La última oportunidad

by Richard Ford, Mariano Antolín Rato (Translator)

Harry Quinn combatió en Vietnam, y a los 31 años ha vivido demasiado. Ahora está en Oaxaca, México. Rae, de la que se ha separado hace poco, le ha pedido que se encuentre con ella en esa ciudad para ayudarla a sacar a su hermano Sonny de la cárcel. El joven fue atrapado con un kilo de cocaína. Pero un abogado con amistades, y los diez mil dólares que traerá Rae, pueden hacer que un juez sin excesivos escrúpulos le ponga en libertad. Sin embargo, muy pronto comienzan las complicaciones. La gente para la que «trabajaba» Sonny cree que les ha estafado y se ha hecho encerrar para tapar las huellas del engaño. Y Oaxaca, paraíso turístico, se irá revelando como una ciudad barroca y terrible, donde turistas y marginales, traficantes de drogas y guerrilleros, militares despiadados y policías corruptos se cruzarán en una danza mortal.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Americana, Crime, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Richard Ford, born February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.

His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LE COSE SONO PEGGIO DI COME SEMBRANO


Foto di Wim Wenders: Entire Family, Las Vegas, New Mexico.

L’estrema fortuna è il secondo romanzo di Richard Ford, viene dopo l’esordio di Un pezzo del mio cuore e prima di Lo scrittore di sport (il cui protagonista Frank Bascombe diventa poi agente immobiliare in Indipendence Day).
Per la cronaca, la gestazione di questo romanzo è stata così travagliata, non solo in fase di scrittura (completamente riscritto spostando la narrazione dalla prima alla terza persona), ma anche per trovare un editore, che alla fine dell’avventura Ford era così stanco depresso e spiantato che accettò la collaborazione a un giornale sportivo. Il che ha trovato voce nel suo terzo romanzo.



Romanzo insolito per uno scrittore come Ford, che sin dal suo esordio ha fatto gridare a “the-next-big-thing”, in verità mantenendo ogni promessa.
Romanzo insolito perché si appoggia al “genere”, in questo caso al thriller noir, anche se viene facile definirlo thriller esistenziale.
Probabilmente perché il protagonista, Harry Quinn, ha problemi con l’esistenza: è un reduce dal Vietnam, la prima guerra “sporca”, è sbandato, gira per gli States cambiando lavoro, cercando di ritrovare un posto nella società. Ma l’esperienza militare lo ha reso solitario, taciturno, irrequieto, forse perfino cinico come l’eroe dei noir classici.
O forse tutto questo era già presente prima del Vietnam...


Foto di Wim Wenders.

Direi che un altro dei suoi problemi è l’essere innamorato della sua donna, la bella Rae. Mortalmente innamorato non è un’esagerazione. Perché lui crede che Rae sia il suo colpo di fortuna: ma per Rae si trova coinvolto in un intrico niente male, che definire pericoloso è un eufemismo.
Infatti Quinn si imbarca in una storia che non si consiglierebbe neppure a un nemico: viaggio in Messico, nella splendida Oaxaca, per cercare di tirar fuori dalla galera Sonny, il fratello di Rae, e quindi il potenziale cognato, che dovrebbe essere un piccolo spacciatore, anche se di cocaina, ma viene fuori che probabilmente si è intascato due chili.
Quantità di droga che apparteneva ovviamente a gente losca, violenta, determinata, e che non conosce umanità.


Foto di Wim Wenders.

E qui Ford tira fuori un altro aspetto alquanto insolito per la sua consueta narrativa: una vena gotica, o neogotica, che proviene dritta dritta dalla sua terra d’origine, il Mississippi, uno degli stati del sud degli US.
E questo vuol dire che il lettore si trova davanti a diverse scene raccapriccianti: un incontro di boxe durante il quale uno dei due pugile perde un occhio, col bulbo che gli rimane attaccato all’orbita per mezzo dei filamenti; gli indiani Ojibwa che catturavano i cervi, gli tagliavano la gola in modo che si potessero dissanguare con lentezza, e durante l’attesa sedevano intorno all’animale fumando marijuana; l’incidente in cui il padre di Quinn perde una mano in una sgranatrice e le ossa sbriciolate intasano lo scarico; lo stesso Quinn legato a torso nudo sul pavimento, novello cristo in orizzontale invece che verticale, e gli spacciatori gli lasciano zampettare sul petto uno scorpione…


Foto di Wim Wenders.

