Watunna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle
Anthropologists and folklorists have gathered, against the coming night of worldwide electronic frost, sheaves and sheaves of oral narrative, but little of it is as readable, coherent, and thought-provoking as Watunna... Though the Watunna can be for us... little more than a resonant entertainment and gaudy fossil, the two existential mysteries that it addresses—the existence of the universe, the existence of 'I'—have not been, beneath the great flurry of modern knowing, dissolved. (John UpdikeNew Yorker)One rarely reads a mythical corpus so richly textured as this Makiritare cycle....The result is a stunning portrayal of Makiritare creativity and an enthralling narrative of the way they imagine meaning in the universe. ...Civrieux and Guss bring the reader inside a contemporary worldview breathtakingly different in the way it imagines conflict and beauty. (Lawrence SullivanNew Scholar)