Although she finds Brazil oppressive, her mixed Indian/American looks allow her to blend in. Marina Singh is an appealingly modern, understated heroine.
The relevance of its underworldly plot to her own situation is not lost on Singh.
The anticipation finally ends in a memorable scene in which Swenson crashes her own box at the opera, where Singh and the Bovenders are taking in a performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Singh spends two weeks in the Amazon city of Manaus in a strange state of limbo with the couple, their easygoing mien at odds with their unspoken power. First, however, she must get past the Bovenders, a hippie couple hired by Swenson to keep outsiders at bay and her whereabouts secret. Unattached, childless and an uncommonly loyal employee, Singh is elected the perfect candidate for the journey. If a drug can chemically mimic this process, the business of female fertility will be revolutionized, along with Vogel’s profit margins. Swenson’s research centres on the Lakashi, an isolated tribe whose women remain fertile well into old age by chewing on the bark of a rare tree. What the company is after would be even more valuable than the ivory the colonials slaughter each other for in Conrad’s novel - at least in terms of share price. His death increases the corporate pressure to get Swenson out of the jungle and the drug to market. The late Eckman’s mission had been to find her and report on her progress. The company doesn’t even know where her research station is. Lately, however, Swenson has cut herself off from contact with the outside world. Swenson has spent decades in the jungle developing a drug for Vogel, the company Marina works for, under a shroud of secrecy. Swenson, who was once Singh’s professor in medical school. Awaiting her is our lady-Kurtz, the brilliant, Svengali-like Dr. Who’s to say that Marlow, had he lived in our times, wouldn’t have been a research scientist for a Minnesota pharmaceutical company like Patchett’s protagonist Marina Singh?īrazil fills in for the Belgian Congo as 42-year-old Singh travels deep into the Amazon in the wake of the death of her lab colleague, Anders Eckman. To be sure, the similarity goes beyond the three-word titles. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is being widely touted as a kind of Heart of Darkness for gals.
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