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Big Plans
The war in Vietnam is raging, Nixon is President of the United States, university campuses are coming apart at the seams. A whole generation, fuelled by moral contempt for the war and zeal for the Civil Rights Movement, has become disaffected from society, determined to create a new world. The vista is grand; anything seems possible. It is a time for Big Plans.
Such is the staging ground for this curious and wonderful book—half document and half work of the imagination—that traces a young man's spiritual quests through the 1960s and 1970s. The first section is the author's factual journal of a trip through South America, the homeland of his grandfather. The journal follows de Barros through the jungles of South America, through a village of bohemians and intellectuals, to the top of the Andes where he argues politics with a gun-toting New York Marxist, to his family's Brazilian estate where he dreams of starting a communal farm. But gradually he becomes disillusioned with the South American counterculture, and the journal leaves him as he returns to the U.S.
de Barros is succeeded by a fictional protagonist, Mark, who imagines the opposite extreme: North, to the wilds of B.C., where he and his wife become pioneer homesteaders, individuals exploring the archetypes of their own consciousness as they fall trees, shoot bears, and raise a log cabin.
Big Plans is an exotic, far-flung work of the imagination that at the same time is familiar, rigorously interrogative, and down-to-earth. Together, the South and North narratives describe with stunning accuracy the attempts of the "political generation" to define its values and live by them.
Such is the staging ground for this curious and wonderful book—half document and half work of the imagination—that traces a young man's spiritual quests through the 1960s and 1970s. The first section is the author's factual journal of a trip through South America, the homeland of his grandfather. The journal follows de Barros through the jungles of South America, through a village of bohemians and intellectuals, to the top of the Andes where he argues politics with a gun-toting New York Marxist, to his family's Brazilian estate where he dreams of starting a communal farm. But gradually he becomes disillusioned with the South American counterculture, and the journal leaves him as he returns to the U.S.
de Barros is succeeded by a fictional protagonist, Mark, who imagines the opposite extreme: North, to the wilds of B.C., where he and his wife become pioneer homesteaders, individuals exploring the archetypes of their own consciousness as they fall trees, shoot bears, and raise a log cabin.
Big Plans is an exotic, far-flung work of the imagination that at the same time is familiar, rigorously interrogative, and down-to-earth. Together, the South and North narratives describe with stunning accuracy the attempts of the "political generation" to define its values and live by them.
191 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1986
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About the author
Paul de Barros
12 books1 followerPaul de Barros was born in 1946 in California and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. Since 1970 he has divided his time between the Cariboo region of B.C. and Seattle, Washington.
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