E quando non siamo immersi nella violenza e crudeltà a tinte cajun, si sguazza nel torbido, nella corruzione e ambiguità: Quinn dovrebbe corrompere i giudici per far uscire Sonny, ha portato dietro il denaro, si serve di un intermediario locale, un avvocato. Ma benedetto ragazzo, sei in Mexico, e che t’aspetti, che le cose vadano in modo programmato ed efficiente?

Ma forse Ford è troppo “scrittore”, troppo stilista per un romanzo di genere, non riesce a trovare il ritmo e il fluire necessari al tipo di storia.
Ciò nonostante, è una lettura ‘muscolosa’.

PS
Anche se non sono del Mexico, queste foto di Wim Wenders rendono bene l’atmosfera. E un giovane Sam Shepard sarebbe stato perfetto per interpretare Quinn.


Foto di Wim Wenders.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engalinho com histórias de drogas e mauzões e teria desistido do livro se Richard Ford não escrevesse tão bem.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Viet Nam vet, Harry Quinn thinks the way to get through life is to be lucky by being careful. Except he commits himself to do something that tests his luck and his carefulness: His girlfriend asks for his help in releasing her brother from a Oaxaca prison, where he is serving time for dealing cocaine, and being threatened by the drug dealers who think he stole from them.

Harry has secured the services of a local attorney named Bernhardt to serve as an intermediary. For a while, it actually looks as if Sonny, Rae's brother, could actually be sprung with bribes. But then, but then, some situations are inherently no win.

Richard Ford's Oaxaca is a city that is suffering from weird explosions set by terrorists; and military units are everywhere. The Ultimate Good Luck is a noir novel in that most noir of Latin American countries, Mexico.

The movement is a slow dance out of control as contingencies pile up. It's rather like Tetris. Does one ever win a game of Tetris?

[keatssycamore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confirmed that Ford is a favorite, but as I age, I think I'm less impressed with styles that have many of the hallmarks of maleness. OTOH, I'm not sure a style choice cancels what is so obviously good/great in something, so it's just a personal issue. And it's corrective, I think. I fell (feel) for ALL the macho tricks as a reader in my 20s, so maybe it's an inevitable part of growing up.

[Hugo Pineda O'Neill · Rating 2 out of 5]

El prologo, el preludio, la antecesion, la idea que gira entorno a la obra, y todo lo que va antes del comienzo, es brillante.

Cuando te adentras, es un fiasco, que en realidad nunca te adentras, porque es un conjunto de palabras que solo arañan la superficie de la trama.

Un veterano de la guerra, Harry Quinn, tipo duro y recto que ha ido a Vietnam y ha vuelto sin traumas ni heridas mentales; conoce a Rae, una apasionada artista con un hermano en problemas legales. Decidido a sacar a su cuñado de la cárcel, viaja a Mexico y termina envuelto en un triángulo del crimen.

Veremos personajes poco construidos, que no tocan la superficie y tampoco lo profundo. Un libro de guerrillas, robos, mafia, asesinatos, atentados, corrupción, superstición, traición. Pieza literaria atestada de hechos que no llevan a nada; lento, aburrido y mal hilado.

Richard Ford es un referente, pero, hasta ahora no le cojo el tiro, me quedo con algunas frases que de cierta forma te impregnan de su autenticidad y grandeza.

''La gente deja que ciertas cosas a las que está acostumbrada duren muchísimo tiempo, sin darse cuenta de que son precisamente esas cosas a las que está habituada las que la están matando.''

