The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

by Bob Shacochis

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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Literature

715 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2013

About the author

Bob Shacochis is an American fiction writer and literary journalist.
He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Reviews

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, Bob Bob Bob Bob, BOB! Help me out here. Get a ruthless editor. Your scattershot presentation turned me into The Woman Who Lost Her Mind.

Sorry to say, this is a novel I will never be able to finish. I made two attempts to read it, and I made it all the way to page 300 on the second stab. I just cannot continue. I leave it to those of you with infinite patience and stubborn perseverance.

[Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A contemporary War and Peace -- without the Peace. And a big fat book, to boot! However, a warning to would-be readers: if you don’t have a decent attention span and at least a smattering of 20th century history under your belt, then forgetaboutit.

I’ve been spoiled by Shacochis, his prose so lush (as they say), the descriptions so void of cliches, the sentences so complex and rhythmic. I wish I had an extra two weeks in life so I could flip the book to the beginning and read it out loud. Every couple of pages something would set the hairs on the back of my neck tingling. I’m spoiled. My usual thriller fare will seem too watery -- nothing to do now but reread The Alexandria Quartet.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don’t need to know much about Haitian, Croatian or Turkish politics to fully appreciate The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, but it helps. It also helps to surrender to the journey – a journey that spans over 700 pages – because immediate answers will not be forthcoming.

This is a big book in every sense of the word: big in breadth, in ideas, in audacity. You will lose your heart to it and end up shaking your head in awe and admiration. And along the way, you will learn something about the shadowy world of politics and espionage, the hypocrisy of religion, and the lengths that the players go to keep their sense of identity – their very soul – from fragmenting.

So what IS it about? That’s not an easy question to tackle. The eponymous woman of the title is Dottie Chambers, the hypnotic and damaged daughter of the elite spy Steven Chambers – surely one of the most screwed up characters in contemporary literature. As a young boy, Steven witnessed the atrocities of Tito’s Muslim partisans against his own father, and he came to age with a zeal to right the wrongs…eventually pulling Dottie into his malignant orbit.

That is all I intend to say about the plot, which spans five decades, many countries, and a wide range of themes. The novel consists of five separate books, some short, some long, a catalog-of-sorts of 20th century atrocities and the loss of not only the individual soul, but our collective soul as well. Mr. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinder, with hints (depending on where you are in the book) of David Mitchell, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, and others…while keeping the narrative distinctly his.

The themes this author tackles go right to the heart of identity and destiny. “We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time,” he writes at one point. In other passage, we are first introduced to Steven with these words: {Steven would be} “introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door o the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.”

The questions he asks are universal: how do you change back if your former self no longer interlocks cleanly with the shape you have assumed? What happens when you become an actor in a theater without walls or boundaries or audiences? Where is the thin wall of separation between “patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury…” And when do we have the right to challenge and to reclaim our own souls before it’s too late?

This is an amazing book, a true magnus opum, a story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Yet at its epicenter, Dottie and the two men who love her – her unhealthy father and the book’s moral core, Green Beret Evelle Burnette – who, in their own way, battle for her very soul. 6 stars.

[Guinotte Wise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man, where to start--I loved this book. What an achievement. I admire Bob Shacochis, dug all his books, but this one...this one is astounding. He took ten or more years to write it. I hope his next one is sooner. But, this one is an Important Book. It WILL win awards. It rockets you here and there, grabs your lapels, takes you from the most gritty shocking extremes to the bunkers of the power elite, from the private clubs to the sweaty jungles, from the roving slavic death squads to the tent cities to the country clubs to the Rick's Places of Istanbul, and on and on--but it's all smooth and beautifully written, gorgeous passages, compelling from the first page. Look, when I read that last page I felt like one does when one has been on a very long, very successful vacation--I mean, I was home, but look where I'd been. My god. I will read this book again. Few authors can do that to me. McGuane, Didion, Shacochis, McCarthy, Fitzgerald. I'll be IN this book again. There's a place I must experience again, where the woman in question, I believe, regains her soul, strange and painful deal--I have to see if that happens as I think it does. Other things, her father as a child, may explain some of his astonishing morality issues. Also, this book, I believe, is a pretty good way to start to understand how our country got the way it is. No spoilers, just observations. Again I say...this is one important book. Whew. What an accomplishment.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

National Book Award-winner Bob Shacochis publishes so infrequently that fans of his previous novel, “Swimming in the Volcano,” have probably retired by now. That’s good because they’ll need the extra time to wend their way through his engrossing, thoroughly overwhelming new book. “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” is a spy novel the way “Moby-Dick” is a fishing tale. Although it never reaches the attack on the World Trade Center, it’s a soaring literary epic about the ­forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinding dance of 20th-century atrocities and countermeasures to explore the foundations of America’s millennial ambitions and the human cost of such hubris.

Be prepared for considerable demands. Members of the U.S. intelligence community with a deep knowledge of Haitian culture, Croatian history and Turkish politics will find this novel a breeze. Others will be taking panicked notes in the margins of their heavy, sweat-stained copies. 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.

The novel pours forth in Shacochis’s torrential style, festooned by his baroque vocabulary, one indefatigable paragraph after another, the phrases ricocheting into hypnotic fractals of grammatical complexity that would send a sentence diagrammer shrieking in terror. Each of the book’s five sections is cast in a slightly different mold, with its own shaded tenor, from political thriller to historical fiction to psychological drama. And those sections come to us out of chronological order, a complication that initially seems maddening but lures us deeper into the kaleidoscopic minds of these spooks who can melt the solid matter of time and identity.

