a taste for life. It must be said that his path then crosses that of an attractive American named Chelsie. This archaeologist, female version of Indiana Jones, is in search of a lost city, capital of the kingdom of Kaan.
A city in ruins which would be nothing less than the cradle of the Mayan civilization. A mythical city in the middle of which Cyrus Longworth Lundell (1907-1994) discovered, in 1931, a pyramid larger than that of Cheops in Egypt.
Champollion’s distant great-nephew, Tristan Savin – who responds to the name of Yves Couprie in the civil status – signs here a work as funny as it is documented. With an eye for detail, he has made the journey he describes himself, going so far as to rent a helicopter to reach this Mayan site nestled in the heart of one of the densest and least hospitable tropical forests on the planet. Like Bruce Chatwin, however, he does not present himself as an adventurer, but rather as a “professional tourist. »
Using self-mockery as a second language, it is in the same burlesque tone as Robert Zemeckis in Chasing the Green Diamond that the author describes this escapade to the depths of the jungle. This does not prevent the excursion from sometimes taking on the aspect of an epic. That of a man who, like Richard Burton – the discoverer of the source of the Nile and not the actor – is convinced that “the happiest moment of a human life is the departure towards an unknown land”.
In fact, his narrator will return transformed from this odyssey. Just like the reader who, at the end of the book, will have discovered a thousand things about the environment of this South American region. Tristan Savin indeed describes to us with rare talent the species threatened by global warming and poachers, in particular the incredible bestiary hidden in this ocean of greenery: anteaters, coral snakes and other spider monkeys. Better than a tourist guide, a book that invites you to get lost, off the beaten track. To be slipped into your luggage for the next vacation.