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Port Tropique
“Gifford uses the charged story of . . . an apprentice smuggler as an occasion for his own literary and cinematic smuggling—from Conrad, Hemingway, Camus, John Hawkes, Howard Hawks, Welles and Ozu, among others—and to discover a new literary form.”— The New York Times Book Review “A poet’s nuanced prose runs through Port Tropique . . . a spellbinding story.”— The Washington Post “A strange, disturbing . . . intriguing . . . impressionist painting of a book.”— San Francisco Chronicle Revolution is simmering in the heat of the battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an “intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of self-willed failure” ( The New York Times ). The ineff ectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the zócalo and occasional nights involved in an ivory-smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege, yet always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz’s mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him. The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, and one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world.
136 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 13, 2016
Port Tropique is the poet Barry Gifford’s love song to those dozens of movies about restless, nomadic American men who find themselves in some tropical locale in Central America drinking away their sorrows. But morose boozing costs money, so our well-read hero Franz Hall makes ends meet by helping smuggle in money for local contrabandistas—that is until the obligatory guerilla uprising overturns the crooked puppet government.
The plot is fairly typical for this sort of affair, but the real pleasure lies in finding some unique sparks of weirdness in this early prose outing of Gifford’s. We see a few of the offbeat flavorings that make later novels like Wild at Heart, Baby-Cat Face, Arise and Walk, and 59° and Raining such addictive, ramshackle pig-outs of the bizarrely poetic.
The plot is fairly typical for this sort of affair, but the real pleasure lies in finding some unique sparks of weirdness in this early prose outing of Gifford’s. We see a few of the offbeat flavorings that make later novels like Wild at Heart, Baby-Cat Face, Arise and Walk, and 59° and Raining such addictive, ramshackle pig-outs of the bizarrely poetic.
January 19, 2023
Barry Gifford is known as the founder of the original Black Lizard Books, which brought noir crime fiction to the waiting masses in the 1980’s who did not know what hit them. He also wrote Wild at Heart, which became a David Lynch movie. If you did not know better, you would assume that Port Tropique would be more classic crime fiction – sort of a 1980’s era Jim Thompson. Not so. Port Tropique is a novel-length prose poem with disconnected dream-like sequences and casual references to Hemingway and other classic writers and classic movies. Set in Port Tropique, which is an amalgam of every Central American and South American banana republic with illicit smuggling, revolution brewing, and money changing hands. The plot is loose. Franz, formerly of New Orleans, has positioned himself in the Zocalo, watching the young girls, and trying to make his connection. He becomes the bag man for a smuggling operation and, when the country descends into revolution and he cannot turn the suitcase full of money over to the hard cases he is working with, flees the country, only to return when he realizes that they will hunt him down wherever he goes. This is not a story you read cover to cover to necessarily follow the plot so much as to drink in the atmosphere.
September 24, 2017
Throwback literature,and lots of nostalgia.I like a writer who makes you feel as if you are living in the settings he or she has created.
September 25, 2012
This short novel is a strange, disassociated noir that is captivating, confusing, but hard to put down. GIfford's main character, Franz Hall, is a beguiling conundrum of a man, a ghost whisper wafting through the darkness of a semi-sinister South American coup. Augmented by bizarre flashbacks and infiltrated by delusional red herrings, it's an engaging slacker mystery delivered with nonchalant aplomb.
August 31, 2021
Franz Hall is an intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of selfwilled failure...
The above is how the blurb describes the protagonist. Big boots to fill and while I enjoyed the book, it is a lazy affair. Franz's job is to look after suitcases of cash for ivory smugglers in an imaginary Central American country - an amalgamation of Nicaragua, Guatemala and Cuba? I don't think Gifford's trip got much beyond drinking beers in the plaza...or zócolo - fine, but for a Conradian novel it does not make. The biography of Gifford included at the end says he writes very American stories. His view of Central America is very much that of the banana republic, a place interesting because Hemingway once had some drinks there. Yes, very American...North American. Maybe it's supposed to be ironic? Gifford also drifts off into stories from Franz's beat lifestyle in the States...not hard to read - but again how much time did he put into this? It's the kind of novel which probably makes Latin Americans conclude that gringos (or Anglos) can only write cartoonish works about their countries. I read this when I was in my late teens and dug it - does not stand the test of time...but fun.
