Richard Lamb travels through "Banda Oriental" (Uruguay) to find himself a perfect job and a perfect girl while his wife back home is totally oblivious to his colourful and often comic misadventures. Richard finds himself in various tricky spots, amongst natives and eventually comes to an important realisation—English imperialism is bad for this place!Jorge Luis Borges dedicated an essay to The Purple Land in his book Other Inquisitions. He compared Hudson's novel to the Odyssey and described it as perhaps the "best work of gaucho literature." Ernest Hemingway also famously referred to Hudson's book in his novel The Sun Also Rises.
Excerpt:
"Three chapters in the story of my life—three periods, distinct and well defined, yet consecutive—beginning when I had not completed twenty-five years and finishing before thirty, will probably prove the most eventful of all. To the very end they will come back oftenest to memory and seem more vivid than all the other years of existence—the four-and-twenty I had already lived, and the, say, forty or forty-five—I hope it may be fifty or even sixty—which are to follow. For what soul in this wonderful, various world would wish to depart before ninety! The dark as well as the light, its sweet and its bitter, make me love it…"