The earliest part opens on the wasted landscape of Croatia during the German occupation of World War II. Eight-year-old Stjepan Kovacevic sees his father beheaded by one of Tito’s Muslim partisans. Before the blood even stops flowing, the boy and his mother flee toward the sea, determined to reach the United States, “the only place strong enough to defeat the enemies of Christ our savior.” In Shacochis’s electrified narrative, this is a frightening odyssey through a society with nothing “left to believe in except the horror of existence.” Military order has collapsed; soldiers devolved into thugs bribe and shoot and rape, knowing they don’t have long to live anyway. For little Stjepan, this ordeal is an indelible introduction “to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul.”

That reference to the boy’s soul isn’t a rhetorical affectation. Shacochis’s approach is not outwardly theological, but, as the title suggests, “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” is a novel invested in the health of souls. His concern for the spiritual implications of patriotism casts a religious aura over this saga reminiscent of the work of Graham Greene. Sin, baptism, rebirth, resurrection — in these pages those theological terms are blessed by the sort of serious consideration that rarely has a prayer in contemporary literary fiction.

When we see Stjepan Kovacevic again, he’s been transfigured into an elegant, though shadowy, undersecretary named Steven Chambers. The little boy’s inchoate desire for vengeance against the enemies of Christ now finds expression in the spycraft of the most powerful nation on Earth. Wielding almost magical military technology, bottomless black-box funding and special ops men trained to godlike prowess, Chambers and his “Friends of Golf” (FOG)pursue “the self-dramatizing schemes of overheated minds, unrestrained in power and influence and felonious inspiration.” Their crusade against the infidels rages away entirely beyond the purview of Capitol Hill and those silly politicians who imagine they’re in control.

Shacochis spins political shenanigans with tremendous verve, but what deepens the novel is the way he attends to the psychological and spiritual repercussions of this “exalted passion to remake the world.” Chambers has raised his brilliant, multi­lingual daughter, Dorothy, in the furnace of his maniacal obsession with the divine cause. The spectacular middle section of the novel, set in Istanbul in 1986, shows us 17-year-old Dorothy torn between life as a happy teenager and work as her father’s spy-in-training, “a professional changeling.” Shacochis writes, “She had been overly inducted into his sophistry, its sideline audience for so many years, his beliefs invading and occupying her metabolism until they had become, without the virulence, her own.” Laboring beneath Daddy’s “daunting piety,” his “spidery habit of weaving webs” and his “indecent tutorials in sensation,” she finds herself physically and emotionally traumatized, her identity shattered in ways that prove useful for spycraft but disastrous for her own mental health.

That theme is the rosary on which the episodes of this monumental novel are strung, as various men try to understand or save or love Dorothy, “a humorless neurotic” or the sexy chameleon who warns her would-be saviors that she has no soul. The most intricate web of events finds her in Haiti, a spiritually febrile place where the loss of souls is regarded with utmost seriousness. It’s the late 1990s, after Operation Uphold Democracy, the U.S. mission that Shacochis detailed in his celebrated nonfiction book “The Immaculate Invasion.” Those many months of on-the-ground reporting now infuse his fiction with an intimate knowledge of the politics — local and invasive. “The army arrived in thunder and left in a foul haze of smoke,” he writes, “having performed a magnificent pantomime of redemption.” But as the world lets Haiti “drift away from consciousness on a raft of indifference,” a number of viperous creatures slithers out of the muck: domestic thugs and rebels, North American gangsters, South American drug runners, Middle Eastern terrorists, U.S. agencies with conflicting interests and, of course, Steven Chambers’s cloak-and-dagger minions, who see the island as a “laboratory.” What has drawn Dorothy to this poor island of violence and voodoo is the question Shacochis plumbs for hundreds of pages, almost all of which seem — miraculously — to be absolutely essential.

How fitting that the first character we meet at the start of this extraordinary epic is a human rights advocate determined to ferret out the truth in Haiti. His frustration is a foregone conclusion, a bloody confirmation of Pilate’s cynical response to Jesus, “What is truth?” Shacochis knows this troubled part of the world where “ignorant armies clash by night,” and he understands the boundless woe spawned by meddling patriots pursuing their crusades. Dorothy may be a clever partner with her father’s FOG men or one of their many victims — or both. After a lifetime of trafficking in “partial truths and confused ripping crosscurrents of bad agendas and perfidious motivations,” she’s a mystery even to herself. Her real desires remain buried in her battered heart, more irretrievable than Langley’s darkest schemes. What’s clear, though, is that the serpentine path of her search for redemption in this novel provides a profound reflection on the soul of America.

[Jane Ciabattari · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is on my top 10 books of 2013 list for BBC.com:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2013...

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

For apt description of this book, see review here on goodreads written by Ron Charles.

This is my first reading of this author, and it was a reading experience hard to compare to any other author's works. Heavy subjects and complex characters accompanied by internalized thoughts and reactions attempting to justify much of what is unjustifiable in this world. The world as it was in the 1990's, military actions in several arenas, experiences of those who try to document world events by words and photos along with disturbing life events of major characters. Sentences range extra long.

Have a chunk of time to concentrate on this dark and complex epic.

Library Loan

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peeling Away the Layers

You often hear complex stories described as peeling away the layers of an onion. Here, though, I would say artichokes, those spiky vegetables that you dismantle a little at a time, throwing a lot away to find that succulent softness at the base of the leaf that you slide off with your teeth. Excuse the metaphor, but with Bob Shacochis the onion simile just doesn't cut it, because everything here is so complex and spiky, delicious and toxic, intricately fashioned and confusing at the same time. Whether this is a fifty-year spy story, or an insider's view of America's nefarious involvement in wars and international skulduggery over the past half-century, or a study in sexual pathology, this 700-page monster is nowhere near as simple as the smooth containment of a regular onion.