''Creo que saber demasiadas cosas lo único que consigue es que te sientas muy triste''

[michal k-c · Rating 1 out of 5]

Typical passage from this novel: “Mexico was like Vietnam or L.A., only more disappointing—a great trivial abundance of crap the chief effect of which wasn't variety but sameness. And since you couldn't remember the particulars from one day to the next, you couldn't avoid and control” — dumb vapid empty macho prose that is like all of the worst impulses of Hemingway / McCarthy combined with none of the affect or insight.

Hopefully Ford doesn’t catch wind of how much I hated this, wouldn’t want him to spit on me at a party or say, shoot one of my novels and mail it to me or something like that. I don’t suspect someone who writes such posturing prose would have such a thin skin — but then again…

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no plausible explanation for why The Ultimate Good Luck is the first Richard Ford book I've ever read other than that no one had ever moved out of town and left any copies of his novels behind. I picked through a discard pile and picked up this story of a Vietnam veteran who an estranged girlfriend beseeches to fly into Mexico and negotiate the release of her drug-smuggling brother from prison. The hero accepts the mission, and everything goes to hell. At first, I felt that I was reading an early work by a cousin to Denis Johnson. Nothing resolves easily for any character in The Ultimate Good Luck; most of them are in far worse shape at the end of the book than when it begins.But Ford, in this book at least, is a romantic, far more so than I've ever detected in Johnson, so much so that the Captain & Tenille ("Love Will Keep Us Together") should collaborate on the soundtrack if the movie is ever made.

[Rafa · Rating 3 out of 5]

La segunda de Richard Ford es un narcocorrido.

[Sergio D. Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inicia sin demasiada fuerza pero termina de manera estupenda. Lo disfruté enormemente. Sin embargo, he de confesar que quizás mis expectativas eran demasiado altas. Por otro lado, es definitivo: me he convertido en la peor clase de lector, el lector nostálgico. Ergo, el hecho de que la historia suceda en México le dio un carácter especial.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

2004: never thought I'd say this - got a bit bored.

[🐴 🍖]

the mild sauce if you will to dog soldiers's fire sauce. the scorpion scene in particular seems a pale imitation of a memorably nasty dog soldiers scene involving a stove. by the end too quinn & rae seem lukewarm-to-indifferent re sonny's plight, inviting the q of why they don't just gtfo. some beautifully painterly scenes throughout -- a rooster scratching around a makeshift oil drum bbq; the unseasonable xmas lights that kick on around oaxaca @ dusk -- it just never made a solid case for the dread it was tryna inspire.

[Zuberino · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is the purpose of Mexico in English literature? Reading books like this, one might surmise that its primary function is as an exotic locale, so different from the "normalcy" of Anglo societies - its cruelty and capriciousness, its blunted indifference to poverty and misery standing in stark contrast to the systematised affluence, the fundamentally pleasant predictability of say life in the US or the UK. One also can't help but wonder about the degree of subliminal prejudice that goes into the making of such books. I guess the happy counterpoint being that in 2018, our Age of Trump, Ford could just as well have set this tale of hapless desperadoes in his own country, and not have to venture across the border for outlandish kicks.

The Ultimate Good Luck is done well enough. The first reading was a difficult one, thanks to Ford's jagged oblique style that passes over and complicates almost as much as it actually says. The second reading brings into clearer focus some of the artistry of the prose and the machinations of the plot. I read it over for that very reason.

The tale unfolds over three dismal days in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, sometime I'm guessing in the late 70s. Quinn is here at Rae's request to see if he can prise Sonny out of prison. Quinn is a veteran who came back from Vietnam only to drift from job to job, from place to place, the one thing of value picked up on his wanderings being Rae, whom he met randomly at the dog tracks in Kenner, Louisiana. Rae is a redhead stunner, impulsive and idealistic. And Sonny is Rae's ne'er-do-well brother, locked up on drug smuggling charges in a vast jail outside Oaxaca City. He's said to have stolen from his suppliers too, which is why various folks with sinister names like Deats and Zago are threatening to do him harm, even as he lights up to high heaven in jail. Can Quinn get him out in time? Who will he have to persuade, what palms will he have to grease before the sands run out for Sonny?

