A compelling and frightening travel tale about resilience amid the crimes of war.
An Australian tourist meets an unexpected fate in a war-torn Central American country in this novel.
Justin Thorntree, a 52-year-old auto parts store owner from Sydney, has decided to spend six weeks traveling in Central America after splitting up with his wife. It is 1990, and he still looks better than Paul Newman, he’s got some money, and he wants to explore. On the bus to Las Mesas, a small resort town, he encounters Gretchen and Monica, two young European women whom he begins to tag along with. The unnamed country is in the final stages of a civil war. At a restaurant in Las Mesas, two local academics describe the volatile social and political situation, which involves guerrillas fighting with the ruling oligarchy. Even so, the scene in Las Mesas is enjoyable, but Justin must head to the capital to replace a missing passport. He is dismayed to learn his ex-wife is suing him for $2 million and drowns his misery in a gloomy cafe. There, a shady character and a devious waitress pull a scam that leaves Justin horribly injured and lying in a ditch. Penniless and with limited mobility, Justin becomes a resident of the Hotel of the Four Winds, an outdoor area for the homeless. An injured ex-guerrilla named Indito takes Justin under his wing, and he becomes one of the war refugees, the invisible people whom no one asks any questions: “It was one of the few dignities afforded those who were dying on the street.” Taken with a woman named Silvia, Justin seems to regard his stay in the country as indefinite, though it becomes painfully clear the war isn’t entirely over. Mascia’s (Sawdust Footprints, 2014) stark prose works very well in describing the delights and the absurdities of traveling in the developing world while deftly constructing a tale wherein the main character is practically swallowed whole by society. Devoid of sentimentality, the harrowing story is effective without being overtly emotional and brings up relevant questions about human dignity and morality regarding the homeless, Latin America, and the “beloved imperialistic benefactor to the north.” As Everyman Justin slowly moves toward recovery, the fictional nation vividly portrayed here is reeling until the book’s conclusion.
A compelling and frightening travel tale about resilience amid the crimes of war.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-9989172-2-1
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Gavilan Books
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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