- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (May 23 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400043255
- ISBN-13: 978-1400043255
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.4 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,897,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Known primarily for his travel writing and poetry (In Dr. No's Garden), Shukman offers a skillfully crafted, eclectic collection of a novella and three stories tracking the rueful meandering of an aging British journalist and other hapless travelers. The first half of the book, a three-part novella, follows Charles Mortimerhas, who has enjoyed a terrific career as a far-flung journalist. At age 56, though, he finds himself back in the desert covering a dubious civil war on the Moroccan border. Bitterly encamped with an insurgency, he fills his notebook with self-pitying reflections, addressed to his ex-wife, Saskia, and staggers in a "daze of remorse" pining for French photographer Celeste, a former lover with whom he shared his finest moments. Shukman's other characters are similarly beat up by peripatetic lives: Harry Burton, the privileged solitary British traveler of "Castaway," stuck on the Bahamian island of Inagua, is "a global man, highly trained" and without attachment. Jim Rogers, the rich securities banker of "Darien Dogs," is "a modern-day hunter-gatherer," who arrives in Panama to secure the construction of a new oil pipeline, and gradually succumbs to the snares of a fetching local prostitute. They make for a sad bunch indeed, but in "Old Providence," feted British painter Rothman Case, awash in drink by middle age, recognizes that the moment of bottoming out also affords him his first glimpse of artistic freedom.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Shukman's new collection is a depressing series of stories about fundamentally broken men. Meeting with the results of a lifetime of bad choices, the protagonists in these tales discover--usually far too late--that their life pursuits were not worth the price of the chase. Shukman flexes his descriptive muscles by setting these stories in extreme locations: the heart of the Sahara and the lush tropics of the Caribbean. It is in the face of brash and boldly uncontrollable nature that these men face their demons. Mortimer, of the title story, has been a true globetrotting journalist. He has ridden through world affairs as though they were so many prize racehorses, changing tack when the story gets tired, but his personal life has barely gotten a paragraph. He is finally shocked and forced into introspection when he learns of the death of the only woman with whom he has ever truly connected. The stories Shukman tells are a warning to men who have let their pursuits become too one-dimensional--and seldom are such warnings handed over with landscapes this compelling. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book infused with regret, nostalgia and piercing loss, Jun 10 2006
By John Thorndike "Author: The Last of His Mind:... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mortimer of the Maghreb (Hardcover)
"Rogers felt the ground sway. He was thinking that if once a man found his path then strayed from it, all was lost."
In this collection of stories and a novella, the men--a journalist, a painter, a banker--have all found their path and strayed from it. The path may be love or art or money, but its loss brings deep regret.
I love a book infused with regret, with nostalgia, with piercing loss. And most of these stories unfold in a present that is liable to be swamped at any time by the living past. Chronology is not so much toyed with as bowed to: the natural true chronology of memory, so much more powerful than the time line of a calendar. The book opens with the title character, Charles Mortimer, stumbling through middle age, trying to rejuvenate his world-wandering, journalistic career. But he is ultimately derailed by the knowledge of his mistakes, of an obsession with work that overcomes all else.
From a character in another story: "He knew that yes, his had been true love and he had thrown it away. Happiness--which was the same as his soul--had shriveled up in him like a dead spider. "
But before the regret and the shriveling, true happiness. Shukman can plunge us into the seminal days of love, in some fearless writing. A hundred and twenty pages into the book, as I was happily reading along, he drops Mortimer and his French lover, Celeste, into the heart of the desert, where time, habits and the solid ground beneath their feet is all obliterated. They trail Brahim and his donkey into the dunes, looking for a gathering of the nomadic Tuareg, and find themselves lost in the best, truest sense: lost in each other.
I've reread these pages twice, trying to figure out how the author managed to sweep me away so completely. For Mortimer himself, this history becomes the engine of his regret, and for good reason: in all his days he was never so engaged with a woman and the world around him--which is to say, happy.
A powerful collection of stories, written in a muscular prose with surprising turns of phrase on almost every page. A treat, for me.
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