*

Story and stylewise, this is obviously early work, before Ford found his footing most famously in the Bascombe novels. The dusty smell of tropical noir is strong here - people have referred to Hemingway and Robert Stone as obvious antecedents - and the gimlet-eyed authorial gaze is at times inseparable from anthropological racism. Ford is very good on the bleached burnt-out atmosphere of Oaxaca, the mood of military menace thick in the air, matched in turn by the bleached burnt-out characters, none more so than ex-military Quinn himself. Quinn believes above all in control, and Rae's love is the very antithesis of control. Although often lost in the Mexican maze, he is in fact a competent operator and ends up proving his mettle in the violent finale.

That finale though is half cliche. Maybe in 1981 this story would have worked, maybe back then you could spend a whole page on describing the actual boiling of a frog in a pan to make the most blindingly obvious point, but today not much of this stuff holds up. It is interesting to see how American literary prose has moved on from that earlier style where you could get away with saying things like - "the shabby, mesmerizing drowse of small chances being taken" and "a pressure seemed released and an inevitability forged, and he thought of the day with longing" and "they all seemed fixed and detached in a pleasing way that made him want to stay in the gallery for a long time" - all of these specimens of laboured overwriting taken from just two pages opened at random. Too many have criticised the cryptic confusion of this type of prose for it not to be a genuine problem. The vagueness and obfuscation, sometimes verging on parody, are all the more frustrating when one remembers the promise of that superb, action-filled opening chapter.

In sum, Good Luck is in many ways a representative work of its time. But it falls some distance short of classic status, so three stars it is.

[Pat Settegast · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book excelled in setting but lacked narrative direction. Similarly, the characters were masterfully sketched and yet seemed unconvinced of their own motives. Perhaps in either case this was the intent; nevertheless both these criticisms seem too closely related to create the necessary tension for supporting an atmosphere of either directionless mystery or apathetic conundrum. Further there is a subplot of Mesoamerican violence that inadvertently manages to become more interesting than the main story.

All told The Ultimate Good Luck felt like an overlong short story. I endured to the end simply because I'm a huge fan of Richard Ford. This is not the book I would recommend to the uninitiated. Rather, I would save it for those writerly readers so blown away by Rock Springs or The Sportswriter as to be walking around in despair of ever creating anything of a matched caliber.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning and haunting book. I have Ford's later, more well-known books (next to read is his story collection: Women with Men), but this early work is masterful as well. It
I want to note the NY Times review by C. D. B. Bryan:
<< ''In the war,'' Quinn tells us, ''you maintained your crucial distance from things and that kept you alive, and kept everything out in front of you and locatable.'' Richard Ford keeps the crucial distance in his writing, too. His prose has a taut cinematic quality that permits him to record the color, the architecture, the movement, the violence occurring in front of him with the Cyclopean detachment of a wide-angle lens affixed to a camera on an exploratory spacecraft landing on an alien planet. It is a style that bathes his story with the same hot, flat, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico, and it captures exactly that disquieting sense of menace one often feels lurking there just off the road.>>

This is a book that will stay with me.

[Richard Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

My love affair with Richard Ford continues! It may be more plot-driven than the character-centred Bascombe novels, but The Ultimate Good Luck is as tightly-written, atmospheric and steeped in melancholy as his most celebrated work. It just adds some hard-boiled thrills.

One reviewer said they could imagine Bogart and Bacall in the movie version, and there is the whiff of The Maltese Falcon here. The maguffin is some missing drug money in Mexico. The ultimate question though is not whether our protagonist will find it but whether he'll survive and revive his relationship.

The sense of place is strong with a chaotic 1970s Mexico being both exotic and dangerous and it's unclear who's in charge and who has the most villainous intentions.

