The bard of the Texas plains ventures into unfamiliar territory in this slender, entertaining travelogue of the tropical islands of the South Pacific.
McMurtry, a veteran of long car trips along the back roads of the American desert, boards a cruise ship this time around, and not without some foreboding; wandering among the Marquesas with a motley complement of international "island junkies" with whom he finds little in common, this most bookish of writers finds himself running short of reading matter, forced to slow down to the tedious pace of long-distance sea travel, and not entirely content at the turn of events. McMurtry doesn't complain: instead, he passes the time remarking on the national and personal idiosyncrasies of his fellow passengers, mostly in good humor, and reflecting on closeted family skeletons, feelings of marginality and loneliness, mortality, and other matters while observing the passing scene.
A departure in many ways, Paradise finds McMurtry in a contemplative mood. "Nowhere else," he writes, "have I felt so far," and not only geographically. There's enough local color, enough dank glens, misty mountains, and sun-dazzled beaches to satisfy armchair travel buffs, but this is a quiet, thoughtful voyage that reveals that true paradise lies close to the heart. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, memoirist, screenplay writer and bookstore owner McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, etc.) took a 1999 cruise to "paradise" Tahiti and the South Sea Islands "in order to think and write about" his parents, Hazel and Jeff McMurtry. The couple "saw the sea only once" during their 43-year marriage in Archer County, Tex., about which their son writes, "Many people like Archer County, and a few people love it, but no one would be likely to think it an earthly paradise." The lush landscape of Tahiti and neighboring islands contrasts sharply with his parents' hardscrabble North Texas life. Listening "to the gentle slosh of the Pacific" in the lagoon beneath his raised bungalow, he recalls the day in 1954, as he packed to leave for college, when his mother startled him with the revelation that she had previously been married. Aboard the Aranui, he watches his shipmates ("world-class shoppers") while making occasional attempts to phone his dying mother back in Texas. He closely observes his surroundings (the Marquesas has "an end-of-the-world feel," while the Ua Pou flea market provides "a good illustration of the reach of global capitalism and its ability to turn the whole world into a species of mall"). As his odyssey ends, he wants "to turn right around and go back to Nuku Hiva." Readers of this excellent travelogue, abounding with literary references from Henry James to Kerouac, will likely return to the book often to reread their favorite passages of McMurtry's meditative prose. Map. Agent, Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry has written a gem of a book part family memoir and part travelog in this slim, autobiographical volume. The author of 24 novels, four nonfiction books, and more than 30 screenplays and editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction, McMurtry has recently become deeply introspective, as evidenced by his memoirs, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (LJ 10/1/99) and Roads. (LJ 7/00) In these memoirs, McMurtry reflected on his own life and experiences, providing a sense of Texas as vast, unique, yet in an inevitable decline. In this new memoir, he tells a west Texas tale, but he writes it from the peace and tranquillity of the South Sea Islands. McMurtry boards a freighter to the Marquesas to begin his journey both physical and emotional and records his parents' lives, beginning with their marriage in 1934 during the depths of the Depression. He analyzes their lives prior to their union and contrasts them with the lushness, laziness, and sheer beauty of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands. This personal little book offers both a wonderful depiction of a place and a sincere picture of the author and his family. Highly recommended. Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
McMurtry is such a pro he could make laundry seem interesting. Now in his sixties, a veteran of heart surgery and the author of two dozen novels, he has been scrutinizing his own life in a spate of memoirs, including Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999) and Roads (2000). In this installment, a magnetic blend of irascibility and grace, he recounts the journey he made to Oceania while his mother lay dying in Texas. He begins in Tahiti, where he praises Gauguin for the painter's discernment of the shadow side of this sensually perfect yet melancholy place. From there he boards a freighter--along with a group of fellow travelers he dubs, not altogether unkindly, lotus eaters and island junkies--for the Marquesas, which, in their profound isolation and refreshing absence of hotels, define, for him, the very essence of "farness." He is surprised, therefore, to find that their communities remind him of Southwest Indian reservations and the "drying-up small towns on the Great Plains," perceptions that intensify his thoughts about his mother, his parents' long, unhappy marriage, and their complete lack of interest in the world beyond west Texas. This is the beauty of McMurtry's forthright chronicle: he's attuned to the silky sea but cued to the grit of home, cannily aware that he's put himself into a sort of limbo, floating from island to island cut off from family, friends, and the news, while his mother is also adrift, separating slowly from the body and the self, bound for a realm that, like the Marquesas, may or may not be paradise. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Mark Busby The Austin Chronicle Paradise is a tight little book...Charting the twains of heaven and hell, ecstasy and agony, is the cartography of the writer and the terrain of Paradise...In the end, it serves as a postcard from child to mom, recalling love before knowledge but written long after the fall.
Book Description
In 1999, Larry McMurtry, whose wanderlust had been previously restricted to the roads of America, set off for a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands in an old-fashioned tub of a cruise boat, at a time when his mother was slipping toward a paradise of her own. Opening up to her son in her final days, his mother makes a stunning revelation of a previous marriage and sends McMurtry on a journey of an entirely different kind. Vividly, movingly, and with infinite care, McMurtry paints a portrait of his parents' marriage against the harsh, violent landscape of west Texas. It is their roots -- laced with overtones of hard work, bitter disappointment, and the Puritan ethic -- that McMurtry challenges by traveling to Tahiti, a land of lush sensuality and easy living. With fascinating detail, shrewd observations, humorous pathos, and unforgettable characters, he begins to answer some of the questions of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his hometown of Archer City, Texas.
About the Author
Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author of twenty-four novels, two collections of essays, two memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, and is the editor of a collection of short stories of the modern West. He lives in Archer City, Texas.
