Another Bone-Swapping Event

Mind-blowing ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian jungle help tourists weather the Covid pandemic and their confused lives in this haphazard account from journalist Fox (The Bathysphere Book). After the author and his wife Eszter traveled to Tarapoto, Peru, in March 2020 to partake of psychoactive potions made by local curandero (healer) Miguel Tapullima Cachique, lockdowns canceled their return flight and they ended up staying for months. Ensconced in a jungle compound, Fox and other participants ingested brews of ayahuasca and other native plants, occasioning drug trips filled with vomiting, moaning, coughing, ranting, and ecstatic or bleak visionary trances (“All of us are dead,” chanted Eszter during one such episode). Fox also explored the region’s flora and fauna, interacted with a rotating cast of “shamanic tourists,” and wrestled with his own demons, including alcohol abuse, the couple’s fertility problems, and an apocalyptic mood induced by the pandemic. He provides some gorgeous landscape descriptions and piquant sketches of the eccentrics he encounters, but his attempts to extract meaning from his hallucinogenic trips are bogged down in turgid psychedelia—“A sleepy hiccup from the mouth of a great frog, bubbles popping out of simmering glue, with a filter shift the background replaced the foreground”—or rambling mysticism. As cathartic as the experience may have been for Fox, it makes for baffling, tiresome reading. (Nov.)