Bay of Souls

Rating:
Summary: A horrid reading experience
Review: After a fine opening, another look at adultery in academia, the plot goes crazy with a soul trapped in an emerald and a revolution on an island. Totally unbelievable. Silly dialogue. Where was the editor? Definitely this is one of the worst books I've ever read by an acclaimed author.

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: Based on some good reviews, I made an attempt to read this book, but I am giving up halfway through. I can't follow the plot and the Lara character is not believable at all.

Rating:
Summary: Voodoo, intrigue and middle-aged angst
Review: Bay of Souls is a relatively short novel that is interesting but at times convoluted. I have only read one other book by Robert Stone, Damascus Gate, which I thought was brilliant. This one, though not without merit, was a bit of a disappointment to me. Michael Ahearn is a professor at a small rural college. He is married and has a twelve-year old son. Michael's life is not unhappy, but it has a bleak quality to it, similar to the cold Northern landscape he inhabits. His marriage is basically good, but his wife Kristin is a formidable and somewhat aloof woman who seems to intimidate him a little. In short, like many men approaching middle age, Michael is doing all right, but feels confined and has the desire to experience something new. This something comes in the form of Lara Purcell, an exotically beautiful professor from a Caribbean island called St. Trinity. They impulsively start an affair and when Lara returns to her island home after her brother dies, Michael comes along. This, to me, is where the novel falters. While the contrast between the rural American heartland and the Third World tropics is obviously a deliberate part of the book, the transition is so abrupt that it seemed to me like a different book altogether. On St. Trinity, Stone throws in a host of confusing, though typical (though more for a spy or suspense type novel) elements --corrupt officials, Columbian drug dealers, an intrepid reporter, American troops who covertly support a dictator. This part of the novel is a little cliched, with Michael running into the same cast of cloak-and-dagger type characters wherever he goes. The spirit of Voodoo also pervades the island, and this is central to the story. Lara believes her dead brother took possession of her soul before he died. She is now committed to retrieving it, which means she has to take part in some elaborate rituals. Lara is also deeply involved in all the political intrigue, in a way that is not well explained. For example, it is briefly noted that she was once a socialist (who may have had an affair with Castro) but then suddenly "switched sides" to support right wing extremists...why? Lara also apparently had some covert reason for teaching at Michael's college; this too is never explained. I suppose these questions are not really the point of the novel, but for me they were holes that I can more easily tolerate in a suspense thriller than a literary novel like this one. Finally, the Voodoo aspect of the tale remains ambiguous --are the occult forces real or only in the minds of the participants? I suppose it isn't necessarily crucial to know this, but I simply found myself with too many unanswered questions by the end of the book. Robert Stone is an interesting and original writer. His use of language is always creative and there are many turns of phrase that I admired in this book, even while I was less than satisfied with their context.

Rating:
Summary: Bad story
Review: I find myself agreeing with some of the other reviewers. This book isn't poor writing style, but the story is so far-fetched, improbable and just plain unbelievable that this book cant be saved. There are two related stories, neither of which really works. First there is a group of professors deer hunting in the winter in a godforsaken part of minnesota (this is the characters' opinion, not to offend anyone). A few strange things happen, and the main character comes home to find his son has been lost in the snow. The son nearly dies, but miraculously pulls through. The main character goes on to meet a woman professor who has just come to teach at the college. She dresses exotically, comes from a ficitious Caribbean island, goes in for a little S&M, and he falls head over heels, despite his jealous wife and little son. After the woman tells him her brother has died of AIDS, has xtolen her soul and given it to a voodoo queen who died two hundred years ago, and how dangerous it is to walk around in a body without a soul (a recitation that would send most men running scared), he decides to pack up and go down to the island with her. Although it's hard to tell what is really going on, things get wilder and wilder, with Haitian voodoo ceremonies, Colombian drug gangs, Latin-American style juntas supported by the U.S. governement. At this point I felt the author was just letting his imagination run wild or he didnt know what he was talking about. If you've read this far, you'll have a hard time finishing, although I did. You''ll wish you hadnt. I cant believe people act like this.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Stone, with the usual quirks
Review: I think that Robert Stone has written some great books, but this is not one of them. Bay of Souls seems torn between an Dellilo style life in the USA novel, and the usual Stone third world Conradesque action/philosophy thriller. Sad to say, but the academic parts, the creeping ennuie, the sudden adultery, minutia of modern life, etc. seem much more real than the drug crazed revolutionary danger parts, which is too bad because there are a lot of people who do the Delillo/Carver thing and not a lot who can pull off the headlong rush of Robert Stone.

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: 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: 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.