Books: South American Jitters

TRANSGRESSOR IN THE TROPICS—Negley Farson—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Even before he started for South America Author Negley Farson (The Way of a Transgressor) had a premonition "that that part of the world would bring me bad luck." With that superstition, plus his weariness—an understandable result of strenuously testing the rest of the world for

20 years—it is not surprising that he gives a curious impression of South America.

At Barbados, the first stop, his rhapsody over scarlet poinsettias brought a hysterically savage execration from an Englishwoman returning to exile in Colombia. Before long, tropical colors had the same psychopathic effect on Farson as well. The South American neuroses of other foreigners were as bad or worse. The rare visitor able to cope with South American life seemed to Farson an even stranger specimen. In the Canal Zone he was dejected by the surfeit of night life, in other Latin-American cities by the lack of it. The natives were too rich or too poor. He alternately froze, sweat unmercifully, gasped for breath in the 12,000-ft. altitudes of the Andes. The farther he went, the sadder he got. So he named South America the "Sad Continent."

Author Farson noted with weary spleen that all South Americans are "Yanqui-haters," that all tourist publicity is phony, that the Germans and Japanese are mak-ing mincemeat of U. S. trade. He found a Japanese circus, a Japanese typewriter repairman; Japanese had even gone into the business of making imitation shrunken human heads.

Supplementary to his main theme of disillusionment are random bits of history, thumbnail sketches of military dictators whom he interviewed briefly, many an anecdote: of a brief but bloody revolution in Quito where the scattered human remains were collected by garbage trucks hurriedly daubed with Red Crosses; of an escaped convict from Devil's Island who murdered his peg-legged fellow fugitive, used the wooden leg to cook him with.

Once, at least, Author Farson must have seemed as spooky to South America as it did to him. When a native guide insisted on an extra day's pay, Farson only stared moodily, then burst out laughing. By this time, fortunately, he was heading by fast stages to Buenos Aires, there to catch a boat from which he did not even look back.