The above is how the blurb describes the protagonist. Big boots to fill and while I enjoyed the book, it is a lazy affair. Franz's job is to look after suitcases of cash for ivory smugglers in an imaginary Central American country - an amalgamation of Nicaragua, Guatemala and Cuba? I don't think Gifford's trip got much beyond drinking beers in the plaza...or zócolo - fine, but for a Conradian novel it does not make. The biography of Gifford included at the end says he writes very American stories. His view of Central America is very much that of the banana republic, a place interesting because Hemingway once had some drinks there. Yes, very American...North American. Maybe it's supposed to be ironic? Gifford also drifts off into stories from Franz's beat lifestyle in the States...not hard to read - but again how much time did he put into this? It's the kind of novel which probably makes Latin Americans conclude that gringos (or Anglos) can only write cartoonish works about their countries. I read this when I was in my late teens and dug it - does not stand the test of time...but fun.
April 12, 2016
Despite having been published by Black Lizard, and bearing the category "Mystery/Suspense" on its cover, Port Tropique isn't really either, and is only nominally a noir (or "post-noir," as the forward describes it). Franz Hall follows the likes of Fred Dobbs in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon of Night of the Iguana, and Bennie in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, in the long narrative tradition of gringos who are hiding from life, their past, themselves, and drinking their way into oblivion South of the Border.
Unlike the aforementioned works, Port Tropique eschews traditional narrative structure in favor of an episodic collection of reminiscences and vignettes of Franz's past and present life, framed by a very thin story about Franz's involvement in a smuggling operation and a local revolution. It's mildly engaging, and brief enough to avoid being monotonous, although it's not particularly compelling.
Unlike the aforementioned works, Port Tropique eschews traditional narrative structure in favor of an episodic collection of reminiscences and vignettes of Franz's past and present life, framed by a very thin story about Franz's involvement in a smuggling operation and a local revolution. It's mildly engaging, and brief enough to avoid being monotonous, although it's not particularly compelling.
November 30, 2017
Great book
Dreamlike noir., told in short episodes--not quite vignettes--with a nearly hallucinatory effect. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks a great novel needs to be long.
Dreamlike noir., told in short episodes--not quite vignettes--with a nearly hallucinatory effect. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks a great novel needs to be long.
October 16, 2020
"SO HERE I AM, HE THOUGHT, sitting in a stinking little room in a tenth-rate hotel in a banana republic town occupied by a rebel army expecting to be attacked any day. I’ve got two handguns, five hundred thousand dollars in stolen cash I can’t spend in a suitcase under the bed and no place to go where I can do myself any good. If I leave they’ll find me and if I stay here long enough a couple of monsters will come through the door and stick a bullet in my ear and take the money without listening to anything I have to say. If he ever wrote a book, Franz decided, he would put into it everyone he had ever liked or disliked. It would be called Tragic Creatures."
"It was not easy to become a bum, he had decided, but once you were one, he knew, it was difficult to be anything else. Anybody could become a bum, and what interested Franz was the possibility that he could become one. The prospect did not frighten him. Sometimes he thought he really believed that it would be better to be a bum than a man with too much money."
— Barry Gifford, PORT TROPIQUE
Barry Gifford, in the bio accompanying PORT TROPIQUE, is described as "the literary heir of Conrad, of Hemingway, of Algren and Camus, exposing the underbelly of the American Dream." And it's true, and it can make PORT TROPIQUE hard to get into at first, with its flat Hemingway affect and its characters who seem to do nothing but sit at sidewalk cafés and sleep with each other if they're sufficiently bored and think about money and revolution and wait forever for connections that may or may not come.
It can also be hard to get into before you realize that it's less a conventional novel than it is a blend of pastiche and homage, with its borrowed style and its characters who seem to exist in a time sometime after Vietnam but constantly reference movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s, and seem to be trying to live like them, and seem to be slow to realize that, like the subject of Jimmy Buffett's "A Pirate Looks At Forty," that there's really no room for them in the world anymore.
But once you do get past these things, the mannered writing become a lot more livable. And enjoyable. Or maybe I'm just saying so because I'm this 1980 novel's audience, a middle-age male who's fallen down the rabbit hole and doesn't seem to feel any particular desire to dig himself out.
