Word: tortuga
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...TORTUGA...
Literary sea voyages often carry a heavy ballast of allegory. The potential, after all, is readymade; it requires no great leap of imagination to see a ship as a tiny world adrift in eternity. Far Tortuga shuns such metaphysics in favor of hard surfaces. Avers is no Captain Ahab, nor is the Eden a ship of fools. The captain and his crew simply make up an exotic collection of drifters, drunks, petty criminals and indefatigable optimists, worth knowing, this novel implies, for their own sakes...
...Tortuga therefore sets sail with a babel of unattributed dialogue swimming in blinding expanses of white space. Pages go by bearing single words: "Polaris," "horizon." Taken singly, these pages seem too easy, too close to the work of lazy poets who write a word like "loneliness" in the middle of a blank piece of paper and call it an insight...
...noted explorer and naturalist as well as a novelist. Back in 1967, he sailed on a turtle boat out of Grand Cayman. As thoroughly as possible with words on paper, he has duplicated that experience, creating along the way an uncommonly successful mixture of fact and fiction. Far Tortuga is a treatise on turtling, an account of the dying days of sailing ships on unspoiled waters, and a history of a locale that winter tourists tripping through the Caribbean rarely see. Most memorably, it is a spare adventure tale about simple men driven to the extremities of pain and death...
...Haiti is an exotic and unique vacation land, there are signs of change. Outside money, particularly in tourist-related businesses such as ho-telbuilding, is coming into the country at the rate of $60 million a year. In the most ambitious of the new proj ects, the island of Tortuga, off the northern coast, is being developed into a resort that will include 13 hotels, condominiums, private homes and a large airport. There are also a number of heady proposals to build expensive new roads to Haiti's southshore beaches, which are as beautiful...