The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
Bob Shacochis, 2013
Grove/Atlantic
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802119827
Summary
Renowned through four award-winning books for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance.
In riveting prose, Shacochis builds a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world. When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful and seductive photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo.
It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed, and to make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both Jackie and Eville Burnette, a member of Special Forces who has been assigned to protect her.
From the violent, bandit-dominated terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to the exquisitely rendered Istanbul in the 1980s, Shacochis brandishes Jackie’s shadowy family history with daring agility. Caught between her first love and the unsavory attentions of her father—an elite spy and quintessential Cold War warrior pressuring his daughter to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan that puts her on course to becoming the soulless woman Tom equally feared and desired.
Set over fifty years and in four countries backdropped by different wars, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a magnum opus that brings to life, through the mystique and allure of history, an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 9, 1951
• Raised—McLean, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri; Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Awards—National Book Award's First Work of Fiction
• Currently—lives in Tallahassee, Florida
Bob Shacochis is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Shacochis was born in Pennsylvania, but grew up in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was educated at the University of Missouri and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and currently teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Books
in 1985, Shacochis published his first short-story collection, Easy in the Islands. It received the National Book Award in category First Work of Fiction. The stories are set in various Caribbean locales and reflect the author's experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Grenadines.
His second story collection, The Next New World, was released in 1990. It widens the author's milieu, containing stories set in Florida and the islands of the Caribbean but also in Northern Virginia and the mid-Atlantic coast.
In 1993, Shacochis published his first novel, Swimming in the Volcano, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. Heavily concerned with politics, elaborate in style and description, and immersed in descriptions of nature and outdoor pursuits, his fiction reflects the influence of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J.P. Donleavy, and especially Ernest Hemingway.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, his second novel, published in 2013, examines U.S. foreign policy and details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul.
Journalism
In the years since, Shacochis has worked primarily as a journalist and war correspondent. A longtime culinary aficionado, Shacochis served as a cooking columnist for GQ magazine, writing the "Dining In" column, which combined often humorous anecdotes with recipes. The "Dining In" columns are collected in Domesticity, a hybrid cookbook/essay collection.
He is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, and was instrumental, along with other literary journalists recruited by then-editor Mark Bryant, including Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, and Bruce Barcott, in establishing Outside's popular and critical success.
Shacochis is also a contributing editor to Harper's, which sent him to Haiti in 1994 to cover the uprising against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the island nation's first democratically elected President, and the subsequent intervention by US Army Special Forces, with whom Shacochis traveled for nearly a year covering the invasion.
The experience resulted in his 1999 The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis's first full-length book of nonfiction. Shacochis's nonfiction generally fits into the tradition of the New Journalism popularized by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and 1970s. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/18/2013.)
Book Reviews
[This] novel is about not one but two contemporary wars, both of them endless: the war on terror and the war on drugs. The America Shacochis describes in this huge, carefully plotted, ideologically challenging book has somehow become one with the woman who lost her soul. But how did she lose her soul? That’s the question at the heart of the novel, but one thing we know: her father is responsible for the loss.... [T]he country the old man has helped to create seems to be on a crusade that, in its pursuit of vengeance and the endless war, looks a lot like jihad
Engrossing...a soaring literary epic about the forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age.... Shacochis darts around the globe over the span of five decades like a sorcerer of world history: Locations shift, time swirls, characters reappear in new disguises with new names. He’s always so relentlessly captivating that you don’t dare fall behind.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
This novel amounts to a prequel of sorts to the war on terror, an epic examination of American foreign policy and loss of innocence, a worthy successor to the darkest works of Graham Greene and John le Carre.... Elegiac.... [A] searching and searing meditation on the questions someone might ask a century from now: Who were these Americans? How should history judge them? And us?
Jane Ciabattari - Boston Globe
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul cannot be put down.... [I]t never loses its way or its ability to drag you along with it.... [A] wild, deadly ride. You won’t want to let go.
Glenn Garvin - Miami Herald
A big book in every sense of the word.... Shacochis is a master at the top of his game.... In this novel, he gives us real, raw-edged characters and a narrative that grips the reader from the get-go. And he does it with such gleaming word-craft and such a sure hand that the reader’s utter engagement never falters. The book is a murder-mystery, a tale of political intrigue, a love story and a fraught father-daughter psychological saga. It was 10 years in the writing and it is a masterpiece...a brilliant, beautiful page-turner.... [L]uminous writing unfurls across every blood-spattered, sweat-speckled, dust-caked page and makes The Woman Who Lost Her Soul a riveting, heartbreaking and ravishing read. It’s a novel of uncommon grace and grit that lodges like shrapnel in the psyche and works its way surely to the reader’s heart, without ever losing sight of those "terrible intimacies."
Tallahassee Democrat
A compelling and thought-provoking novel...it plays a deep game, and it will haunt your dreams... [Shacochis] controls a hugely complex plot with great skill and writes set pieces with gripping effect.... Line for line, his writing is stunning.
Colette Bancroft - Tampa Bay Times
A love story, a thriller, a family saga, a historical novel, and a political analysis of America’s tragic misadventures abroad. The novel yokes the narrative drive of the best Graham Greene and le Carré to the rhetorical force and moral rigor of Faulkner.... With a vision at once bitingly realistic and sweepingly romantic, Bob Shacochis has written what may well be the last Great American Novel. What other American writer has put as much heart into his creations, as much drive, as much history?
Askold Melnyczuk - Los Angeles Review of Books
Shacochis has written one of the most morally serious and intellectually substantive novels about the world of intelligence since Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.
Tom Bissell - Harper's
(Starred review.) In Shacochis’s powerful novel of sex, lies, and American foreign policy....[in which] people are pulled into a vortex of personal and political destruction.... Shacochis details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul. Gritty characters find themselves in grueling situations against a moral and physical landscape depicted in rich language as war-torn, resilient, angry, evil, and hopeful.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [T]ruly magisterial. It opens with humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigating the death of Jackie Scott, a feisty photojournalist who once whipped him around in Haiti.... Eventually, she's the woman who loses her soul, as "America…at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets" has lost its soul. Densely detailed yet immensely readable, this eye-opener...could have been titled "Why We Are in the Middle East." —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A beautifully written, Norman Mailerlike treatise on international politics, secret wars, espionage, and terrorism.... A brilliant book, likely to win prizes, with echoes of Joseph Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carre.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [S]tunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost.... Shacochis has delivered a work that belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene... [The Woman Who Lost Her Soul] moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written.... An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.
Kirkus Reviews
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