At any rate, PORT TROPIQUE is much more about atmosphere than plot, so let's get the plot out of the way so we can talk about what the novel is really about: Franz is an expatriate American from Florida by way of New Orleans, in an unnamed country somewhere near Mexico that might be Belize, or maybe El Salvador. He picks up suitcases off a dock every so often, delivers them to someone else, brings them back, and gets a few thousand a pop for his efforts. But, when revolution his Port Tropique, Franz has to leave town with the money to protect it. But of course the people he works for think he ran off with their half-million dollars, and when it's safe to return to Port Tropique, Franz has to figure out how to return the return the money without getting killed. Or how to get safely out of the country, with or without the money. Or look into Door Number Three.
But it's really not a novel of plot. What it is, more than anything, is the trunk novel of a talented writer in thrall to his influences — and really, it's not so much a trunk novel as it is a patchwork quilt of trunk stories, with vignettes and flashbacks that seem to have been pulled out of a writer's file titled STUFF TOO GOOD TO TOSS THAT I HAVEN'T FOUND A PLACE FOR YET. In the hands of lesser talents, this sort of novel fails. And for some who require constant twists, who can't conceive of sitting on a beach chair watching the world go by without checking their phone every fifteen seconds, it might fail anyway. But for those who have learned patience and appreciate atmosphere, it richly rewards.
Why? Back to what PORT TROPIQUE is really about. It's about shabby suits and sidewalk cafes and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and bantering with foreign correspondents. It's about tropic breezes and midnight boat rides and ceiling fans and indifferent sex and old movies and bright menace and hazy memories. It's a fever dream in which past and present are blurred together to the point that even Franz doesn't know which is which, or knows but doesn't care.
And that mannered writing grows on you with each passing page. Some favorite snippets:
— "It is a mistake to be famous while you are alive, thought Franz, but it is even a bigger mistake to be famous after you are dead and be unable to have the pleasure of ignoring your detractors.”
— “Language, he decided, was possibly the most emotionally confusing issue in the world, the supreme cause of revolution and assassination.”
— “He drank some more and sweated and waited and tried to ship himself from dreaming of what had already taken place and what he could no longer control.”
— “Franz bit off the end of one of the four six-peso Cuban cigars he had bought at the Biarritz, tongued it, and sat on a bench in the square waiting and wondering like everyone else who had nothing much to lose.”
— “After the serpent and the bear had departed, Franz ordered a Cuba Libre and silently saluted the memory of Errol Flynn.”
— "Sitting up like a lioness, proud head reared, a wide-eyed, dangerous, saber-bright beauty, Marie was browned and blond from the Italian sun, her slim long legs folded delicately under a thin yellow cotton dress, blond strands fallen over almond eyes, nose slightly crooked, tilted gently away from lips full and moist in a natural pout. It was like seeing Ingrid Bergman at twenty waiting at a bus stop."
— "She wore an orange lace blouse and swirling black skirt embroidered in green and orange with the figures of serpents. Franz immediately thought of Ava Gardner dancing in the moonlight on the Mexican beach with her two servant boys in Night of the Iguana."
— "THE RAIN BEGAN DURING THE NIGHT. It woke Franz and he went over to the window, lit up the next to the last of the six peso Cubanos, and sat and looked out at it. The initial cloudburst had filled the street instantly and now it settled into a steady downpour. This was the real beginning of the rainy season."
— "It had been a while since he had been tempted to trust someone himself. He couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad, so he let it pass."
— "He knelt and looked at the money. He puffed on the cigar. Then he laughed. He laughed and laughed and fell on the ground and rolled around in the wet leaves. The animals growled and honked and shrieked, the guns bopped and chattered and Franz lay on the ground and laughed and cried and then began to shiver and shake and vomit and crap and piss until he had nothing left in him and he passed out."
— "Franz showed Bernardo the rest of the money and told him not to worry, they would be more fortunate than the characters in a book he had read had been. After all, Franz said, laughing, he and Bernardo were real men. Bernardo said he hoped Franz was right, but that even though he could not read he knew it was only real men who could die and not the characters in a book."