Actually, I should compare it to a whole crateful of artichokes. For the novel is written in five separate books, each its own puzzle or tangle of puzzles. The first three at least are set in different places at different times, with apparently different casts of characters: Haiti in the later nineties, Yugoslavia just after WW2, Istanbul in the mid-eighties. In fact, many of the people do return, but with so many changes of name, rank, and apparent occupation that it can take a long time to work the connections out. Shacochis is a meticulous writer, but he does require his reader to take a lot on trust.

At least he begins somewhat steadily: Tom Harrington, an American investigator, goes to Haiti to look into the shooting death of an American woman for which her husband is being blamed. In 200 pages that seem like later John le Carré (only not quite so good) or Michael Gruber (but better), Tom's investigation turns up surprise after surprise, not only looking into the couple's private life but also delving into his own. The possible explanations for the woman's death include sexual jealousy, terrorist activity, involvement with the drug trade, some clandestine interest of the US government, even voodoo. This book ends with a solution of a sort; it could almost be a stand-alone novel—in which case, I would have given it five stars.

Then Shacochis goes into overdrive, and I began to feel conflicted, loving it and losing it at the same time. The action piles up almost too fast to catch your breath, and there are some superb settings: the chaos of a country escaping a world war only to plunge into a civil one; the color, scent, and bustle of Istanbul; a horrifying storm at sea; a high-stakes honey trap that goes horribly wrong; even some golf games at exclusive courses among the top power-brokers in America. Shacochis can write, there is no doubt about it. But he doesn't know the meaning of excess; there is no twist of plot that cannot be followed by another twist and yet another. He ties up his loose ends, no question, but there were far more strands going at any one time than this reader could keep track of, and eventually I just ceased to care. So far from the relative order of le Carré, whom I mentioned earlier, I came to feel that Shacochis was occupying the proliferating paranoia of a Neal Stephenson novel, the bizarre nightmare of Marisha Pessl's recent Night Film, or at times even the sex and violence of old Harold Robbins paperbacks I used to read in my more excitable youth.

I think that it would work if this said something significant about American policies on the world stage, or really developed its characters in ways that would touch our sympathies. But none of them spoke to my heart. The title character, Dottie, to give her one of her many names, is beautiful and brilliant but, yes, she really does seem to have lost her soul. Not her fault, for the most part, as we will learn when we meet the figure behind her, her loving (too loving) father, an American diplomat and CIA operative. Astounded, but unable to tear ourselves away, we watch what he does to Dottie, using her even as he is grooming her to follow in his footsteps. Not entirely his fault either, as the books retrospectively link together and we realize that he too has been raised in a crucible of violence and revenge. But understandable or not, both these figures are exceptions in our society, even monsters, and while their stories may have a horrible baroque fascination, they can say nothing about humanity as a whole, and very little about the culture that is supposed to have shaped them.

[Jason Luu · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was happy to receive the beautiful hard copy of this in the mail, but disappointed with the content inside. I’ll be up front and say that I couldn't finish this book (I put it down about a 1/3 of the way through). The story and characters are fine but the prose drove me nuts. It’s as if no one edited this story at all. Extremely long run on sentences (I read my wife a single sentence that equals the length of a traditional paragraph), confusing lack of quotations for dialogue (I couldn't tell if what I was reading was a thought or dialogue until I got to the end of the sentence), and overwritten in general. That’s not to say that the prose doesn't have its moments, but given the length of the book, that shouldn't be surprising. I am always thankful for the opportunity to read work from authors I am unfamiliar with, but for the editing issues alone, I cannot recommend this book.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning book (though what's up with that title?). Every sentence is a gem, which is saying a lot, because there are so many of them. A quite dark look at pre-9/11 US geopolitical machinations, told through the lens of a fraught father-daughter relationship.

[Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my Amazon Best Books of the Month review: In this breathtakingly ambitious work, spanning the globe and many decades, Shacochis has crafted a (mostly) fictional backstory to 9/11, tracing the ancient hatreds that continue to infect history. At the story’s core is Jackie Smith (aka Renee Gardner, aka Dottie Chambers), posing as a photojournalist in late-1990s Haiti, a feral and dangerous place--where Jackie fits right in. Beautiful, heedless, and damaged, Jackie/Renee/Dottie is a man-eater: “Hers would be a slavish cult of eager youth and wicked men.” Among those who fall under her spell are the earnest humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington and the malleable gung-ho Special Forces operative Eville Burnette, not to mention her Croatian-turned-America father, whose inappropriate attentions add a creepy touch. Lording above all is a group of golf buddies, shadowy puppet masters from the “acronymic spawn” of military and intelligence agencies, whom Shacochis hilarious calls “phallocrats”--“little guys with big d**ks, or at least big d**k syndrome.” From Haitian voodoo dances to World War II Croatian to the first inklings of a group of Arab extremists known as “The Base,” this is a spy thriller engorged into a brilliant reflection on “the cult of millennial revenge.” Inevitably, there will be Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad comparisons. I’d add two Davids to the mix: Lynch and Cronenberg. And though it’s a brick of a book, it rarely slows: transfixing and magical; sexy and lurid; propulsive and unpredictable and quite troubling. Some of the set pieces are unceasingly good, and every line is crafted with obsessive care--no small feat in a 700-page book. Awards judges? Take notice. --Neal Thompson

And here's a Q&A I did with Shacochis on our Amazon Books blog, Omnivoracious.


