Jungle

I started reading Jungle yesterday afternoon and almost could not put it down till I finished it tonight. It is about 4 men and their adventure into the wild jungle of the Amazon and how they split 2-2, and the narrator ended up alone in the jungle for nearly 3 weeks, and he made it. Again I find myself groping for the right words to use. I can't remember if I've ever been to a real rainforest other than those in the zoo's fragile forest section (which was their nicest feature ever) but I've always loved the idea of rainforests. Lush jungle and green trees glistening, strange flowers blooming, monkeys, soft mud and everything so alive. And after finishing the book, reading all Yossi said and remembering that I bought the book from Corrie who interviewed him (that's how I got the book, getting her review copy) and she asked him about how accurate the book can be since it happened decades ago or something like that, and as I flitted through the remarks printed on the first 2 pages of the book, made by The Sunday Mail and all those newspapers and magazines and read all their zesty satisfying phrases I realised that the signature (With love, ....2006) on the title page of the book, that I'd always flipped past with a sense of strange irritation, was really the signature of Yossi Ghinsberg. Not that I never knew, it just never registered, and it suddenly took on a different meaning. It suddenly meant a lot that his signature was there, he whose crazy and mysterious story is in the book. I hate signatures, and this is the first time any signature has meant anything to me.

Isn't it funny that the relationships and people in books and movies can sometimes be so much more real than anything in real life......