'IT WAS A strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.' (Leonard Woolf, The Village in the jungle.)

It is a swelteringly hot, humid afiernoon. There is not much wind. I am sitting here writing in a bungalow on the western perimeter of the Yala National Park over- looking Banduwewa - a small reservoir only twenty- eight miles from Beddagama (literally 'jungle village'), the subject of Leonard Woolf's

Literary Review

May 2004

Categories

Christopher Ondaatje

Boldly Going

The Number of the Beast

At Least He Had A Conscience

The Buck Starts Here

An Island For One

You Give Me Fever

A Fine Young Cannibal

Of Mudaliyars and Men

Watching The River Flow

Trouble Brewing

She Had the Measure of His Manhood

Pictures From The Edge

In Search of Nomads: An English Obsession from Hester Stanhope to Bruce Chatwin

The Parson’s Pastime

Developing the Dark Continent

The One About the Chinese Condom Factory

The Potent Pod

The Time of the Bodysnatchers

Courting The Madonna

The Lure of the Peppercorn

First Contact

Meeting the Unknown

Between The Rock and a Hard Place

Riddle of A River