Bob Shacochis

[Laurel Saville · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most bad ass books I have ever read. The writing is breathtaking and the story outrageously complex and compelling. Prepare to have it take over your life.

[Marla · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would retitle this book, The Woman Who Lost Her Mind, because that's how I felt reading it. When I picked it up at the library, it was so thick, I thought I'd accidently requested large print, as I have been known to do. That was not the case. This book is over 700 pages. But hey, I'm an avid reader, and love nothing more than to bury myself in a good story.

This was not the book for me. The dialogue has no quotations, which is irritating more than expected. There were sentences that had 30 words in them, but seemed to contain no noun or verb. There were endless descriptions that went on for pages of the most minute, inconsequential things. Yet I forged on. Bob was teasing me with some voodoo stuff...maybe I would be enlightened on this subject and the culture surrounding it...there was a murder...it might come around. I was hopeful. I put it aside for a week, hoping I would be drawn back to it. A snowy, blizzard outside this morning, a cup of tea...perfect for a long book. It was not meant to be. I made it to just shy of 300 pages, a valiant effort by anyone's standards. Bob needed an editor. Like fuh real.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, there were amazing parts of this novel, basically the first 2/3rds. It's divided up into 5 books. Books 1-3 were awesome. From comprehensive character development, intrigue and suspense, catapulting you from the U.S. to Haiti to Croatia to Turkey and back again, feeling like you were unlocking some secret espionage of these intertwined lives, cultures, and eras made these sections a great reading experience. Book 1 sets the stage for everything to come, Book 2 gives you back ground and motivations, and Book 3 focuses on the title character in-depth. There quite a bit of graphic violence, however, Shacochis creates a believable world of international subterfuge, where regular people gradually get twisted into truly crazy situations.

But then unfortunately you still have about 250 pages of confusing nonsense, where a ruthless editor would have made all our lives as readers so much better. Certain characters become completely inexplicable basket cases. The title character suddenly has little to do with the story. Tangential snippets from the first three books start popping up for no apparent reason. It's like Bob Shacochis spent all his energy writing the first 2/3rds and then thought "well...this is getting kinda long...meh" then slapped whatever down on the page, and sent it to the publisher.

Perhaps I'd have felt differently if the jacket blurbs weren't statements like "the last great american novel" or describing it as some fictional representation of how the US is becoming a vengeful, war on terror, police the world kind of country. And perhaps being a Pulitzer finalist, I went in with ridiculously high expectations. Yet after spending the better part of a month on this book, when I finally put it down my last emotion was of relief that it was over.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do yourself a favor and stick with this one, even if at first you find the subject grim, the plot confusing, and--god forbid--the characters unlikable. Not only will your patience be rewarded on all counts, but I was amazed at the transformation that took place as I began to realize that these I was really going to miss these people I had started off hating.

While this is a deeply political novel, it's about an extremely personal version of geopolitics in which conflicts between nations and religions play out on the micro-scale of a father's relationship with his daughter, a lonely soldier's search for meaning, a humanitarian's fallibility.

Shacochis' empathy for these people's brokenness, perversity, and, finally, their goodness, is this book's greatest achievement. Leave the notion of "likability" in the dust where it belongs--embrace complexity, forgiveness. Books like this show us how.

[Mari · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a tedious, pompous and cliche strewn disappointment from an author whose work I admire.
Eruptions of occasional breathtakingly dazzling language kept me slogging through the rest. Alas....

[Esther Bradley-detally · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first opened this book, the initial prose, which I'll quote a bit below, pierced my heart and soul. It was so good. His perceptions wonderful. I eventually bogged down, but that's my brain on bog, certainly not the author. Bob Shacochis is winner of the National Book award and a splendiferous writer. He get into the marrow of the human condition. I wrote down the quotes I liked because I want one of my writing groups to see his language! Oh my!

Good Writing – from The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Bob Shacochis, winner of the national book award.

“If he told her everything, he imagined, correctly, she would want to leave him, or she would pray for the salvation of his distant heart, which was the salvation of a man in a time and a place and a country and not the salvation of an immortal self, because when Americans pray, they pray first that history will step aside and leave them alone, they pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life. They pray for the soothing blindness of happiness, and why not?

But history walks on all of us, lashed by time, and sometimes we feel its boot on our backs and sometimes we are oblivious to its passing, the swing of sorrow and triumph through humanity, sorrow, and then, finally crippling grief fading to obscurity, which is perhaps why Americans want little to do with history, why perhaps they hate it, why prayer comes easier than remembrance, which is how history knots its endless endings and measures the rise and fall of its breath. And when history swirls around you and passes on and you inhale its aftermath, the bitterness of its ashes and the bygone sweetness of time, and excrete history into memory, you never quite believe you had once heard its thunderous God-like whispering, that you had trembled in the face of its terrible intimacies, and you fell silent. (Pp3-4)

Each time he left the island he would tell himself the situation thee couldn’t possibly get worse. Each time he returned, things were worse. Haiti was post functional, a free-range concentration camp, and Tom had abandoned faith in the country’s ability to save itself. Haiti couldn’t find its bottom." p. 22

[Cynthia Archer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow. I feel like I have really accomplished something in finishing this book. I had no doubt that I would, but still it was a bit of a battle to get to the end. This is a long story. I enjoyed it, but it confused and conflicted me. I'm not sure that there was a point to it, and yet it seems like too important of a book to not have a purpose. If you like long convoluted and complex drama, then this will probably appeal to you. I found myself enjoying parts of the story and feeling completely uninterested in others. Having been to Haiti, I found the descriptions of it astoundingly accurate. The book gives the reader a clear picture of this country and its conflicts. I was also intrigued by some of the characters, who all suffered from many flaws. The length of the story combined with the movement back and forth in time from present to past was a real challenge for a reader to keep straight. I would also have liked the story better if there were less political and military minutiae and more character and historic development. This might be the deciding factor between loving or only appreciating this book. Either way, I am thankful to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.