— "Paul said he thought at first you were CIA, but now he figures you’re just looking for a reason to stay alive.”
If that's your thing — TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT meets THE STRANGER meets NIGHT OF THE IGUANA meets early Jimmy Buffett — PORT TROPIQUE will come across to you as great classic noir porn, a collage of noir's greatest hits harking back to its greatest time. It is a sunshine-through-half-shuttered-window-blinds kind of shadow novel. That seems diminishing, and yet it's praise. It is a novel that knows who it wants its audience to be, and it's up to the audience to pick up on that signal or to decide it doesn't broadcast on their frequency. It definitely broadcasts on mine.
"It was not easy to become a bum, he had decided, but once you were one, he knew, it was difficult to be anything else. Anybody could become a bum, and what interested Franz was the possibility that he could become one. The prospect did not frighten him. Sometimes he thought he really believed that it would be better to be a bum than a man with too much money."
— Barry Gifford, PORT TROPIQUE
Barry Gifford, in the bio accompanying PORT TROPIQUE, is described as "the literary heir of Conrad, of Hemingway, of Algren and Camus, exposing the underbelly of the American Dream." And it's true, and it can make PORT TROPIQUE hard to get into at first, with its flat Hemingway affect and its characters who seem to do nothing but sit at sidewalk cafés and sleep with each other if they're sufficiently bored and think about money and revolution and wait forever for connections that may or may not come.
It can also be hard to get into before you realize that it's less a conventional novel than it is a blend of pastiche and homage, with its borrowed style and its characters who seem to exist in a time sometime after Vietnam but constantly reference movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s, and seem to be trying to live like them, and seem to be slow to realize that, like the subject of Jimmy Buffett's "A Pirate Looks At Forty," that there's really no room for them in the world anymore.
But once you do get past these things, the mannered writing become a lot more livable. And enjoyable. Or maybe I'm just saying so because I'm this 1980 novel's audience, a middle-age male who's fallen down the rabbit hole and doesn't seem to feel any particular desire to dig himself out.
At any rate, PORT TROPIQUE is much more about atmosphere than plot, so let's get the plot out of the way so we can talk about what the novel is really about: Franz is an expatriate American from Florida by way of New Orleans, in an unnamed country somewhere near Mexico that might be Belize, or maybe El Salvador. He picks up suitcases off a dock every so often, delivers them to someone else, brings them back, and gets a few thousand a pop for his efforts. But, when revolution his Port Tropique, Franz has to leave town with the money to protect it. But of course the people he works for think he ran off with their half-million dollars, and when it's safe to return to Port Tropique, Franz has to figure out how to return the return the money without getting killed. Or how to get safely out of the country, with or without the money. Or look into Door Number Three.
But it's really not a novel of plot. What it is, more than anything, is the trunk novel of a talented writer in thrall to his influences — and really, it's not so much a trunk novel as it is a patchwork quilt of trunk stories, with vignettes and flashbacks that seem to have been pulled out of a writer's file titled STUFF TOO GOOD TO TOSS THAT I HAVEN'T FOUND A PLACE FOR YET. In the hands of lesser talents, this sort of novel fails. And for some who require constant twists, who can't conceive of sitting on a beach chair watching the world go by without checking their phone every fifteen seconds, it might fail anyway. But for those who have learned patience and appreciate atmosphere, it richly rewards.
Why? Back to what PORT TROPIQUE is really about. It's about shabby suits and sidewalk cafes and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and bantering with foreign correspondents. It's about tropic breezes and midnight boat rides and ceiling fans and indifferent sex and old movies and bright menace and hazy memories. It's a fever dream in which past and present are blurred together to the point that even Franz doesn't know which is which, or knows but doesn't care.
And that mannered writing grows on you with each passing page. Some favorite snippets:
— "It is a mistake to be famous while you are alive, thought Franz, but it is even a bigger mistake to be famous after you are dead and be unable to have the pleasure of ignoring your detractors.”
— “Language, he decided, was possibly the most emotionally confusing issue in the world, the supreme cause of revolution and assassination.”
— “He drank some more and sweated and waited and tried to ship himself from dreaming of what had already taken place and what he could no longer control.”
