Rating: 
Summary: An Adequate First Draft
Review: I was surprised to learn, after reading Bay of Souls, that this was Robert Stone's first in five years, because it seemed hastily thrown-together. I thought the story of Kirsten and Michael Ahearn and their son was wonderful and then more or less dropped. According to his blurb at the back, Stone had some interactions with Madison Smart Bell. I wish he'd written about Haiti, instead, essays, and finished the tale he started, which was like Updike with a little more edge. Maybe I'm just not a voodoo guy, but I was sorely disappointed with the promise of the beginning of this book set against its patched-together ending.
Rating:
Summary: Let down
Review: I've been a Robert Stone fan since way back, but I never finished Damascus Gate and Bay of Souls was a big let-down. It was a mish-mash of foriegn intrigue and existential angst and male sexual fantasy. What went wrong? This guy is one of our best. Hopefully, this is just a temporary diversion.
Rating: 
Summary: still a fan, but latest novel is disappointing
Review: I've read all of Robert Stone's novels and will probably continue to do so, but that's based more on the earlier stuff. I especially liked Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, Children of Light. Outerbridge Reach had good things, but was the first step down; Damascus Gate was a big letdown. On this latest, there seem to be 2 stories smashed together -- one semi-interesting about middle-aged guy starting an affair and one unconvincing about the woman he has the affair with and her kooky life in Haiti-like latin american country. I thought the first provided a good delineation of how a restless guy in a less-than-satisfying marriage might end up straying (and, tellingly, the novel gets immediately more compelling when the story returns to this setting at the end), but the other story just didn't work for me -- too contrived, too much hokey intrigue, too much like a fake Robert Stone. I'm in agreement with the other reviewer who holds out the possibility of an "Old Man and the Sea"-type comeback (although that particular fishy tale is no favorite of mine) because I'm truly grateful for the books Robert Stone has given us and I wish the best for him (and, selfishly, I want more great stuff to read). One thing I might recommend to ol' Bob would be to focus on the humor -- I don't mean he should try to write a comedy, but what's really missing from his later books for me is that they've become too humorless; just not funny in places like they used to be. Maybe a clue there? I don't know...and I feel like I'm on shaky ground telling Robert Stone how to write novels, so I'm done.
Rating:
Summary: Odd
Review: Pas terrible, ce roman de Robert Stone. Moi, ma toute première impression était que "La baie des âmes" me semblait terriblement masculin. Le roman s'ouvre sur une scène de chasse où le personnage central, Michael Ahearn, part avec deux amis dans une forêt pour chasser le cerf. Passage dans un bouge pour se procurer du pur whiskey, ambiance locale et rustre, rencontre d'un être ensanglé et vociférant dans les bois... bref ce roman commence d'emblée à me décontenancer. Et puis, l'histoire paraît hésiter entre l'intrigue universitaire et le surréalisme. On se trouve dans une province américaine, où la couleur locale penche sensiblement vers la foi religieuse et non vers l'érudition digne de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. L'ambiance est glauque, on patauge dans la neige boueuse, on suit l'universitaire Michael Ahearn dans ses réflexions sur son enseignement, ses étudiants et l'atmosphère ambiante. Il est marié à Kristin, une épouse de plus en plus suspicieuse, jalouse et distante, père d'un petit garçon intelligent et sensible. Un jour cet homme va rencontrer Lara Purcell, dont la réputation de femme exotique, mariée à un français, ayant parcouru l'Afrique et venu en Amérique enseigner les sciences politiques, annonce un vent nouveau. Michael et Lara vont devenir amants, puis Lara doit partir sur l'île de Sainte-Trinité pour célébrer les rites funéraires de son frère et par la même occasion récupérer son âme perdue. Là, j'avoue que le sens de l'histoire a cessé de m'échapper. D'une province décalée et crasseuse de neige fondue, on bascule sur une île en proie aux soulèvements civils et révolutionnaires, aux trafics de drogue, aux soupçons d'espionnage, etc. A la page 192 (sur 292), j'ai capitulé. Complètement larguée. Ce roman possède très certainement un charme secret mais son histoire, trop embrouillée, envoie son lecteur dans les roses. On peine à décrocher du milieu sulfureux pour se retrouver vers des conflits politiques et autres rituels du vaudouisme. Et l'écriture brute de l'auteur n'accroche pas ma sensibilité féminine.
Rating: 
Summary: A Very Relevant Novel.