[Moon Rose (M.R.) · Rating 2 out of 5]

To infiltrate the underlying structure of the most privy honorable council of any bureaucratic system in any government is to unearth dizzying mazes of convoluted networks incoherently intertwined to a birds eye view of an even more puzzling questions, a cornucopia of conundrums with a secret intelligence that somehow ironically put the words peace and democracy together and make it synonymous with the diabolical incessant need of waging war.

Perhaps, it is too much just to relegate this heroic role of any government, or any structural institution that is as the protector of the whole, to this debasing personal monologue of mine, to accuse without further thought, or to point without much proof especially if the necessity of our own survival is already at stake, yet it is clear that the covert intention could sometimes lie wrapped up like a cellophane cover, invisible yet shiny either way, showing the desire that goes with the preservation of peace and democracy for all is only a shallow cover up to protect the wanton desires and self interests of the few, aggravated even furthermore, if the whole system is taken over and used as a vehicle for one's own personal vendetta.

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a complex novel that whirls in this intricate vortex of machination created by men to destroy and obliterate other men that do not belong. It is the story of a Croatian boy damaged by war and crushed by ethnic differences, who grows into manhood in America conditioned to manipulate the system for his own vengeance, or for the name of vengeance as spawned by his demented mind, of a few good and innocent men helplessly thrown into the lot becoming victims of its myriad of conspiracies and of a woman molded and condemned to the stiffness of her role like a lifeless sculpture of Venus devoid of any function of her own soul...

The premise of the novel is intricate and interesting enough on its own. It seems like a gate pass to a furtive and elusive world of the bureaucratic system that somehow elucidates both its triumphs and follies, which Bob Shacochis meticulously utilizes and elaborated even further with the complications of his given plot set in a tone designed to thrill and titillate (supposedly) as the narrative subsequently veers to unraveling the mysteries and suspenseful side of its story. Perhaps, more than enough qualities in a good book to solidify the interest of any reader of diverse taste, yet Shacochis is also a florid writer, a very florid one for that matter that somehow contributed to the lack of pace necessary for this particular kind of genre that eventually choked his reader with too much information, drowning his story and characters with his own wordiness.

It is truly difficult to scrutinize a novel that seems to be lauded by critics as one of this year's best. In fact, I was too excited myself to begin reading this novel, perhaps with too much expectation that is nominally required for any reader, which I later found out after finishing the novel, have somehow become a harbinger of my own bitter frustrations.

Let me be clear, I do not hate the novel at all. Hate is too strong a word to describe what I actually feel. As a matter of fact, I do not believe in hating because it is not just an awful waste, but for the reason, it does not contribute to anything substantial. Perhaps, my criticism reflects only my firm believe that this novel could have been an outstanding work of fiction, if not hampered by its too much artistic indulgence, the floridity of which sacrificed the authenticity of the novel as an art form, breaking up the momentum built as the crescendo of its narrative plummets to the lowliest surface that verges on the mortal sin any writer can commit---that is to plunge their readers to an unnecessary tiresomeness, eventually losing the rigid bond that should hold his characters and his readers to an exquisite place of imaginative experience. ☾☯

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is brilliant. Yes, the omniscient narrator goes wordy at times, but for the most part the voice and lingo and speed of the novel's world are not only right-on, but redeem all sins of wordiness. Yes, it lacks quotes around dialogue (whaaaa; I did not miss them). Yes, the Jackie character as we are introduced to her is stereotypical, but that is accounted for later and not because Shacochis can't write rounded women characters. Marija, in the second section, disproves the cliched women criticism. Also, when we get to Burnette (the strongest section) all becomes clearer because HE is so clear and direct and we are getting the story more through his p.o.v. I can see why Shacochis did not do that right off the bat, however; the story unfolds in a suspenseful way as he presents it and we learn more about the characters and their motivations. Also, 'Jackie' and her story gradually opens so we know what happened to her soul, and how, and perhaps even why -- what basically corrupt social structure has contributed to her loss(es), and everyone's. I would give this 4.5 star, the minus .5 because of the occasional 'wordiness' (and because I guessed the outcome). I have to say, though, that when the story really got going for me I looked back trying to find examples of what bugged me at first but couldn't find them. So I was reading differently, or the book became different; not sure which. Last but by no means least, Shacochis reminds the reader that this novel is about the Christian-Muslim conflict (both patriarchal cultures, perhaps in inevitable conflict because they are patriarchal), which has bloodied the world for centuries.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate giving up on books, especially one that's inspired as much reader love as "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul," but this is one dark slog. It demands a lot of focus -- as a lot of readers have (often bitterly) noted, Shacochis doesn't put quotes around his dialogue here -- and while I think I understand why he made some of his stylistic choices, given that they add another surreal layer to a story that's supposed to feel like a hazy nightmare, the extra work they require isn't really rewarded. Shacochis clearly knows his setting, and there's a germ of a truly harrowing tale here, but it's crushed by uniformly unlikable characters and a narrative that suffers occasionally maddening drift. A great book to read if you want to feel like you're in hell with people you'd never want to meet, but hard to recommend otherwise.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, this is what I thought...I FELT this book! I was sucked into this novel, ostensibly about,um, just possibly war and terrorism. If you read this, hang on...it gallops along and I just held on tight to the reins of the writing... which were very long sentences filled with breathtaking descriptions and psychological insights.

