Archive - September 2, 2013

Well, I spent a majority of it reading Bob Shacochis’s (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76) big, sprawling, long, and complex novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, a novel that spans five decades and three continents. It is a book Shacochis has been writing for twenty years and it is out this month from Grove Atlantic. They are calling it, Bob’s magnum opus. The plot goes something like this: A humanitarian lawyer, Tom Harrington, travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful seductive photojournalist, he is confronted there with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It is the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. To make sense of the death of the journalist, Harrington must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both the photojournalist and a member of the Special Forces who was assigned . . .