— “Franz bit off the end of one of the four six-peso Cuban cigars he had bought at the Biarritz, tongued it, and sat on a bench in the square waiting and wondering like everyone else who had nothing much to lose.”
— “After the serpent and the bear had departed, Franz ordered a Cuba Libre and silently saluted the memory of Errol Flynn.”
— "Sitting up like a lioness, proud head reared, a wide-eyed, dangerous, saber-bright beauty, Marie was browned and blond from the Italian sun, her slim long legs folded delicately under a thin yellow cotton dress, blond strands fallen over almond eyes, nose slightly crooked, tilted gently away from lips full and moist in a natural pout. It was like seeing Ingrid Bergman at twenty waiting at a bus stop."
— "She wore an orange lace blouse and swirling black skirt embroidered in green and orange with the figures of serpents. Franz immediately thought of Ava Gardner dancing in the moonlight on the Mexican beach with her two servant boys in Night of the Iguana."
— "THE RAIN BEGAN DURING THE NIGHT. It woke Franz and he went over to the window, lit up the next to the last of the six peso Cubanos, and sat and looked out at it. The initial cloudburst had filled the street instantly and now it settled into a steady downpour. This was the real beginning of the rainy season."
— "It had been a while since he had been tempted to trust someone himself. He couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad, so he let it pass."
— "He knelt and looked at the money. He puffed on the cigar. Then he laughed. He laughed and laughed and fell on the ground and rolled around in the wet leaves. The animals growled and honked and shrieked, the guns bopped and chattered and Franz lay on the ground and laughed and cried and then began to shiver and shake and vomit and crap and piss until he had nothing left in him and he passed out."
— "Franz showed Bernardo the rest of the money and told him not to worry, they would be more fortunate than the characters in a book he had read had been. After all, Franz said, laughing, he and Bernardo were real men. Bernardo said he hoped Franz was right, but that even though he could not read he knew it was only real men who could die and not the characters in a book."
— "Paul said he thought at first you were CIA, but now he figures you’re just looking for a reason to stay alive.”
If that's your thing — TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT meets THE STRANGER meets NIGHT OF THE IGUANA meets early Jimmy Buffett — PORT TROPIQUE will come across to you as great classic noir porn, a collage of noir's greatest hits harking back to its greatest time. It is a sunshine-through-half-shuttered-window-blinds kind of shadow novel. That seems diminishing, and yet it's praise. It is a novel that knows who it wants its audience to be, and it's up to the audience to pick up on that signal or to decide it doesn't broadcast on their frequency. It definitely broadcasts on mine.
August 21, 2013
Look at Port Tropique as Latin Noir. Author Barry Gifford's hero is a bagman for whoever has to transfer large amounts of illicit funds. In the meantime, he makes friends with journalists and others passing through the city, which somewhat resembles Merida in Mexico's State of Yucatan.
I have always enjoyed Gifford's novels, and this early one is no exception. Gifford has the tropical vibe down pat, and his characters are all searching for some kind of equilibrium which always eludes them:
This makes for great summer reading.
I have always enjoyed Gifford's novels, and this early one is no exception. Gifford has the tropical vibe down pat, and his characters are all searching for some kind of equilibrium which always eludes them:
So here I am, he thought, sitting in a stinking little room in a tenth-rate hotel in a banana republic town occupied by a rebel army expecting to be attacked any day. I've got two handguns, five hundred thousand dollars in stolen cash I can't spend in a suitcase under the bed and no place to go where I can do myself any good. If I leave they'll find me and if I stay here long enough a couple of monsters will come through the door and stick a bullet in my ear and take the money without listening to anything I have to say.That is the basic situation of Port Tropique, which Gifford handles faultlessly.
This makes for great summer reading.
June 15, 2011
Despite its publication by Black Lizard, "Port Tropique" is only peripherally a crime novel. It is instead a loose connection of vignettes, aligning it closer stylistically to Bolano's "Antwerp" or even Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Gifford wrings a lot of feeling out of the nonlinear structure-- intertwining dreams, cold hard realism, ghosts of ex-lovers, and memories of Hollywood and literature into a hypnotic tropical rhythm. Because of this rhythm, the potentially interesting plot about Central American drug smuggling is somewhat sacrificed, often getting sucked into Gifford's whirlwind of haunting image and atmosphere. But this won't matter if you let yourself get sucked into Gifford's whirlwind--it's worth the trip.