Paradise FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
Whether digressing on his mother's romantic exploits or the call of the South Seas, the much-admired McMurtry continues to deliver in Paradise. In 1999, prompted by his mother's approaching death, he embarked on a voyage to Tahiti and the South Sea Islands, seeking time to write about his parents and their long and stormy marriage in small-town Archer City, Texas. Vividly portrayed, they stand in high profile against the backdrop of their limited world, with McMurtry's incisive observations weaving smoothly between Texas and Tahiti, between their past and his present.
Like the explorers who preceded him -- Melville, Gauguin, Thor Heyerdahl -- McMurtry became inspired by the Polynesian landscape and culture. The darkness and splendor of paradise is a persistent theme. While reflecting on paradise and those who so ardently seek it, McMurtry -- like Gauguin -- notes in the islands a strain of melancholy blending darkly into the lush and vivid scenery. In "Le Bateau and Les Isles Marquises," McMurtry asks: What is paradise? Where is paradise? Who are these people who come seeking it? And precisely what do they seek? McMurtry calls them "international slummers," the lotus-eaters who come to remote and exotic islands to find something -- significance or perfection or the unknown. They remain unfulfilled: So little paradise is left, so few places are free of tall buildings, cars, noise, and garbage. For them and most of us, McMurtry notes, paradise is pristine: clean beaches, friendly locals, no fast food restaurant chains.
McMurtry is not immune to traveler's letdown. Thin dogs, listless youths, and insensitive tourists amply armed with cameras stir self-awareness and sadness. But good humor infuses McMurtry's observations; easy dry wit flows throughout. We are left contemplative and questioning, better able to laugh at our optimistic and escapist expectations. (Peter Skinner)
Peter Skinner lives in New York City.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In 1999 Larry McMurtry, whose wanderlust had been previously restricted to the roads of America, set off for a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands in an old-fashioned tub of a cruise boat, at a time when his mother was slipping toward a paradise of her own. Opening up to her son in her final days, his mother makes a stunning revelation of a previous marriage and sends McMurtry on a journey of an entirely different kind." "McMurtry paints a portrait of his parents' marriage against the harsh, violent landscape of west Texas. It is their roots - laced with overtones of hard work, bitter disappointment, and the Puritan ethic - that McMurtry challenges by traveling to Tahiti, a land of lush sensuality and easy living. With fascinating detail, shrewd observations, humorous pathos, and unforgettable characters, he begins to answer some of the questions of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his hometown of Archer City, Texas."--BOOK JACKET.
FROM THE CRITICS
Book Magazine
In this slim memoir, McMurtry attempts to connect two very different chapters of his life. The result is a sometimes strange, ultimately unsatisfying book. Partly a portrait of his parents' troubled marriage, it details "the rich mosaic of their incompatibilities." The book then jumps a half-century later to describe a trip McMurtry took to the South Seas as his mother neared death in Archer City, Texas. This voyage to paradise contrasts sharply with the hardscrabble landscape that his parents left so infrequently, and McMurtry attempts to establish connections between the remote islands beyond Tahiti and the lives of his parents. This travelogue reads more like the sort of magazine piece a novelist dashes off on a working holiday. There are some characteristically wonderful passages that only McMurtry could write: "I have survived into my sixty-fourth year by never underestimating the belligerence of swine," or his simile for the diminishment of his parents' hope: "life turned out from under them like a fine cutting horse will turn out from under an experienced rider." But a trip that could have been condensed into a few pages (or even paragraphs) simply can't support a memoir. —Don McLeese (Excerpted Review)
Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry has written a gem of a book part family memoir and part travelog in this slim, autobiographical volume. The author of 24 novels, four nonfiction books, and more than 30 screenplays and editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction, McMurtry has recently become deeply introspective, as evidenced by his memoirs, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (LJ 10/1/99) and Roads. (LJ 7/00) In these memoirs, McMurtry reflected on his own life and experiences, providing a sense of Texas as vast, unique, yet in an inevitable decline. In this new memoir, he tells a west Texas tale, but he writes it from the peace and tranquillity of the South Sea Islands. McMurtry boards a freighter to the Marquesas to begin his journey both physical and emotional and records his parents' lives, beginning with their marriage in 1934 during the depths of the Depression. He analyzes their lives prior to their union and contrasts them with the lushness, laziness, and sheer beauty of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands. This personal little book offers both a wonderful depiction of a place and a sincere picture of the author and his family. Highly recommended. Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A glancing memoir by McMurtry (Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, 1999, etc.), an extraordinarily talented spinner of tales, the author of such bestselling and critically acclaimed titles as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show. His recent turn to writing travel memoirs (Roads, 2000, etc.) has produced less satisfactory results, however, and here he recounts a Polynesian cruise on which representatives of various nationalities behave in silly and predictable ways—the Germans slugging beer, the French casting snide looks, the Danes retreating into their cabin for libidinous fun—while he combs the ship looking for something interesting to read and takes notes on the passing scene. His descriptions of the people he encounters seldom transcend travel-magazine captioneering: "The girls were lovely, with hip movements that would have earned them immediate employment at any lap-dancing establishment in Las Vegas," or "The Tahitians . . . aren't lazy, but neither are they harried. They seem happy, competent, friendly, talkative." More interesting are his bookish asides on the writers and artists who have made their way to the South Seas—Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, Henry Adams, and the like. More interesting still, if oddly juxtaposed, is his account of his parents' sad marriage, which began with much promise but ended in bitterness. "He was a bright hope," he writes, "so was she—and yet life turned out from under them like a fine cutting horse will turn out from under an inexperienced rider." McMurtry ties these threads together, but only very loosely, with random thoughts on the quest for earthly paradise, or at least "escape from the culture ofoverachievers." No overachievement itself, this is likely to disappoint loyal McMurtry fans.
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