Used book – Rouge Brésil - Prix Goncourt 2001, Jean-Christophe Rufin

The French conquest of Brazil is one of the most extraordinary and overlooked episodes of the Renaissance. Rouge Brésil tells the story of two children, Just and Colombe, forcibly embarked on this expedition to serve as interpreters for the Indian tribes. Everything about this adventure is outsized. The setting: the wild bay of Rio, still given over to jungles and cannibal Indians. The characters – and first and foremost Chevalier de Villegagnon, leader of this expedition, nostalgic for the Crusades, steeped in ancient culture, a precursor to Cyrano or d'Artagnan. The events: the dramatic closed-door setting of this French Tropical region is a dress rehearsal, ten years in advance, of the Wars of Religion. Teeming with portraits, landscapes, and action, Rouge Brésil, written in a language with Voltairean irony, takes the form of a coming-of-age and love story. But more deeply, through the destinies and choices of Just and Colombe, this book stages two opposing conceptions of man and nature. On one side, European civilization, conquering and universal, which claims to be liberating but discovers itself to be murderous. On the other, the Indian world, with its sensuality, its sense of harmony and the sacred, the permanent call of happiness...