April 22, 2014
My fiancée bought this book in a used book store in New Orleans. On our car trip back home, I read it out loud to pass the time. I actually finished the book during the drive (a bit hoarse...I have a greater appreciation for audio book actors). The book is basically a novella with small chapters describing the past & present actions of Franz, the main character. I didn't feel like there was enough plot to drive the story. At one section, it states that Franz felt like he was seeing his life flash before his eyes in slow motion and that's how it felt to me too. The book jumped around way too much & became very convoluted at the end, although I did like the ending. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it did pass the time.
April 14, 2010
I'm reminded of Italo Calvino's description of Hemingway's work as "violent tourism". That is what this is. That being said, probably the best of Gifford's fiction that I've read. He actually manages to pull off some pathos here, and comedy that is dark instead of just corny.
Gifford always makes me thirsty for certain kinds of cheap extinct beer. Like Jax. Or Superior? Don't think I've had that.
Gifford always makes me thirsty for certain kinds of cheap extinct beer. Like Jax. Or Superior? Don't think I've had that.
October 13, 2012
I felt engulfed in a kind of retro haze, not unpleasant, while reading this novella. The setting, the noir film references, the Rive Gauche attitude and a bit of Beat flavor all blend together in a jazzy revival of times past, which in turn folds in with the main character looking back on several periods of his life. While it may all seem like it's been seen or read before, Gifford injects a dose of his own particular brand of prose and scores.
January 20, 2016
Denis Johnson meets Dennis Hopper 'neath the flamboyana tree. Hard-boiled, dreamy, lyrical, and lewd. Alternate title: Smuggler's Blues (R.I.P. Glenn Frey). I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
July 20, 2019
Having read a lot of Barry Gifford novel (18 books and counting), I can recognise Franz as basically Roy from the Roy Stories and Roy as basically Barry Gifford (as per Phantom Father). So what we have here are some Franz/Roy/Barry memoir type pieces interspersed with a shortish noir narrative set in an unnamed Latin American country. It's decent enough, but not Gifford's best by any stretch. Not his worst either.
August 4, 2018
Barry Gifford is among the best pulp writers of all time. Port Tropique is not exactly his finest post-modern foray into the genre, but it has all the hallmarks of what makes Gifford so effective, especially the pacing. The main character Franz has more depth then most anything you'll read in Chandler (maybe with the exception of The Long Goodbye) as well.
February 21, 2025
This is a fun short book. I watched a movie called Perdita Durango or something like that and enjoyed the violence and debauchery so I looked up the writer and it was Barry Gifford. I intended to read a different book by him but this was the one the library had so I picked it up. It honestly reminds me of a story I wrote called The Gringo Bandito. So, naturally, I enjoyed it.
March 31, 2024
Really enjoyed this succinct but thrilling story of stories. Like a more relaxed Hemingway novela, its descriptions and character details really hooked you; along with its constant storytelling breaks / vignettes made it a good read.
April 17, 2016
Welcome to Barry 19s World.
In a bizzare and violent Carribean port city, there 19s the smell of mangoes, gun powder and plenty of dope in the night air. An young American writer is walking around in the sweltering heat heat with two guns in his pockets and a suitcase full of money, trying to maintain his sanity in the middle of a communist revolution
This is Port Tropique: 1CFranz still could not dismisss frim his mind the sight of an overturned Buick in front of a nightclub, the passengers trapped inside while people stood around on the sidewalk and in the street laughing and drinking, music blaring, waiting for the cops to arrive.
Gifford creates has created his alter ego in the person of Franz Hall, man of mystery and imagination, who stumbles along the line between reality and fantasy. He 19s come to Port Tropique to forget his ex lover, write a novel about Ben Franklin, and stay alive.
I love how Gifford is able to paint sharp, cutting images and paste them together into a surreal collage of sex, drugs and murder. Each one of his stories develops a new idea and/or a strange nightmare. Running and blurring one into another, they make up one of the most complicated and insightful and unpredictable characters I 19ve ever encountered.
I 19ve read this one over and over and over.
