蘭に魅せられた男―驚くべき蘭コレクターの世界 (ハヤカワ文庫NF) [文庫]

気鋭の女性作家が蘭コレクターの面妖な世界に踏み込み、蘭泥棒を巡る類なき事件を描いた狂騒のルポ。〈マルコヴィッチの穴〉の監督・脚本コンビが〈アダプテーション〉のタイトルで映画化し、アカデミー賞を受賞。文庫化にあたり、著者インタビューも追加収録。

人々の心を捕らえてやまない花、蘭。中でもポリリザ・リンデニイは、幻の「幽霊蘭」と呼ばれ愛好家垂涎の的となっている。その虜となった野心家の男ジョン・ラロシュは、フロリダ州保護区から幽霊蘭を盗み出すことに成功。大量増殖し富と名声を手に入れようとしたが…コレクターの面妖な世界を巧みに織り混ぜ、蘭泥棒をめぐる類なき事件を描いた狂騒のルポルタージュ。アカデミー賞受賞映画『アダプテーション』原作。

珍種の花を盗み捕まった男は、奇矯な蘭コレクターだった…。蘭栽培に関する蘊蓄やコレクターたちの面妖な世界を巧みに織り混ぜながら、蘭をめぐる類い稀なる犯罪事件を描くノンフィクション。映画化決定。 --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors.

The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:

I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.

Even Orlean--so leery of orchid fever that she immediately gives away any plant that's pressed upon her by the growers in Laroche's circle--develops a desire to see a ghost orchid blooming and makes several ultimately unsuccessful treks into the Fakahatchee. Filled with Palm Beach socialites, Native Americans, English peers, smugglers, and naturalists as improbably colorful as the tropical blossoms that inspire them, this is a lyrical, funny, addictively entertaining read. --Barrie Trinkle
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

"Folding virtue and criminality around profit are [John] Laroche's specialty," Orlean writes of the oddly likable felon who's the subject of her latest book. But what could be virtuous about poaching endangered orchids, which?not insignificantly?are worth a small fortune? If exotic flowers were cloned, everyone could afford them, Laroche would say. It's just such "amoral morality" that compels New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Saturday Night) to relocate to Naples, Fla., in order to dig into an orchid-collecting subculture as rarefied as its object of desire. Orlean spends two years attempting to place maverick Laroche in the rigid strata of orchid society, the heart of which is located in Florida. The milieu includes "Palm Beach plant lovers" and international stars such as Bob Fuchs, a commercial breeder whose family has been in the business for three generations. Laroche, on the other hand, is a self-taught horticulturist, yet one who has enough expertise to convince the nearby Seminole Indians to hire him as plant manager for their nursery. With the promise of big profits, he launches a plan to reproduce the "ghost" orchid, using samples stolen from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, leading to his arrest. Though she fills in a brief history of the $10-billion trade, Orlean's account of her orchid-land explorations, which include wading through a swamp in hope of spotting a ghost orchid (she doesn't see one) is not so much an expose as a meandering survey of the peccadilloes of the local orchid breeders. Clearly Orlean is most intrigued by autodidact Laroche, not the world he temporarily inhabits, which unfortunately makes for a slim, if engaging, volume. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

In Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native Amer-ican activists, and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious.
        
New Yorker writer Susan Orlean followed Laroche through swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida's orchid collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, fanatics, and smugglers whose obsession with plants is all-consuming. Along the way, Orlean learned the history of orchid collecting, discovered an odd pattern of plant crimes in Florida, and spent time with Laroche's partners, a tribe of Seminole Indians who are still at war with the United States.
        
There is something fascinating or funny or truly bizarre on every page of The Orchid Thief: the story of how the head of a famous Seminole chief came to be displayed in the front window of a local pharmacy; or how seven hundred iguanas were smuggled into Florida; or the case of the only known extraterrestrial plant crime. Ultimately, however, Susan Orlean's book is about passion itself, and the amazing lengths to which people will go to gratify it. That passion is captured with singular vision in The Orchid Thief, a once-in-a-lifetime story by one of our most original journalists.

--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

"The best writers make you care about something you never noticed before. Susan Orlean is a perfect example...In a dry reporter's style, spiked with wit and charged with infectious enthusiasm, Orlean explains orchid biology and traces the history of orchid hunting, scattering surprises as she goes....An endearingly timid explorer who shudders each time she lowers herself into the teeming ooze of the Fakahatchee, Orlean is also an acute observer of the personalities and rivalries she encounters...Orlean allows accidental discoveries and encounters to dicate the book's peculiar, engrossing course."
        --Anna Mundow, The New York Daily News

"Orlean's hilariously reported, discursive narrative wanders off into Seminole history, real-estate fraud, stolen flora, and the scary, swampy Fakahatchee Strand. Just when you fear you're lost in the Everglades, she returns to the flower at hand, and unleashes some delirious prose....Orlean shows great restraint and never adopts an orchid--readers may not manage to be so cold-blooded."
        --Alexandra Lange, New York Magazine

