Martin Strel - Slovenia's FAMOUS fish man (The Man Who Swam The Amazon - Matthew Mohlke & Martin Strel)

Member Name: fizzywizzy

Product:	The Man Who Swam The Amazon - Matthew Mohlke & Martin Strel
Date:	09/07/08 (159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Exciting, easy to read style

Disadvantages: I wanted to learn more about Martin

Slovenians are on the whole pretty laid back people. They have their passions but they enjoy them quietly. A Slovene friend of mine once told me that in Slovenia people are 'known but not famous'. I can kind of see her point. The country has a population of less than 3 million, just over 300,000 live in the capital; sooner or later you are going to bump into one 'celebrity' or another. Most people in the public eye are, as Tanja would have it, 'known' but there are so few of these home-grown notables that they aren't 'famous'; she claims that would involve degrees of being 'known' and in Slovenia all 'known' people are known to the same extent.

She's even so bold as to claim that if Bono walked into a pub in Ljubljana people would know who he is (she accepts that he is most definitely 'known') but they would simply say 'There is Bono' and not bother him. Maybe she's right; when Paul McCartney and she-whose-name-I-cannot-utter visited Ljubljana a few years back they were able to quietly enjoy several of the waterside cafes I regularly visit myself and, while people recognised them, nobody pestered them for autographs.

But in February 2007 I was crossing the English Channel by ferry when I chanced to pick up a newspaper someone had discarded and this was how I became acquainted with the legend that is Martin Strel. The fifty-two year old pot-bellied Slovenian had just embarked upon his daring attempt to swim the length of the Amazon, a feat that had never before been successfully completed. The report told me that all of Slovenia was supporting this unlikely hero who had already completed major swimming achievements by swimming the length of the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtze amongst others. I texted Tanja at once "I have found a famous Slovenian! Martin Strel must surely be famous rather than known". The return text "OK, I'll give you that one".

"Swimming the Amazon - 3,274 Miles on the World's Deadliest River" is the account of that expedition. It's credited to Martin and to Matthew Mohlke, a young American writer who Martin met when he joined the expedition team for the Mississippi swim some five years earlier: in actual fact Martin contributes only an afterword, the rest of the book is written by Mohlke.

In spite of the fact that if you are interested enough to read this book in the first place you'll know that Strel did successfully complete the swim, it is a real page turner with enough hair-raising moments to have you holding your breath and curling your toes every few pages. As the title says the Amazon is the world's most dangerous river with the perils of crocodiles, mosquitoes, intense sun and heat, tidal changes and even pirates and drug dealers to worry about. Sometimes it seems that just as the team member solve one problem, another takes its place.

The story is recounted in a journal style and follows not just the ordeal from Martin's point of view but also from that of the various team members. Although I enjoyed Mohlke's style of writing which is relaxed and youthful I did feel that the book focussed too much on his own experience and not enough on Martin's. The sections where Mohlke describes how Strel was feeling as the swim progressed are recounted as Mohlke's perceptions of Strel's mood and behaviour rather than Strel describing how he felt himself. I had also hoped to learn more about Martin himself and found the little titbits I did learn were not sufficient to satisfy my curiosity.

Although that aspect was lacking, I did enjoy the descriptions of the environment and the animals and plants encountered on the trip as well as the sections that gave a more cultural insight into the different countries and settlements along the route, from bustling dangerous cities where crime is rife to small secluded settlements where the sight of this guy in the wetsuit had children screaming and the men-folk rushing to lock their women away. In other places the people took Martin to their hearts, giving him the nickname 'the fish man', and even jumping into the river to try to swim alongside him at some points - never for very long though because Strel swims depcetively fast even against strong current.

I also appreciated the sections that focused on the other members of the expedition from Martin's son Borut who is expedition manager to the various local people who join the crew at different stages of the expedition. It was interesting to see how the crew managed their relationships in difficult circumstances and how Martin related differently to them depending on their roles within the team.

I would have liked to have learned more about the presence of the medical team who were there not only to make sure Martin had the best care possible during the swim but to promote 'telemedicine' whereby their work would be beamed across the world to help doctors in developing countries to learn more. There were references made to Martin's mental state, especially towards the end of the swim, but I felt that the author could have gone into this in a bit more depth.

"Swimming the Amazon" is not a challenging read but it is a very entertaining one. Rather than being a book that enlightens on marathon swimming or a biography of Strel it falls more into the realm of travelogue, much more than I had expected.

Recommended for people who like to read travel literature or who like to live by the seat of their pants. Exciting rather than enlightening but at just over three hundred pages this is a book that makes a worthwhile diversion.


In January 2008 I foolishly announced my intention to meet the great man within the next twelve months; watch this space.......
320 pages

Summary: An account of one Slovenian's amazing feat