In a bizzare and violent Carribean port city, there 19s the smell of mangoes, gun powder and plenty of dope in the night air. An young American writer is walking around in the sweltering heat heat with two guns in his pockets and a suitcase full of money, trying to maintain his sanity in the middle of a communist revolution
This is Port Tropique: 1CFranz still could not dismisss frim his mind the sight of an overturned Buick in front of a nightclub, the passengers trapped inside while people stood around on the sidewalk and in the street laughing and drinking, music blaring, waiting for the cops to arrive.
Gifford creates has created his alter ego in the person of Franz Hall, man of mystery and imagination, who stumbles along the line between reality and fantasy. He 19s come to Port Tropique to forget his ex lover, write a novel about Ben Franklin, and stay alive.
I love how Gifford is able to paint sharp, cutting images and paste them together into a surreal collage of sex, drugs and murder. Each one of his stories develops a new idea and/or a strange nightmare. Running and blurring one into another, they make up one of the most complicated and insightful and unpredictable characters I 19ve ever encountered.
I 19ve read this one over and over and over.
July 28, 2019
This is the second book I've read by Gifford--I don't know if all his books are written the same way, but so far, he's been consistent. As a style, I think it could be very annoying--it doesn't settle on anything, sort of hyperactive, a novel in vignettes.
And not so much a novel either, really, but I enjoyed it. Had a very 90's feel to it, for some reason--not something I think I can explain, though maybe it's the lingering effect of David Lynch's Wild at Heart I'm thinking of.
Sometimes this style works, sometimes not--I didn't really care much for Wyoming: A Novel, but the same kind of style (without some of the preciousness of Wyoming) in both books. Still looking forward to reading some of the Sailor and Lulu novels.
I don't really read books for entertainment, but if I did, Port Tropique is the kind I gravitate toward.
And not so much a novel either, really, but I enjoyed it. Had a very 90's feel to it, for some reason--not something I think I can explain, though maybe it's the lingering effect of David Lynch's Wild at Heart I'm thinking of.
Sometimes this style works, sometimes not--I didn't really care much for Wyoming: A Novel, but the same kind of style (without some of the preciousness of Wyoming) in both books. Still looking forward to reading some of the Sailor and Lulu novels.
I don't really read books for entertainment, but if I did, Port Tropique is the kind I gravitate toward.
December 29, 2008
"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality." - Joseph Conrad (epigraph)
"At first Franz thought he would take the five-shot Ridgefield .38 but changed his mind and took the Smith & Wesson .32 because it was the gun his brother had used on those jockeys in LA and would be more likely to not freeze up in a spot if only for sentimental reasons." -p. 15
"'They were all nice girls,' Ben said, 'nice girls. But they wanted too much. They each wanted me to be more of the time a way that I could only be part of the time and no matter how much we did any of the certain things we did or how good it was when we did them it did not mean a thing when it came to their wanting me to be more of the time the way that I could be only part of the time.'" -p. 118
"At first Franz thought he would take the five-shot Ridgefield .38 but changed his mind and took the Smith & Wesson .32 because it was the gun his brother had used on those jockeys in LA and would be more likely to not freeze up in a spot if only for sentimental reasons." -p. 15
"'They were all nice girls,' Ben said, 'nice girls. But they wanted too much. They each wanted me to be more of the time a way that I could only be part of the time and no matter how much we did any of the certain things we did or how good it was when we did them it did not mean a thing when it came to their wanting me to be more of the time the way that I could be only part of the time.'" -p. 118
October 12, 2008
I really enjoyed Sailor's Holiday and Wild at Heart, but this did not capture my heart and mind nearly as much.
October 8, 2015
I felt like I had read this book before - very similar to some works by Conrad, Maugham, Dos Passos and Fleming. Gifford is very simplistic and weaves the story in a unique, cinematic way. The best thing about it was the last sentence.
April 24, 2009
Totally awesome. Hemingwayesque with a noir sheen and lots of pop culture references, roundabout narrative, chock full of great little stories, all somehow bound by very economical prose.
August 16, 2014
He tones it down for this one and tries to capture a character dying in slow motion. Interesting, but it's good that he kept up his usual high speed pace.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 11, 2024
Gifford can be so great. I didn't like this one at all.
January 16, 2009
Fun mosaic of noir in a central american country. Harkens Conrad and Thompson.
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