Product Description
An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself.
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 Far Torture ( jiks )
This book was torture to read. it deals with a fishing boat in a small Caribbean port. I suffered through the entire book
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 an unusual and poetic story ( roansworld )
This is a magnificent novel, surprising and fresh in almost every respect. The placement of words and sentences is eye-catching and perhaps a bit confusing initially. It becomes a highly effective means of telling the story, adding a poetic quality. There are no quotations. At first, it can be hard to determine who is speaking. However, this becomes easier as the story progresses and even forces the reader to pay closer attention to the characters' traits. The tale is really told through dialogue, with very clear, sparse prose in between. Repetition and inversion are successfully employed, such as "The ship rolls, the ocean booms. The ship booms, the ocean rolls." The ease with which the words flow makes this an enjoyable experience. Nautical terms abound. It's difficult to say if the characters are likable. The characters each have moments in which they appear funny and kind hearted and then others when they are downright nasty and foul. True human nature, I suppose. The dialect is easy to pick up and is consistent throughout. It is a crucial part of the overall atmosphere. The trash and waste in the water is sad, but probably accurate. The whole culture of the Caribbean is discussed, from the coast of Nicaragua to Jamaica. The last quarter of the book takes a few well-executed plot twists and the momentum picks up amazingly. After meeting the "pirates," it is impossible to put down. The story is fascinating for its characters and the picture of the difficult life of turtlers. Head and shoulders above At Play in the Fields of the Lord, though that is a good book. This novel stands alone and is immensely satisfying.
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Too much vernacular
It might have been a good book but I got tired of reading the "dis", "dat", "dem" vernacular and finally just gave the book to the local thrift shop.
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A beautifully-rendered meditation on timeless themes ( stkebo2 )
One glance at the pages of "Far Tortuga" will be enough to convince any reader that the novel is unique. The narration of the story is unconventional, to say the least: snippets of dialogue (in faithfully-rendered Caribbean dialect) are interspersed with brief but beautiful descriptions of the ocean and its inhabitants. The story is simple but timeless: nine sailors/turtlers/outcasts onboard the "Lillias Eden" go on a late-season green turtle-hunt in the waters between Cayman and Cuba. We learn about the characters mostly through the dialogue; we learn also about shipwrecks and mutinies and black magic--all of which play key roles in the resolution of the plot.
But plot truly takes a back seat in this novel; "Far Tortuga" is, first and foremost, a set-piece. It's remarkable how the style of the novel mimics movement and change, how the characters' dialogue calls to mind a particular time and place, and how the descriptive passages can transport a reader instantly to a place he or she has never been. Matthiessen's fiction is particularly adept at showing the delicate (and not always positive) interplay between man and nature (read "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" or "Killing Mister Watson" for other great examples); "Far Tortuga" is no exception. If there is any drawback to this novel, it's that, in longer conversations, it's not always easy to discern which character is doing the talking. But I gather that's Matthiessen's idea: to get the reader out of the "novel" mindset and into the actual story, where voices collide and commotion ensues and what's important is not always who's doing the talking, but what's being said.
This novel, like the age of seamanship is describes, seems to be vanishing. This is a shame. Despite its unusual style and literary ambitions, "Far Tortuga" is a great read that deserves a wide audience. (The same could be said for all of Matthiessen's work.) If you're willing to hunt it down, though, you won't be disappointed.
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a unique tone-poem of a novel of sea and men ( cgbleak )
Let's begin low-brow: "Far Tortuga" is the ultimate beach read. Read this while the sun strikes the sand and the waves crash and you'll practically hallucinate yourself into a full blown virtual reality. But even if you're landlocked, Matthiessen does a masterful job of evoking the sights, smells, and sounds of the Carribean. His success is due largely to the pungent, poetic, shorthand style of writing, unique to Matthiessen's ouevre, and perhaps American literature. I'd guess it'd be more obvioulsy an "experimental" style if the author didn't pull it off so adroitly. Visually, there's lot of white space on the pages of this book. Near the end, there are pages that might contain as little as a phrase, a name, or less--all for reasons that seem more organic than experimental. Much dialog between the crew of the Lillius Eden is unattributed, and not set off by quotation marks. Any initial confusion this creates is short-lived, as it is through the character's talk that we learn to distinguish them (it's also how Matthiessen reveals their seperate dreams, ambitions, sins, etc.). I can't over-emphasize that these stylistic oddities are more then mere quirks, but truly seem to be the best, most organic (and maybe only) way to tell the tale.
And what a tale. Though what exactly is so gripping about it is hard to say. The turtle-hunting voyage of the "Lillias Eden" seems ill-fated from the start: the turtles have already been over-hunted into scarcity and it's mighty late in the season to cast off. But that doesn't stop the ragged, largely reprobate crew of from embarking--for most, it's the best chance they have in a working-class third world life of dwindling returns. There's likely to be a lot of cultural distance between these guys and the people reading about them, so it's all the more remarkable how Matthiessen manages to make these characters unique individuals whislt also making them universally identifiable Everymen. This is no mean feat.
Lo, there are still some turtle left in the sea--but there are also pirates (the unromantic modern ones), reefs, wrecks of ships and wrecks of men. To say much more would be to tresspass on too many potential delights.
This is a multi-faceted, multi-leveled work. Thomas Pynchon's blurb (strange but true) on the original hardcover suggests while "Far Tortuga" is a "masterfully spun yarn" it's also a "deep declaration of love for the planet." But this is the ecological concern of a lifelong naturalist, really only witnessed by the book's always-evocative poetic descriptions of nature. And for "poetic," don't dare read "mushy." This is a supple, muscular poetry (indeed a masculine poetry, as befitting it's subjects), a whole lot closer to Homer than Rod McKuen. It's a book Conrad would have embraced, maybe even championed. Maybe Robert W. Service, too. It's a book of unique delights, one of my all-time faves, and I really envy anyone their first reading.
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