It also feels like a post--Vietnam novel, not only because the main character is a Vet, but because it sees Americans venturing into a country they don't understand and cannot possibly conquer. A deeply satisfying read.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. This book started well enough, but it then began to feel familiar and quickly became annoying. Bernhardt's cryptic conversations with Quinn seemed to have no real purpose and didn't really go anywhere. Neither Quinn nor Rae seemed to care that much about Sonny, so the whole exercise began to seem pointless. And I didn't really care for either of them that much. None of the character's motivations made any sense. And most of the dialogue was uninspired - people talking at each other, not to each other, people not really saying anything or making cryptic statements. It was really a go nowhere book. When I break it down like this, I wonder if it wasn't really more of a one star book, but I have read many one star books and I don't feel like this was there. But at only 200 pages, it was a slog.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very early book by an author I appreciate greatly - except, it turns out - not his earliest work. Quinn, a veteran of Vietnam (and this was written very shortly after the end of the war) is in Mexico trying to rescue his girlfriend's brother from prison. Nothing goes as planned, people are killed, people are stoned, people steal, no one can count on anyone's honesty. As is usual with Ford, there is not a wasted word, everything is said as straightforward as possible, but in this early work, too much of it just doesn't quite make sense. Sentences are unfinished - to make a point? But what the point is I never quite got. I'll go back to his later books.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ford is a favorite author, but I didn't enjoy this as much as his later books. I kept wanting a map of the area so I could follow where the characters were going. The dialog was choppy and never a direct line; a question was asked and never directly answered; a conversation started but never followed-through. It always seemed like the answer or the result was around the corner, but I never quite got there.

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

<< "Love's a hardship, right?" Quinn said. Bernhardt looked at him as if they understood one another perfectly. "Exactly," he said, pleased. "It smells always of extinction." "It's a sweet smell, though, isn't it?" Quinn said. "Ahh," Bernhardt said, and smiled to show his incisors. "It is (ital.) a sweet smell. There's nothing like it. But it is extinction just the same." In a different setup, he thought he might've found a way to like Bernhardt, only the setup didn't include that now. Intimacy just made things hard to see, and he wanted things kept highly visible at all times. >> << It was nuts, he thought, to be tied to somebody, two counting Bernhardt, you had no feeling about, but who somehow made all the difference. That was the essence of the modern predicament. The guy who had it in for you was the guy you'd never seen. The one you loved was the one you couldn't be understood by. The one you paid to trust was the one you were sure would cut and run. The best you could think was maybe you'd get lucky, and come out with some skin left on. >> Harry Quinn. Tough guy. Vietnam vet. Sometime jobber on oil rigs as a union pipefitter. And weekend repo man taking his chances with deadbeat sailors stealing back their Firebirds for a small percentage. If you've read Chandler, or John D. MacDonald--the grit and angst of private dicks mucking around in the randomly violent, seedy confines of noir--then you'll quickly identify with Richard Ford's "The Ultimate Good Luck." A novella that probably morphed from a short story, the characters are few, some of them fleetingly so, but the places range from Michigan (Ford's from there) to Louisiana, parts of the Southwest, Chicago where he has a nasty run-in with an addict driving a Toronado (takes place in the 70s) and Oaxaca, Mexico where most of the story takes place. Not to mention Quinn's flash-backs to Nam. No irony is lost on the fact that the brutality and chaos and corruption in Oxaca between the police and armed soldiers versus guerrillas and narcotics smugglers with hapless tourists--from Flint, Michigan, no less--and civilians caught in the middle mirrors the same disregard for law, life and liberty as was the nightmare of the fall of Vietnam. To survive Quinn is obsessed with keeping his sh*t wired tight on a mission to spring his wife's brother from prison. Sonny is not just set-up and busted for muling, but accused by narcos of skimming half of a cocaine deal that "complicates" the payoff to bribe a judge to get him out. Ford's prose has been likened to Hemingway's for its disjointed, labyrinthine construction and fragmented dialogue that is, at times, difficult to follow. The effect works to convey the cognitive challenge of the protagonists, Quinn and his wife Rae whose default setting includes her pot smoking, and affinity for alcohol mixed with recreational drugs, and well, it's more than they can handle just trying to keep it together. It slows one's reading rate down, considerably, and the narrative of only 200 pages seems like more. Overall, like Hemingway, the pacing of events has a cinematic quality whose vivid imagery highlights, in halucinatory detail, those rarified sensorial moments experienced during a catastrophe, and even more disturbingly after some processing of what's happened, the terrible clarity of awareness just after. Ford readily accepts the influence Hemingway has on his writing, but he adds it's still the bulk of a story-teller's job to have one. No argument there. Not shown: another half-star.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memory seemed like an account full of the wrong currency.

