Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians - Pierre Clastres

Chronicle of the Guyaki Indians is an unsentimental, yet sympathetic, depiction of the year anthropologist Pierre Clastres spent with a so-called 'savage' tribe of Indians in Paraguay in 1963. It describes the everyday life and habits, ritual and cosmology of these Indians. It makes compelling, sometimes shocking reading - when, for instance, the Indians' anger at the fate they have to suffer causes them to start murdering their own children. But Clastres's book - in Paul Auster's marvellous translation - brings this alien world close to our own.