Review: Robert Stone has done it again in this little novel. Bay of Souls, like his previous books, has the hero in a personal crisis in a dangerous place. On a tiny Caribbean island there are many dark forces at work and they are not just political.It is an exciting story and Stone's plots are tinged with metaphor. Once again we see how the great powers act in the Third World countries they say they are liberating. As Liz McKie, a Miami Herald reporter, says of the American intervention in St. Trinity "..we don't quite get the bad guys out and the good guys turnout to be not very different from the bad guys and, hey, it's all looking kind of the same as it was." Some critics have savaged this book and DeLillo's Cosmopolis I think unfairly. It's maybe because these writers say what they think and step on a few toes.This is a great read and is written in taut chilled prose. Read it and decide for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Not nearly up to Stone's standard
Review: Robert Stone has long been one of my favorite writers, but this book is terribly disappointing. The characters are flat, cliched and uninteresting. They are merely reruns of previous characters in earlier and finer novels. The action is predictable and mundane. If an unknown writer would have submitted this to a publisher they would have gotten a devestating rejection note, I'm afraid. I'm going to reread "A Flag For Sunrise", to remind me of how good Robert Stone can write.
Rating: 
Summary: Political thriller
Review: Robert Stone writes in an intense style with erudite knowledge of 3rd world politics and history and can leave one feeling lost in the dust sometimes. His artistic reality is not likely to promote domestic tranquility. His basic point of view could be described as youthful or irresponsible; it could also be described as highly sympathetic to the oppressed people of the world. "Damascus Gate" a sprawling novel about Jerusalem, released in 1998, provides a great deal of obscure knowledge about Jewish intellectual history, and is populated with some shady characters as heroes and heroines:third-world political idealists, religious fanatics..., messianic figures who are also rock musicians, night-club jazz singers, drug dealers and addicts--all in the jumble of 3 cultures: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. This can be interesting and exciting, but it is also long, not exactly a weekend read.In this case, the oppressed people are the Palestinians. "Bay of Souls" is not necessarily less ambitious but is written on a somewhat more manageable scale. It's underlying premise is marital infidelity. It concerns revolution on a 3rd world island in the Caribbean. The protagonist, a middle-aged male Midwestern college English professor, happily married with a son, becomes involved with a 3rd world revolutionary professor who invites him, in the course of their affair, to return to her island for her deceased brother's voodoo funeral ritual, during which time she also hopes to recapture her own lost voodoo soul. Her family were former plantation owners on Haiti who left before the Haitian revolution. He unfortunately becomes involved with an emerald smuggling operation and the ongoing revolution on the island which, along with the voodoo ritual, prove quite life-threatening. Important minor characters include an American reporter and an American general who is prepared to take control after the revolution. The scenes in the second half of the novel provide most of its dramatic tension, whereas the scenes in America are more familiar and relatively-speaking more relaxed. They remind me of Chuck Berry's "Back In the USA"--"I'm so glad I'm living in the USA."
Rating:
Summary: Washed Up
Review: Stone works best on a grand scheme where his grandiose themes have time to build and then draw the reader in. Here the characters seem flat and the prose is ordinary compared to his former lyrical masterpieces like "Hall of Mirrors" and "Dog SOldiers." It is always a bad sign when writers start writing novels about writers and teachers. It means they are running out of ideas. And while Stone is a contemporary master, his last three novels "Outerbridge Reach," "Damascus Gate" and "Bay of Souls" go from average to below average to downright bad. Time it seems has had a deleterious effect on Stone's storytelling ability, as he is forced to rehash age old revolutionary themes that seemed so ripe with pertinence back in the 60s and 70's. Still, I have no doubt that Stone can pull out an "Old Man in the Sea" like Poppa Hemingway did late in his career. For a short gem of a novel exploring loss and rediscovery see Denis Johnson's "Name of the World."
Rating:
Summary: Strickland, where are you?
Review: Stone's novels have always had holier-than-thou,pondrous protagnoists. But, they've always been brilliantly balanced by intense yet hilarious, real characters. Pablo lets 'A Flag for Sunrise' work (see, i can't even recall the main character's name.) Walker and the hilarious directors allow the seriousness of LuAnne in 'Children of Light'. And of course, the great Strickland, one of the most enjoyable characters in modern fiction, gets us through the flat and humorless Brown in 'Outerbridge Reach.'
But in "damascus Gate' and now 'Bay of Souls', everyone is pondering their existence, no one is fun, let alone funny or light, nothing balances the Drama. And that's what these books are getting to be: paperback Dramas, not the multilayered, back and forth novels Bob has written with such perfection.
Rating:
Summary: Fine Stone, with the usual quirks
Review: The novel's strengths are in its taut, beautiful, suspenseful descriptions of man and nature. There are two key scenes, beautifully written, charged with suspense, surreal and macabre, which carry the whole book: a hunting sequence and a diving sequence. Unfortunately, these scenes are at the beginning and near the end, and much of what connects them is not nearly as vivid or as suspenseful. Still, it's a very short novel, and well worth the investment of time. As with most of Stone's books, one occasionally feels as if he is clobbering you over the head with his contrived, deliberate themes on the state of America ("America is my theme" - R.S.), but there's less of that here than in something like, say, Outerbridge Reach, where he expanded the image of America as a rudderless ship of state in the hands of an ill-equipped captain to ridiculous length. Maybe the Voudoun imagery was liberating, although most of the Divine Horsemen stuff feels lifted from Maya Deren without having been really felt or digested by Stone himself.
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