This masterful work of prose style, available, I believe, only through Lulu.com, is an adventure story-cum-mystery set on a rubber plantation in the Amazon in the late 1930s. Rogerio, the protagonist, is a company spy, making a little extra money by reporting on the activities of his compatriots to the bosses who operate the plantation on behalf of the Ford Motor Company.

The plot is a bit twisted and confusing; it involves a biological treasure, a mad botanist, and a secret only the indios know about the interrelationship between various organisms. But who cares? In the meantime the reader is taken on a wild ride up the Amazon, and treated to a host of various characters, all corrupt to some degree, and all attempting to survive in a jungle that also teems with often viscious diversity.

The boss of the plantation, Tanner, is in some ways a good man, if a bit of a blindered workhorse. If there is a character in the book that represents a moral center, it's his fiancee, Rebecca, a Quaker, who responds to her lover's pleas by coming to visit, unannounced. Tanner is so paranoid about the mysterious visitor that he is to receive (after a previous unannounced shipment of Monopoly sets, which he fears will ruin his workers) that he has her arrested before she leaves the ship. Later, she is attacked in a manner that implies the jungle itself is implicated.

Olukotun is a major new talent in American letters. While it's often true, as in a journey through a jungle, that one has no idea one where is going while one reads this book, it's also endlessly fascinating if one stops to smell the prose.