“Don’t we breathe through what we speak? Don’t story-telling and singing blot out our pain?”
The Amazon River and rainforest have captivated, provoked, even frightened, since the earliest times of human habitation. In Orphans of Eldorado, Milton Hatoum evokes the legend of The Enchanted City – a shining city of gold at the bottom of the Amazon River where people live as enchanted beings.
The story is set in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazona region. Here Amando Cordovil runs a shipping empire with the help of his trusty lawyer Estiliano.  Arminto Cordovil, Amando’s son and the narrator of the story, is somewhat estranged from his father. One day he receives notification that his father would like to see him and the two agree to meet.
But before they can do so Amando dies suddenly and Arminto inherits a fortune. He, however, becomes obsessed by Dinaura, a woman who lives with nuns. His passion for her blinds him to the slow decay of his shipping empire and when the Eldorado – a boat with much of his cargo onboard – sinks, he is left with nothing.
And Dinaura disappears. According to the whispers around the town, she has been taken to The Enchanted City, [...]

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ORPHANS OF ELDORADO has been chosen as one of the Books of the Year by the Financial Times – in the translated fiction section, in which there are about ten books.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6bfb59f8-fe61-11df-845b-00144feab49a.html#ixzz17LusQBLo

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Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives — they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, AS Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugresic, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson.
The series launched on 21st October 2005 and is the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication ever undertaken.
http://www.themyths.co.uk/?p=73:

Orphans of Eldorado
Author: Milton Hatoum
Published: February 2010
Original edition: 9781847673008
Mass market edition: 9781847672995 (Published in 2011)

‘With his erudition and marshalling of historical detail. Hatoum compressed an epic into a novella.’ Times Literary Supplement 
‘Clear in each particular but tantalisingly elusive in its overall meaning, Orphans of Eldorado does what every good telling of a myth should.’ Financial Times
The setting for this magical fable is Eldorado, the Enchanted city that inhabited the fevered dreams of European navigators and conquistadors, but eluded all attempts to find it on the map. Some have linked it to Manaus in the [...]

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Orphans of Eldorado, by Milton Hatoum
Reviewed by Paul Engles on February 12, 2010
www.Bookgeeks.co.uk
A tiny Roman numeral at the top of the spine announces (in a whisper) that Orphans of Eldorado is the thirteenth instalment of Canongate’s critically acclaimed Myths series. However, it seems that Canongate have relaxed their branding, as Hatoum’s slim novel is issued as a trade paperback, and a colourful one at that. The decision to publish in paperback has prompted a flurry of angry comments on the novel’s official page on the Myths website, but binding aside, Orphans of Eldorado doesn’t disappoint.
The myth that underpins the story concerns Amazonian tales of an enchanted underwater utopian city. Hatoum suggests in his afterword that these stories, which involve people being seduced by dolphins or anacondas and taken down to the riverbed to live an enchanted life, may have been the inspiration for the conquistador’s search for the chimerical golden city of Eldorado. Supernatural rumours and whispers abound in Hatoum’s depiction of early twentieth century Brazil: the novel opens with two vignettes about a man who is strangled by his own enormous penis and a woman who copulates with a male tapir. However, the narrative is driven by an ancient, [...]

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