Mar
23
Far Tortuga
March 23, 2007 |
I got another book, a novel, called Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen. I had read it a long time ago but subsequently lost my copy. I don’t remember what reminded me of the book, but I decided to order it. Usually I would just go on amazon and order the book but this time I happened to be in my local bookstore when I remembered it. After searching for the title (for more than a reasonable amount of time…) they were able to order it for me. For some reason I got a strange satisfaction from getting the book in a more roundabout way than my usual manner. It was about a week before the store called to let me know that the book had arrived and by that time I was already in New York city for the week. When I returned it took me another week to actually get into the book store and pick it up. And last night I read the first few pages and the story and characters started to come rushing back into focus from the last time I read it years ago.
The book itself is very interesting and kind of different from your standard novel. The typographical style and narration in particular are not laid out in the normal manner. The majority of the story is told though dialog between characters. Instead of setting that dialog out in quotes it is block indented. When there is narration it is written in a way that reminds one of stage direction from a script instead of narration. It feels like to me like the author is able to do more with less words.
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