Insights into what? America, war, peace, no war, endless war, jihad war, holy war, revenge, cruelty, the linked brutality and sexuality of men, (yes, MEN, delineated with many paragraph sucker punches, one after another,) women, love, young love, sailing, fishing, and on and on and on and on. I read this book at night, and then dreamed about it. Perfect ending, which is the gift of a brilliant writer. Stick with it.

[Marybeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wasn't written for me. It wasn't written for you either unless you drink really expensive red wine and went d1 for law school. A walk in the park for someone with immense spatial intelligence. I can recognize however that this book is not a mirage covering a layer of fluff. Translation, do not write a review calling for a stronger editor.

[Sonia]

Did not live up to the hype. I gave up at p 169. There has to be at least one likeable character for me and there are none here.

[Ula · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is such an enigma. I love it. I hate it. It mesmerized me. It broke me. It was tedious. But my god, it was also incredible.

[Dawn Stowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shacochis has a wide ranging and powerful voice. His research is impeccable. What an incredible journey of discovery of the inner workings behind theatres of war. The ending was okay but not equal to the content. 4.5 Here are some quotes:

In fact they were precious and at constant risk of going stale, so he made them exotic novelties, these pleasures, sucked them to near depletion, then ran off to hunt the nearest white whale, that thing we need to do to keep us from our disappointment or lethargy, to jolt ourselves back to feeling.

Haiti had been collected by the genteel world, the world of infinite possibility, turned over in its manicured hands, sniffed and shaken, and discarded back on the heap.

And what lesson might that possibly be that had yet to take hold? Love thy neighbour, or exterminate the brutes?

Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he’d say – he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul.

… regrouping as a tribe in every god-lonely place in the world where hatred gushed through the streets in order to supply citizens back home with the images of the endlessly playing movie called Other People’s Problems.

Could a woman even recall a self without breasts and hip after the trail of childbirth or the malfunctioning furnace of menopause.

… they were dumber than pet rabbits

He was staying because of the girl, the only woman he had truly hated without first having truly loved.

Every force begets a counterforce, and in that sense vodou was little different than the other religions of man, and like other men Haitians lived with the fears bred in and of darkness, and Haiti’s darkness was the darkness of another, lost world that its people were not yet ready to let fall away, even as they diluted it with the powdered milk of Christianity.

… the embassy seemed more inclined to act as a pimps for the ancient regime, good at providing the ringleaders with golden parachutes, silk lifejackets.

So how many scoops of bullshit were those assholes able to pile on your cone, Tommy Boy?

Justice was the blood sport of kings, human rights were the toilet that powerful men shit in.

Humour – His eyes bulging, Tom nodded energetically at Dolan, then across to Gerard and back to Dolan again, never having known himself to behave like this, the (whole boiled) egg sealed behind his lips like a congealed bomb, and rising from his stomach to block its descent a dread telegraphed the obvious, that whatever happened next would trigger his dissembling . . . Tom expelled the egg into his hand and sat there wild eyes and breathing like a runner.

Tom thought wearily, Well, we are all spies, aren’t we. It seemed to him like a preexisting condition, like whiteness.

Occasionally in the lonely hotel rooms he spent much of his life in around the globe he thought as fell asleep about ape souls, something that bothered him, the six million year split from common ancestry. What was in an ape’s soul? Was it very much different that was in his? In our own ability to see and confirm ourselves, had our rise as a species been propelled by one simple skill, the slick repackaging of our brutish heritage into an alliance with the divine? Thus men have souls. Thus, apes are without. Thus the ordination of violence. And this – When a nation lost its souls. Where did that soul even come from to begin with? What was the genesis of a nation’s soul? The answer seemed only to be war.

… the compressed grace of his beatific smile in a city where smiles were as unlikely as roasted chicken and laughter was consigned for safekeeping to the insane.

His mother’s side of their bed remained an empty blue glow that night, her absence a bottomless pool daring him to come close and swim away.

He will shit in your mother’s milk.

Memory alone, with its random chords and puny awards, could never be as alive or full as this dream.

Barbie speaks Turkish, he said beaming, exaggerating his delight, and she sighed, having heard this everywhere she went in the world from men this man’s age, father’s coerced by their daughters into buying blond-haired American dolls.

… be careful who you rescue because you’re likely to be stuck with them

The screams echoing from the depths of the building hour after hour seemed unreal to me and I could not quite imagine I would end up in one of those rooms, howling like an animal.

That Sunday morning in June, the poyraz, like an old family servant, met them at the cove’s entrance, its freshening kiss of wind a bolt of cool velvet drawn across her bare shoulders and the backs of her legs.

A muddy goat trail flanked by nodding sunflowers led then away from the ruins into a ravine where they wandered into the ancient city’s ampitheatre, scaling its broken rows of seats to the top of the windswept hill from which they could see the arched remnants of an aqueduct leading past a nearby village ringed with poplars, its dirt track connecting to a narrow road winding back toward the mainland.

… a big-boned giantess nearly twice her size, thanks in part to the women’s outlandish hair, corn-coloured with platinum highlights, stacked and lacquered into a Babylonian ziggurat of seashell whorls towering straight up off the top of her skull. She wore an equally outlandish caftan, broad-striped purple and orange, pink ballet slippers on her large feet, her very long fingers ringed with clusters of jewels, a hardware store of bangles above each knobby wrist, her pouched dark eyes outlined with falring tails of kohl and her face, glistening and heart-shaped, had been denied its natural beauty by an outsized Levantine nose hooked over the hyper sensual protrusion of her lips, camel like and scowling.

