Far Tortuga is one of my favorite novels. I've read it many times and will continue to read it. It's a simple story in which little happens except that men, without really understanding it as such, confront nature and existence and the unwavering progress of time. It's April of a year in the mid-1960s. It's the time of turtle fishing in the banks and reefs of the Caribbean along the coast of Central America. The run-down schooner Lillias Eden leaves Grand Cayman with a mongrel crew of 9 representing every shade of black and white Caribbean. The novel is about that voyage. It's remarkable for its narrative simplicity which manages to incorporate these men in the basic simplicity (if we choose to think of it in that way) of existence itself.It's equally remarkable for its spare text which so vividly conveys the natural world around these men and what they say in it. Most of the novel is dialogue, and is interestingly rendered by Matthiessen in the island patois actually spoken. There isn't much for the crew to do on the voyage to the turtle grounds and between stations within the scattering of reefs where they fish. So they talk. There is constant chatter about the intricacies of turtle fishing, of lives spent on the sea handling ships and boats, of the petty rivalries of men and families. This is the random, aimless talk of men dependent on the knowledge contained in such idle chatter, gossip, superstition, legend and stories, and accepted wisdom. Change is a theme--they're aware of modern times seen against days now gone when the fishing and their lives were seen to be better.Threaded through the dialogue Matthiessen has given us on almost every page sketches which indicate such things as time of day, weather conditions, the chop of the sea, the shine of stars. Matthiessen makes the reader aware of the crew's immersion in nature. On a page might simply be a man's name. Another page might carry a smudge of ink and the name of a star. Page 386 contains a line and the single word "horizon." On page 327 the pattern of descriptive words forms the figure of a man, and a poem.These men pit their experience and their collective histories against the indifference of nature. They have a limited array of weapons with which to fight the hopelessness they feel. They use their individual strengths, they sing songs, and they rely on companionship or stark competition. But they're no better than the turtles they trap. They're born, they live, they work, eat, reproduce, have their separate sensibilities, and they die. If they discern any meaning in their existence, it's only a glimpse and hardly encouraging. They have only the world they inhabit, and it's killing them. This is a novel about men engaged in doing what they must because it's all they know to do. It's about human destiny and existential despair on the despairing sea. One can imagine the crew of the Lillias Eden looking up at the uncounted numbers of stars in the Caribbean night sky. The vast display would, in my opinion, represent Far Tortuga's true value better than the Goodreads system. This is one of the most beautiful novels in the English language.
I've read this book twice over the years, and I thought I'd recommend it on the occasion of the death of its author. It happens to be my favorite Matthiessen novel, and it's his personal favorite too, as he mentioned on a Fresh Air interview a few years ago. It's a simple story of a crew of Caribbean turtle fishermen--characters in the best sense of that word--out on a seasonal hunt in an odd ship caught awkwardly in a transition from sail power to diesel. It's more or less the same plot as Moby-Dick, and also like Moby-Dick, it's intensely experimental. Published in 1975, during a period of "post modern" excess in American literary fiction--that is, highly self-conscious works of cartoonish parody, wacky academic prose, absurd or nonexistent plots, and so on--Far Tortuga went the other direction. A practicing Zen Buddhist throughout the second half of his life, Matthiessen writes every word of Tortuga as if it were a meditation. White space plays an important role in this beautiful novel, as do little Zen sketches of the weather, and differing font sizes to help us sort through the many voices of his characters. He employs no dialog tags and only one metaphor throughout the entire book. And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more sensually evocative and thrilling adventure tale anywhere. It's one of America's great novels. Mark my words, someday this book will be widely read in literature classes (if the human species doesn't wipe itself out first by ignoring Matthiessen's message of respect for the physical Earth). Do yourself a favor and read it before some yahoo makes a terrible movie about it.
What do You think about Far Tortuga (2000)?
This novel feels like reportage, which it is in a sense; it was drawn from PM's time in the Caribbean researching an article on green turtle fishing for the New Yorker. The narration, particularly describing the natural beauty and peril of the cays and the sea, sounds like something written by a white American nature writer. The dialogue, in dialect, sounds like anything but. The dialogue is not delivered in a patronizing way - "behold these savage men" - but rather in a careful, painstaking, at times dreadfully unjudgmental way.The novel is a narration of the death of a proud and rather unpleasant culture being replaced by tourism. It does not leave one excessively sad at what died out there in the reefs, per se, but certainly at what replaced it, and the catastrophic natural cost of human "progress".I binge-read the novel in a weekend. This confuses me, as, graceful passages of nature aside, it was one of the most consistently unpleasant pieces of fiction I've read, up there with 'Ship of Fools' by Katherine Anne Porter. Horrible people doing horrible things according to the logic of their own constitutions, in pursuit of the harvest of creatures that everybody aboard loves and dreads to kill.The style, which seems to throw a lot of people off, was perhaps the reason I couldn't put it down. The use of whitespace, pictographs, fragments radically opens up the claustrophobia of life aboard of the Eden. I much appreciated the spareness and the way the dialogue was left to fend for itself.Only those with strong constitutions and desires to know a world that has evaporated need apply. But I expect they will not be disappointed.
—Jonathan
Four and a half stars, five if you have a weakness for the Caribbean and its cultures. This book is well-conceived and brilliantly executed, again demonstrating that Mr. Mathiessen's range of accomplishment and meticulous craftsmanship are unexcelled. In this case, the story line follows a turtle-fishing voyage on a dilapidated motor/sailing vessel from the Cayman Islands south to the Cays off Nicaragua. The crew of nine is as broken-down as the boat, and their troubles mount as they head south. In Mr. Matthiessen's careful and respectful hands, the voyage is representative of the deterioration of the traditional ways of life of the black Caribbean population. One part of the book's power is the accurate capture of Caribbean dialogue and shared tales of nautical history and superstitions; another is the beautiful way in which the book is physically composed. There's more, of course; all in all, it's a beautiful thing.
—Al
Simply and elegantly written. At times the writing is like prose, at times it is in plain, often obscene patois; regardless of the style used by the author, "Far Tortuga" is always beautiful to read.I loved the sense that there was no world outside of the Eden, the present-tense writing added to the effect that I felt as if I were squatting on an oil drum eating or standing along the rail watching a cigarette pack blow along the scuppers. Significant to call the ship "Eden" because the author often builds the world off of the ship to be chaotic, hellish at times.The characters, were flawed, plain, never perfect or even good men; however, I liked them all, even Copm Raib and Vemon.Then there was the underlying story of the turtle. The author leads you along a journey that holds the idea of the turtle as a mythical mysterious creature and at the same time he humanizes the actual turtles that the crew catches. "The Green Turtle is smart" (Copm Raib often says.I just reread this book and caught a whole bunch of details I missed before. I picked up on a couple of metaphors, like the cigarette package. Also, I picked up more on the dislike and mistrust between the crew members and I also picked more up on the relationship between Raib and the other boat captains, including Andrew and Desmond.(Minor spoiler to follow) I heard that this was a "Moby Dick" story and I really enjoyed thinking about it in that context.This is my favorite book and I will read it again...
—Matt
