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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
Far Bright Star grabs you by the scruff of the neck and doesn't let go until the journeys' end. It reminds me of those classic western movies like "The Magnificent Seven", Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns or “The Unforgiven”. The writing is stark and realistic. You can almost feel the hot sun bearing down and desert grit in your mouth.
It is 1916 and a veteran of battles, Napoleon must lead a rag tag band of soldiers. “They are a sorry lot -- "freebooters, felons, Christians, drifters, patriots . . . surgeons, mechanics, assassins,” on a search for Pancho Villa. This odd cadre is ambushed by unknown guerillas on the border and there begins the battle that will leave the physically and emotionally battered warrior Napoleon wishing at times he were dead.
What else can I say? Author Robert Olmstead has spun a really good story. -Amy O.
It is 1916 and a veteran of battles, Napoleon must lead a rag tag band of soldiers. “They are a sorry lot -- "freebooters, felons, Christians, drifters, patriots . . . surgeons, mechanics, assassins,” on a search for Pancho Villa. This odd cadre is ambushed by unknown guerillas on the border and there begins the battle that will leave the physically and emotionally battered warrior Napoleon wishing at times he were dead.
What else can I say? Author Robert Olmstead has spun a really good story. -Amy O.
Well written, exciting and brutal story in the McCarthy mode. I liked it but I wanted more and this was barely more than a short story. A good 3 star read.
This was absolutely fantastic. A starkly beautiful and haunting Western novella in the spirit of Cormac McCarthy. Its prose is brusque and impactful without being mannered. The narrative is fat-less and driving, as one would expect from a well-done novella. The protagonist, Napoleon Childs, is empathetic and interesting without ever being quite knowable (or anywhere near my own demeanor). This is just great stuff, and right up my alley right now.
Mexico. I enjoyed this - not my usual read, but very interesting, descriptive, and thoughtful.
Eesh, bloody, violent, dirty hell. With a few chapters of meandering dreamscape hovering between life and death.
This was almost a 5 star book for me. I feel like this story is told pretty succinctly, which I appreciate. I feel like this is maybe the best book I have read this year at creating something visual with language. The images of men glowing blue in the electricity of a thunderstorm, of a man resting small and forgotten in the sands of a long dead ocean, and of a patrol coming across and treating cavalierly a body blistered and stripped of skin upside-down and unrecognizable are all haunting and hard to get out of your head.
The real problem comes in the second act where Napoleon wanders the desert alone for forever. Olmstead was great at dialogue. He was great at opening or closing a chapter with a brilliant landscape. He could not for the life of him write convincingly from the perspective of a man lost in the desert. It dragged on forever. The tone was all over the place. If you consolidate the 3+ chapters into one, I think I'd probably call this my favorite book this year to date.
The real problem comes in the second act where Napoleon wanders the desert alone for forever. Olmstead was great at dialogue. He was great at opening or closing a chapter with a brilliant landscape. He could not for the life of him write convincingly from the perspective of a man lost in the desert. It dragged on forever. The tone was all over the place. If you consolidate the 3+ chapters into one, I think I'd probably call this my favorite book this year to date.
A great, short western.
It's an unbelievable stroke of luck to be living when both Robert Olmstead and Cormac McCarthy are writing. To get one writer of these sorts of minimal, violent, pretty books would be a pretty decent stroke of luck. So to have two is almost more luck than anyone really deserves.
What I love about this book is that it's a western, but it defies what I consider the traditional stereotypes of westerns. For the most part, I've read westerns that are long and literary, and westerns that are short and trashy. But this one takes the literary, cuts it down to a manageable length, and the result is pretty damn good.
I sometimes wonder if authors of westerns feel that the length of the book, the expansiveness, helps encapsulate the expansiveness of the landscape and all of that. Olmstead take a different tack, and the shortness and brutality of the book matches well with the shortness and brutality of the characters' lives.
Just don't mistake this withholding for a lack of generosity on the part of the author and his storytelling. Everything that needs to be there is. Everything that doesn't is in a Longarm somewhere.
It's an unbelievable stroke of luck to be living when both Robert Olmstead and Cormac McCarthy are writing. To get one writer of these sorts of minimal, violent, pretty books would be a pretty decent stroke of luck. So to have two is almost more luck than anyone really deserves.
What I love about this book is that it's a western, but it defies what I consider the traditional stereotypes of westerns. For the most part, I've read westerns that are long and literary, and westerns that are short and trashy. But this one takes the literary, cuts it down to a manageable length, and the result is pretty damn good.
I sometimes wonder if authors of westerns feel that the length of the book, the expansiveness, helps encapsulate the expansiveness of the landscape and all of that. Olmstead take a different tack, and the shortness and brutality of the book matches well with the shortness and brutality of the characters' lives.
Just don't mistake this withholding for a lack of generosity on the part of the author and his storytelling. Everything that needs to be there is. Everything that doesn't is in a Longarm somewhere.
This is a very violent book that may be hard for some to take. And that’s ok. Because we aren’t supposed to like battle, or the people who perpetuate it. We aren’t supposed to be cool with a horse kicking a guy’s nuts off as a way to torture him. So, if this bothers you, I’d say you are well adjusted.
Literate western that reminds a bit of Cormac world of lots of violence, descriptions of nature and horses, terse dialogue between men undergoing extreme tests of character as their lives are threatened by people who wish them ill. Sounds like Cormac doesn't it? This is a short novel that kind of loses its steam toward the end unfortunately. Still, few westerns w/ literary leanings so worth checking out if Cormac is your thing.
