This expansive and ambitious novel attempts, fairly successfully, to weave an immediate concern for the environment with an incredible and complicated story. The setting is the Brazilian jungle, and the cast of characters could people a circus: a middle-aged Japanese man with a golf ball-sized sphere buzzing in front of his forehead, a three-armed executive from New York, an old man who founds the ``science'' of featherology, and a boy who is believed to be an angel--to name just a few. These characters converge, each with a separate mission, on the unique ``natural'' phenomenon known as the Matacao, a huge flat plastic plain in the middle of the jungle. Boundless greed and the unthinking destruction of our environment are as much a part of the story as the delicate relations among the characters. Although the clever parodies of modern society (from yuppies to New Age spiritualism to animal rights groups) are a bit heavy-handed, and at times the plot bogs down in its own intricacies, this is ultimately enjoyable reading.-- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.
Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying.” — New York Times Book Review
“Bizarre and baroque, funny and sad. Yamashita's novel may say more about saving the rain forest than its nonfiction counterparts do.” — Utne Reader
“Dazzling . . . a seamless mixture of magic realism, satire and futuristic fiction.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“An imaginative tour de force.” — Capital Times
“Impressive . . . a flight of fancy through a dreamlike Brazil.” — Village Voice
“Surreal and misty, sweeping from one high-voltage scene to another.” — LA Weekly
“Amuses and frightens at the same time.” — Newsday
“Parodies misguided development the way Catch-22 did senseless wars . . . mak[ing] us laugh and cry.” — Sierra
“An ecological fantasy that skewers giant corporations, religion, fads, yuppies and just about every kind of greed. It may be the world’s first multicultural condemnation of capitalism.” — Pioneer Press
“An explosive satire about mortality and catastrophe.” — Asian Week
“Smooth and seamless.” — A Magazine
“An exuberant black comedy.” — Daily Yomiuri
“The American equivalent of Joseph Conrad’s Congo in The Heart of Darkness .” — Rafu Shimpo
“Yamashita has drawn upon her considerable inventive powers to deliver a good read.” — Amerasia Journal
“Thoroughly entertaining.” — Stanford Daily
“Incisive and funny, this book yanks our chains and makes us see the absurdity that rules our world.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Expansive and ambitious . . . incredible and complicated.” — Library Journal
“Yamashita’s biting satire is a powerful test of our senses, our sensitivities and sensibilities. I haven’t been as enthralled since having read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five .” — Special Libraries Association
“This satiric morality play about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest unfolds with a diversity and fecundity equal to its setting. . . . Yamashita seems to have thrown into the pot everything she knows and most that she can imagine—all to good effect.” — Publishers Weekly
“[T]he woes and ills of contemporary society are acutely described here; but Yamashita’s affection for the quirkiness of human nature, as well as her sympathy for her characters’ plights, makes this a novel, not a polemic. A fine debut.” — Kirkus
“ Through the Arc of the Rain Fores t attacks environmental devastation through the logic of satire and the sensibilities of the poetic mind. Yamashita plays out today’s soap opera of the futility of man’s faith in technology on the stage where it is currently most brutal, stupid and immoral: Brazilian Amazonia.” — Charles L. Hogue, Curator, National History Museum of Los Angeles
