The Fruit Palace

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the fruit palace - Rated
This book is a rare thing.There is something of the streetwise combined the well read.It puts you in a space between the world of the conformist and the outlaw.People can only critisize the sincerity of the story but even that only adds to beautiful prose-like seedy imagery in this unreal chaotic reality.It rocks.

Glamorising the pre-Pablo Escobar Colombian Cocaine Business - Rated
This book is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining written on the Colombian contribution to the illicit drugs industry, but should be read with some caution. The book was written prior to the ascent of the Medillin and Cali Cartels and this shows clearly in the book. The book gives the distinct impression that the journalist is being funny and supposedly intrepid in his quest for the Great Cocaine Story at the expense of Colombia and the people who have to put up with having the Great Cocaine Story in their back yard and who are the real victims of the supposedly victimless crime of taking drugs. The book is also quite dated - the daring do would have been impossible in the last twenty years, and this does need to be borne in mind reading the book.

I have read this book twice. The first time was over two years ago, and the second was just a couple of weeks ago. In the interim I have moved to live in Colombia and have now lived here for two years and had to put up with the conditions that are used in the typical manner of travel books to prove how entertainingly corrupt the natives are (and by implication, inferior), by people who will be leaving the country in just a couple of weeks.

Despite the above if you treat this book as an entertaining and not particularly true picture of Colombia, ie just as a good read, the book is worthwhile even if it does fall into the usual traps of travel writing. But be warned - Colombia has changed tremendously in the least two decades.

Subtle blend of travelogue and political observations - Rated
The Fruit Palace is unusual in travel book terms as it is written by someone who can actually write in an engaging style.

I have read fewer novels with a better opening - a sting in a bar that sets the tone for the atmosphere in Columbia for a westerner.

Nicholls combines adventurism with a poetic appreciation of the people, their culture and country. His trail has a sense of doom about it - Columbia seems to have a lot of characters pursuing ever diminishing circles of lives. Yet one is left with an overall sense of beauty and the unexpected which only such a level headed observer such as Nicholl could give the reader.

Enough to make you want to go.