"Artful...In Ms. Orlean's skillful handling, her orchid story turns out to be distinctly 'something more.' Getting to know Mr. Laroche allows her to explore multiple subjects: orchids, Seminole history, the ecology of the Fakahatchee Strand, the fascination of Florida to con men....All that she writes here fits together because it is grounded in her personal experience...acres of opportunity where intriguing things can be found."
        --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"The collecting mania that Susan Orlean has so painstakingly described is, like the orchid, a small thing of grandeur, a passion with a pedigree...Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy for a person you might not have thorugh about empethetically...The Orchid Thief shows her gifts in full bloom."
        --Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review

"Orlean writes in a keenly observant mode reminiscent of John McPhee and Diane Ackerman....In prose as lush and full of surprises as the Fakahatchee itself, Orlean connects orchid-related excesses of the past with the exploits of the present so dramatically an orchid will never just be an orchid again."
        --Booklist

"Orlean is a beautiful writer, and her story is compelling even for those whose knowledge of orchids is limited to the long-ago prom corsage. The Orchid Thief is a lesson in the dark, dangerous, sometimes hilarious nature of obsession--any obsession. You sometimes don't want to read on, but find you can't help it."
        --Anita Manning, USA Today

"If you liked MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, this new nonfiction work by Susan Orlean will hold you utterly spellbound. Like many orchids, it's a beautiful hybrid: part crime story (about orchid poaching in the wild swamps of Florida), part exotic read (about a fanatic society of flower breeders). Led by the title character, a charismatic plant smuggler, you'll journey with Orlean through a strangely fascinating, almost mystical subculture."
        --Glamour

"Readers suffering from the impeachment blues can start the new year right with The Orchid Thief, a swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great. Here are visionary passions and fierce obsessions; heroic settings; outsize characters, entrepreneurs on the edge of the frontier, adventurers seeking the bubble reputation....Ms. Orlean, an intrepid sociologist among the orchid fanatics, is also a poetic observer of the Fakahatchee swamp. There's an offhand brilliance in her accounts of its weird beauty and discomforts. But the most compelling sections of this fascinating book deal with the orchids themselves....Zestful."
        --Frances Taliaferro, The Wall Street Journal

"The landscapes of John Laroche and the state of Florida elicit some of Susan Orlean's best writing....her ear for self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description....Such rapturous evocations are reason enough to read Orlean's book."
        --Dean Crawford, The Boston Globe
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Susan Orlean writes like a dream. The Orchid Thief is a horticultural page-turner, quite possibly the first of its kind. But even if you couldn't care less about orchids, Orlean's tale stands as a riveting dissection of the collector's obsession, and the peculiar state of mind and nature that is contemporary Florida."

--Michael Pollan

Between hardcovers, nobody but Carl Hiaasen can talk Florida to me the way Susan Orlean has in The Orchid Thief, which so richly captures the Sunshine State's bizarre personality, its fevered optimism, its hurricane whims of passion, the hard heat of those not always legal dreams that have made its citizens notorious. Orlean has crafted a classic tale of tropic desire, steamy and fragrant and smart and entertaining."

--Bob Shacoch1s

The Orchid Thief is the finest piece of nonfiction I've read in years: characters so juicy and wonderfully weird they might have stepped out of a novel, except these people are real. The Orchid Thief is everything we expect from the very best literature. It opens our eyes to an extraordinary new universe and stirs our passion for the people who populate the world. Susan Orlean is a writer of immense talent. I would follow her anywhere."
--James W. Hall

Hot orchids are the starting point of Susan Orlean's account of plants and people obsessed with them in the weird world that is south Florida. Along the way, she meets Seminoles, alligators, and a variety of crazy white men. The Orchid Thief provides further, compelling evidence that truth is stranger than fiction. In this case it makes most entertaining reading."
--Andrew We1l

Susan Orlean's prose is always lucid, lyrical, and deceptively comfortable, but with The Orchid Thief, she's in danger of launching a national epidemic of orchid mania. The passion is infectious and addictive."

--Katherine Dunn
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her articles have also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire. She is the author of Saturday Night, a New York Times Notable Book of 1990, which, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, "calls to mind Damon Runyon, Evelyn Waugh, and screwball comedy." She lives in New York City.
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

オーリアン,スーザン
1955年、オハイオ州クラーヴランド生まれ。ミシガン大学卒業後、『ボストン・フェニックス』のスタッフ、『ボストン・グルーブ』のコラムニストを経て、1992年より『ニューヨーカー』のスタッフ・ライターを務め、現在ノンフィクション作家として不動の人気を誇る。また、『ローリング・ストーン』『ヴォーグ』などにも寄稿している。最近は、ニューヨークで暮らしている

羽田 詩津子
お茶の水女子大学英文科卒、英米文学翻訳家(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)