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Far Tortuga: A Novel
by: Peter Matthiessen

List Price: $16.95

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Used Price: $3.25
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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780394756677
ISBN: 0394756673
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: January 12, 1988
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: January 12, 1988
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 124402

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Far Torture
This book was torture to read. it deals with a fishing boat in a small Caribbean port. I suffered through the entire book

Rating:

- an unusual and poetic story
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- 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.

Rating:

- A beautifully-rendered meditation on timeless themes
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- a unique tone-poem of a novel of sea and men
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 ... Read More

Books : Far Tortuga: A Novel