Little guys with big dicks, or at least big-dick syndrome. Phallocrats.

They were the architects of the unseen, the fabrication of interlocking subterranean networks and processes that formed the human infrastructure of what are known as deep events – multigenerational efforts routed together into a fusion that seemed to hold together everything in the cosmos of power, the continuum of power, the throb of ancient algorithms, an almost mystic coming together of forces converging across a grid of specialties. Deep events evolved in deep time and produced tectonic shifts in human affairs.

. .. the planet was chockfull of expendable people, overflowing with targets, and genocide an organic event, as common as a wheat harvest.

The amorphous – blob, not creep – had warped his mind and misaligned his thoughts and left him groaning inwardly with some genuine existential soulburn.

War is but an spectacular expression of our everyday life.

In the road-less mountains the rivers flowed undefeated, the colour of lapis, as they had since time immemorial, but the tidal river below this bridge on the road from the airport to the centre of the city looked and smelled like a channel of diarrheal sludge, its filth oozing toward the nearby sea through the middle of a dung coloured slum, a warren of repulsive miseries, constructed entirely of wreckage and garbage and degradation. Even the charity of a penny would not fall their way.

Cowboys and Muslims, gentlemen, said Ben, grinning at Burnette and Vasich. Mount up.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was quite a ride. This is a very complex story, full of shifting point-of-views, timelines, with plot reveals scattered throughout all of the different sections, but it’s totally worth it. It’s definitely a “slow burn,” perhaps a bit hard to get into in the beginning, but by the end I could completely understand why it was a Pulitzer finalist, and one of the best books of the year.

It gets me how a bunch of reviews on here give it one star with complaints like “Bob, you need an editor,” or “I read 167 pages and couldn’t get into it so I quit,” or “I didn’t find any of the characters likeable.” I mean, I guess those are fair complaints, but I don’t think it’s fair to give the book a 1, at least until you finish it and see how everything plays out. Those things are all semi-true, but that’s kind of the point.

The characters don’t come across as likeable at first because the first section is setup as the “mystery,” the “what’s going on” section to get the narrative flowing. All the characters are either intelligence agents, people the agents are running, UN investigators, criminals, or TBDs. Your first glimpse of them will probably not be a very “likeable” or “endearing” scene. They are all guarded, watching what they do and say, shrouded in mystery. And then the first section ends and we are whiskey away, 6o years back into the past to a different continent to a seemingly unrelated sequence. But it all connects, it all plays out, and it’s not super hard to follow if you just stick with it; and by the end you can see just how masterfully it was for Bob to orchestrate it thus, giving such information and tone and historic details and teases that I’m glad his editor didn’t pare this down into the typical, brain-dead thriller that Brad Thor or some other hack would throw together. By the end, I found a number of characters very likeable, or at least I was rooting for them despite their very obvious flaws. But I could understand where they were coming from.

I found the shifting time frames a great way to see the character development, to see where these “spy-types” came from and how they originated, to see how they got to the “present” that we see in part 1. And I thought the jumping of continents as setting and the multiple storylines a very intelligent way of pulling together the main theme(s) that he was exploring. This is a massively ambitious novel about war and peace, global politics, intelligence agencies, intelligence overlap, shifting identities, revenge, the impact of the past on the future, the shifting alliances and moral obligations people face, the overlap of one culture’s war on another’s, and on and on and on. It can make it hard to follow when pretty much every character has multiple names or identities or complicated and unstated missions, but that’s kind of the nature of the game, and I think the way it is written is a great way of leading the reader through it as if we are the Tom Harrington character established in Part 1, the “investigator” trying to discover exactly what happened, the reveals coming to us slowly and subtly.

This is definitely not something to tackle if you aren’t ready to invest the time and energy into it. It’s not an easy read by any means. (Some days I felt like I read only 50 or 60 pages over the course of 3-4 hours, flipping back and checking stuff, reading slow, hacking my way through the “military speak” or just trying to follow the unfamiliar details and terminology about Haiti, voodoo chiefs, Turkey’s geography, who exactly Mr. Dupreys is again…) But it’s totally worth it, and every detail falls into place perfectly by the end. (It’s even clever in the way it references real historical details, with a major section taking place in the end of WWII, but a lot of talk about the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 80s, and even a couple passing references, though not name-dropping them, to KSM and Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.) But if you’re not ready for a high-minded, deep, contemplative, complex thriller/mystery, then best to see what James Patterson is releasing this month.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epic, well written espionage novel traveling across Istanbul, Croatia, Haiti, Germany, Africa, and the U.S. with special agents and special forces in pursuit of drug dealers, traffickers, counterfeiting, communists, and terrorists spanning the timeframe from WWII in 1944 to 1999.

Stjepan Kovacevic, son of Marija and Andre, endures the hardship of war and the ethnic and religious tensions between Serbs, Croatians, Russians, Turks, and Christians, Muslims and Jews. His godfather, Davor Starcevica, are ruthless and hardened accomplice throughout Stjepan's life. In book three, Steven Chambers (a.k.a. Stjepan Kovacevic) has diplomatic status in the foreign services. As a result, his daughter Dorothy attends grade school in Hong Kong and Kenya, middle school in Rome, high school in Turkey and Virginia, college in New England, graduate school in Boston and fluently speaks multiple languages. Steven plays games with Dorothy of riddles, puzzles, and finding surprises. Dorothy's life becomes twisted and out of control because of her father's obsessions, leading her at an early age, to be a pawn in a terrible game forever altering her being and soul. Dorothy becomes a razor sharp agent with pseudonyms of Carla Costa, Renee Gardener and Jackie Scott. She enters the underworld of voodoo and drugs in Haiti with her husband Jack Parmentier. Eville Burnette, U.S. Special Forces, is brought into Haiti to bring Renee back from the dark side.

