Port Tropique

By Barry Gifford and Ed Gifford, Barry; Gorman

Book Overview

Revolution is simmering in the heat of battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an "intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of selfwilled failure" (New York Times). The ineffectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the z calo, and occasional nights involved in an ivory-smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege. Always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz's mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158322856X
• ISBN13: 9781583228562
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Stan Getz fans, they're everywhere.

It was a dark and stormy night. In the banana republic of Port Tropique guns, money, sex, power, and politics are shuffled slicker than a Vegas blackjack dealer. All the dames have red lips and cold eyes and cruise the bar without leaving their seat. The men wear panamas drawn down over their eye and speak in grated muffles. The local authorities are unwashed louts and everything is sweat and heat and panting in the dark. It's every ginjoint in every movie in the world rolled into one little book with nothing to do with Ben Franklin. Great for a Saturday afternoon.

Five stars for a brilliant noir outing

Barry Gifford is a poet (in fact) with a will to communicate. He drew each chapter as an artist, framing his stalled antihero with keen intelligence. We have become so saturated with standardized images and imagined protocol among gangsters/CIA bagmen/gun runners that it takes an author of rare imagination to write immediate prose that pulls us from the cookie-cutter version, back into the human mind. I've lent this book to many friends and they all raved, except the last one, who failed to return it. I wish he or she would deliver the goods.