Not a lot to say about this book; it is very short, and a very different setting from the Ford books I’ve read so far. Instead of Montana, it’s set in Oaxaca, Mexico.

The main character is a veteran who has temporarily moved to Mexico to help his ex-semi-wife’s brother get out of prisión where he went for trafficking cocaine. This is sort of a step-by-step heist caper, except of course that it’s Ford so you have no real idea of where it’s going to go next except that if any new characters come in they’re going to be hard luck, too.

Harry Quinn’s mechanism for dealing with bad luck is to be very careful; by making sure to know everything before it happens, and back up when something unexpected happens, you can, if not woo good luck, at least repel bad luck. But as anyone who has dealt with bad luck and Heisenberg knows, any action in favor of avoiding bad luck can itself put into motion bad luck.

There are several readings of the title, including that the ultimate good luck is to be completely blocked by fate from doing something really stupid. The character seems to think that being fully located in yourself is the ultimate good luck, analogous to driving a vehicle at night with the lights out to sneak up on a criminal, which “made you feel out of time and out of real space and located closer to yourself, as if located was the illusion…”

This is a good book and well-written. It is also an incredible downer. None of the characters are likable, everyone makes the sort of not-quite stupid but unhelpful decisions that often cause people to fail in real life. It was both enjoyable and a slog, which makes no sense, but that’s Richard Ford.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all about atmospherics: a dreamy, eerie landscape of sun haze and deep nighttime darkness; a nightmarish place where you understand very little and control even less and the people around you may or may not be trustworthy or murderous. Ford is very good at creating this world. He's also good at building tension. It's not entirely believable, but maybe the whole story can be taken as an allegory representing the condition of almost any people in almost any place.
There are disappointments that could drag it down to 3.5 stars or even 3. Strong echoes of Hemingway fill the first 50 or so pages before Ford's own style comes into force. Much of the dialogue is illogical or elliptical, not the more direct wording of real life, although that may be just part of the general dreaminess. The book can read like a blend of a Hemingway action story, Albert Camus' existential novel The Plague, and a modern action thriller. It's an early Ford work that seems like a way point on the road to his more fully realized The Sportswriter. But it has an advantage over the latter book. The Sportswriter's Frank Bascombe is an irritating main character; you want to grab by the lapels and tell him to shape up and start making decisions and following through on them. The main character in this one, Harry Quinn, can come across as confused, depressed or even sullen, but at least he makes decisions and acts.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Centro felt to him Vietnam again, a crystallized stillness above the rooftops and swarming, full-bore eeriness in the street.
Café tables in the Portal were jammed with tour-bus passengers drinking Cuba libres, and campesinos down out of the second class camións milling in the sun, crowding the tabloid stalls. Bernhardt had left them in the middle of Las Casas Colón behind the Juarez market and Quinn had pulled Rae through the corridors of swaying meets out into the Avenue Ruyano between the banquettes of country flowers and Zapotec nostrums that cluttered the business end of the mercado. She hadn’t mentioned Sonny. He understood she was storing that to deal with in private, and that was the right way. She was giving him time to think what to say.”

I have never read anything by this author, and assume this is not the book to start with. I did read it for the Oaxacan references, but the disjointed dialogue that others mention turned me away. The description of the environment and characters almost felt like a noir…where the tough leading man of few words spills his thoughts of everything, not sharing a lot. Some of the sentences were crafted so beautifully, but most of the book, I was bored.

