Light Action in the Caribbean: Stories

What a pleasure to discover this book of absolutely beautiful stories. This is an author who has clearly lived life to the fullest and has accummulated a vast store of wisdom and understanding of what it means to be human. Lopez writes poetically and with deep conviction and respect for his characters. Too bad he doesn't write novels--could be another Steinbeck, maybe. These are stories that will stay with you for a long time.

These stories are all over the map -- from 17th century love letters between Peruvian saints to a 20th century mappist who devotes his life to his practice. This is my first encounter with Lopez, but his excellent writing is evident throughout. Though I didn't like all the stories (the Lords one was the weakest I thought), I found his subject matter so interesting and the ideas so gripping that I couldn't put it down. Lopez has a knack for creating a sense of place from the land. These stories contain some beautiful slices of Americana and some memorable scenes and characters. I love the story about the 17th century saints. Many gems in this short collection.

In this slim volume of short fiction, Barry Lopez quietly evokes landscapes: of the earth, of the mind, and of the heart. Some stories, such as "Stolen Horses," are simply told; others have a multi-layered richness. In "The Mappist" (my personal favorite), a man solves a mystery of pseudonymity as he tracks down a skilled mapmaker who alternately worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and secretly hand-drew elaborate, knowing maps accompanied by passionate text. Here, the reader glimpses the shape and color of the past, present, and future and what it means for two men who see them all in the lay of the land. "The Letters of Heaven" confronts the humanity of saints, and how one man reconciles passion and God. Not all stories are equally successful; in the title story the brutal conclusion seems oddly out of place, as though it belongs to another story. Still, these stories are artfully told, in language that sometimes startles with its simple beauty.

Although the title of this book promises "light action in the Caribbean," the stories you will encounter here are actually heavy with meaning. Barry Lopez's writing has the ability to change the way you perceive the world. For instance, his essay "Apologia" in ABOUT THIS LIFE (1998) forever changed the way I will think of animals killed by automobiles. "Light" is not a word I would use to describe the writing of Barry Lopez.These stories are challenging, but worth the effort if read slowly. In this collection, Lopez introduces us to a diverse assortment of subjects: horse thieves, prison inmates who dream of animals, a 54-year-old gardener who marries a 22-year-old girl, an itinerant who thinks about hoofprints, macaws imprisoned in a hotel, a historian, a restoration geographer, and a 12-year-old deaf girl, who was "hit in the head by a stray bullet . . . that . . . had eclipsed the hearing in both ears" (p. 64). In my favorite story of the collection, "Remembering Orchards," Lopez's first-person narrator stares at trees in an Oregon orchard, "like sparrows frozen in flight" (p. 5), to bring the stepfather he never knew back to him: "the work of his hands, his desire and aspiration, just above the surface of the earth, in the light embayed in their branches" (p. 8). In another story, Lopez's character (a lawyer?), dogged by the grief of a failed relationship, finds engagement in the world again by silently working for six months in a monastery's gardens, while also building a model ship. In the not-so-subtle title story, the revolting, conspicuous consumption of a yuppie couple ends in Caribbean bloodshed.Travelling these stories may not always be easy. But for anyone interested in taking an insightful journey with Barry Lopez, I recommend these rewarding stories.G. Merritt

Barry Lopez is probably best known for his nonfiction writings, but the majority of his published books are fiction. His latest collection of stories may be his most diverse, and offers some of the best writing of his career. It's not a perfect mix -- some of the stories are less than the sum of their parts, others are a bit too heavy-handed or obscure -- but the best of the works here are stunningly good in ways few American writers have achieved.Lopez's usual technique is to create a first-person narrative of an encounter with the natural world which opens up and broadens the narrator's understanding of humanity and the universe. (There are a few sharp departures, most notably the almost nihilistic title story, though even it is tied closely to a fine attention to natural details and processes.) When this technique works, as in the remarkable and Borgesian "The Mappist", the story has the depth and power of a novel.For all of Lopez's concern for the natural environment his characters inhabit, he is also astute in his presentation of his characters as thinkers and scholars. The titles of books fill these pages, for many of his characters are bibliophiles and scholars -- one "story" is a paragraph followed by pages of endnotes and a bibliography -- and one of Lopez's great gifts as a storyteller is his ability to show the conjunctions between the imagined world of the page (the environment of the word) and the physical reality of gravel beneath feet and horse hair beneath hands.Lopez takes risks as a writer, and we should celebrate him for that, for the risks pay off more than not. Perhaps his greatest risk, and the one we should celebrate the most, is his unyielding desire to find decency, honesty, and even nobility in attention to the everday details of living.