I wasn't certain where the story was going in Book One; however Books Two-Four completely grabbed my intrigue, and Book Five brought it home with a slightly bumpy start. A very complex and very well written book.

"When we say someone has lost his soul, what are we saying? That somehow that person has been emptied, that a light has been extinguished at the center of his being. He sold his soul to the devil, we say. What happens to people who lose their souls? They seem to die and be reborn in order to breed horror and misery in the world. Whether they are full of hatred or not, they seem to be without love, loveless, emptied of all love, the enemies of love."

"The warrior must descend all the way into his body and soul and live in that gap where the world falls apart. What I want to know is, what does that really mean, said Burnette, pounding the steering wheel with the side of his fist. I lost it in that room in Sarajevo. My mind—gone. No argument. What worries me is what I found, what remained after everything else. No more wondering who you are, because here you are, pal. What was it? she asked. My soul, man. That’s what you find in the gap where things fall apart. You descend to your soul. Tell me what you mean, she said. This interests me."

[Jared Della Rocca · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Bob Shachochis was here at Bennington College for MFA, I told him about a book idea I had. "Mr. Shachochis (as those close to him would call him), there's this woman who comes in here EVERY DAY and sits at one of the back computers having a little croissant. Well, after about a month of watching this woman come in religiously and eat her croissant, one day she was sans croissant. (Mr. Shachochis and I would often sprinkle in foreign words, like 'sans', into our conversation.) So I asked her about it and she said someone had taken her breakfast! I said, Mr. Shachochis, there's a book here waiting to be written. It would be called, 'The Woman Who Lost Her Roll.'" I could tell from the spark in his eye, and the way he just walked away without even responding that the seed had been planted.

Well, I've now finished The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and a bit surprisingly, there's very few (read: zero) references to the library and this poor woman and her roll. So I had to nick one star from my rating because of this plot misfire. The rest of the plot, though, garnered a very strong four stars.

Reviews of the novel characterize it as a portrait of the American intelligence world, pre-9/11. But leaving it at that is like saying Gone With the Wind is about owning a plantation. Shacochis' work not only pictures the intelligence community pre-9/11, but his entire writing becomes that maze of confusion, unable to divide plot lines one from another, but instead tying themselves into a Gordian Knot. Jumping between time periods over the course of 700 pages, and waiting until three-quarters into the book to begin making connections, you begin to understand the pre-9/11 comparisons as you see after the fact how each character was connected. The plot itself brings forth that same repeated review reference, as you're repeatedly confronted with characters who work not for one agency, but a myriad of agencies. There's no discussion between agencies of who is using a specific asset, and even the parent agencies are frequently unaware of what a department is doing. And amongst all this intrigue, power struggle, intelligence quarantining in an attempt to do what? Defeat communism? The question pulses constantly, as Jackie states at one point: "She could not calculate the slippery algebra of enemies (if the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, then what?)" The entire 700-page masterpiece can boil down to that one quote, and that one quote can be the motto for U.S. foreign policy over the last thirty years. Until we are able to answer that question, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul will remain relevant, regardless of how many years pass.

[Steve Gehrke · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" is one of the greatest contemporary novels I've read. It's so much better than books that have gotten far more attention and miles better than Donna Tart's "The Goldfinch," (not to say Tartt's book is bad, but this book is in another league entirely)which won the Pulitzer over this book.


This is a long, complicated, challenging, and stylistically ambitious book that works on almost every level: the plot is compelling enough to keep you reading without being (with one small exception) contrived. The characters are so completely drawn that they keep talking in your head after you've finished. The title character, whose name changes (for reasons I won't give away), and her father are two of the most complex characters in contemporary fiction. They are obsessive, manipulative, often cruel, sometimes downright evil (especially the father), but also strong-minded, wickedly intelligent and (in the daughter's case) tender, and even loving.

I hesitate to explain too much of the plot, both because it is full of explosive surprises that would be wrong to give away, and because a summary of the plot will make it sound like a suspense novel or a thriller, which it isn't. Not completely, at least, though it contains elements of both those genres, and it's knowledge of the intelligence world (which I can judge only by how authentic it feels, not being a spy myself) rivals that in LeCarre's novels. Where this book surpasses LeCarre (and almost all other contemporary American novelists) is in it stylistic accomplishment. Critics often talk of style as if it were a "shallow" element of a novel, but few critics bother to define what they mean by style. To me, when I say that someone has a "great style," what I mean is that the sentences themselves are full of insightful, surprising moments that feel real or surprising that alternately teach us something new about the world, or capture something "often thought, but never so well expressed." These moments are, for me, the greatest pleasure that reading can give, and "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" is filled with them.

The book is full of long, clause-riddled sentences that often unravel in a way that makes every sentence feel like a journey. There's a metaphoric energy behind much of the writing, which draws the details into focus, and there are psychological and political insights scattered across almost every page. The fact that Shaccochis maintains this style for 700 pages without ever letting the writing go slack is a remarkable accomplishment. This is one o those novels that will have you thinking, throughout, "how in the world did he do this?"