[Brian Washines · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a time when a young author delves into the sordid underground of society, a place where they can allow their prose to oscillate and dance. Hot nights with a pack of smokes and a pint of bourbon under a rickety fan. Before Ford embarked on his Bascome saga, he dragged Quinn, a war veteran blue-collar vagabond, to hell. If only because he's rendered himself dependable if not quite successful at life. This case, a brother-in-law-of-sorts stuck in a Oaxaca jail. It's the kind of situation where buy money goes missing and as a result, so do people. The Ultimate Good Luck is a brand of Southern Border Post-Noir that includes Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and Sam Peckinpah's film Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. Does it attain that status? Not quite. The rating is a solid 3.7 rounded up, but the prose Ford writes is masterful. A reviewer long ago described this genre of crime fiction in terms of a hamburger; there's passable and there's gourmet and everything in between. Ford has given us a good smashburger. A little rare in the middle, charred to the edges. Enjoy.

[Anni Kramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gripping novel by Richard Ford is one of his finest, in my eyes. The protagonist Harry Quinn, who tries to get his ex-wife's brother Sonny out of prison in Oaxaca, Mexico, reminds me very much of McCarthy's Suttree: he has his emotions under control, a veteran of Vietnam, but is wary of losing control, tries to keep his emotions hard and lean and overcome his fear.
The novel simply broils with tension. Often enough, I found it hard to envisage the places where the action was taking place, but that didn't matter so much, as the pace was fast, the movements always going ahead, so that there was no time to think or wonder, if I wanted to keep up with Quinn's dizzy motion. His treatment of Rae is at once harsh and passionate. He knows that he needs and wants her and puts his life at risk to get Sonny out of jail.
Excellent prose, strong, stark language. I subtracted one star for the dialog, which in places did not make sense to me. Everything else is brilliant.

[Alejandro Chirinos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Qué te llame tu ex esposa para que vayas a rescatar a su hermano que está preso en México y corras al objetivo quiere decir que aún sientes algo por ella y harías lo posible para recuperarla
Queen es el personaje principal de esta historia, quien corre a rescatar a su cuñado y tiene que relacionarse con gente de dudosos escrupulos para lograr liberarlo, de lo contrario lo podrían matar
Su ex- esposa, Rae, llega a México para conocer la situación de su hermano y obvio, reinicia el amor con Quinn.
Esta es una novela de reencuentro en el amor, en el medio de un Oaxaca en Mexico, salvaje, violento rodeado de drogas, narcotráfico y terrorismo.
Ford relata una novela interesante, el argumento no es tan rico, no obstante podemos disfrutarla, hay muchos momentos buenos, y se puede leer en menos de una semana.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed every page of this. A perfect little novel/novella. It's got so much going for it and develops into a real page-turner. I especially like Ford's philosophical digressions rendered in his conversational speaking voice right there on the page. He does it in almost every paragraph. The open-ending is very much like his short stories. A master of creating atmosphere in terse, quick strokes.

[Santiago Quijano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Esta es más una novela estílistica que otra cosa. Llegué a la págna 102 y tuve que abandonar. 102 páginas son más que suficientes para hacerte una buena idea del estilo y para darte cuenta que no tienes ninguna empatía por el protagonista, que no te importa lo que va a pasar con él en las 131 páginas restantes, ni con la historia.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early book by Ford. I did not like the story nor ANY of the characters. But even in his early works the prose is elegant, the descriptions of the country side, the town or a garden are vivid and illuminating. I also enjoy his technique of filling in background information with abrupt tangents throughout the book. I recommend the book as a primer in Ford’s writing style.

[John Rohde · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read all the Frank Bascombe novels and tried this one just to see. It has the spare language that Mr. Ford is known for, but it is clear that he was a much younger writer when he wrote this, and it lacks the penetrating observances that Frank made. Also, it is a dark subject, dark story, and written in a dark way, and I was a little down while I read, unlike the happy-go-lucky Frank I had become used to. I enjoyed it, glad I read it, and was also glad when I finished it!

[Eric Kirkman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reminded me of the film The Counselor. Bad plot. Bad dialogue. Bad characters. Boring. Only Ford's excellent writing style gives this book any real value and even that is butchered by the book's numerous failures.