Tampico: A Novel

by Toby Olson

Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been warehoused at "the Manor," a long-eroded home for the forgotten. The men take turns telling stories, stalling death as they relive pivotal parts of their pasts. Outside, the cliff crumbles and a lighthouse slips toward the sea. John, in particular, enthralls the others with his tale of Tampico, Mexico, where he met an Indian woman named Chepa who owned a house at the edge of a mountain wilderness. She was his first love—and his first lesson in the dangers of foreign intrigue. But his is not the only memory haunted by mysteries born in Mexico. Sick of waiting for death, stirred by the shifting ground beneath their feet, the Manor's residents finally resolve to quit that place and head out for Tampico. With inexorable pull, and exquisite scenes that could only come from Toby Olson, Tampico celebrates a sublime band of calaveras , "those skeleton messengers of mortality," who seek self-discovery even as their lives are ending.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2008

About the author

Toby Olson (born 1937 Chicago) is an American novelist.
Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas.
He graduated from Occidental College and Long Island University.
Toby Olson has published eight novels, the most recent of which – The Blond Box – appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2003; and numerous books of poetry, including Human Nature (New Directions). A new novel, The Bitter Half, is forthcoming. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson’s novel Seaview received the PEN/Faulkner award for The Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tampico begins quite promisingly and it even seemed briefly that Toby Olson is ready to cross postmodernism with magic realism creating some new literary form…
“Mystery of the unlikely. A ghost story. But we are all ghosts apparently, hidden from life in our soft coverings, only shadow figures, until flesh falls away and we are skeletons, calacas clacking as they join the dance.”
The Day of the Dead – isn’t it some distant echo of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry?
“All men and women long for the might have been, those avenues of life they didn’t take, and in the recognition that each one was a possibility, held in the memory as vision grown hazy at terminals beyond all bright beginnings, longing becomes empty nostalgia as the veins dry and collapse along the bones and the broad gestures of the body wither at the outer reaches. Devoid of the animation of living, all come narrowed and regretful to their deaths, since of the many possible lives, only one was lived.”
Alas, the novel is neither postmodernism nor magic realism – those possible avenues were never taken. The tale just becomes more and more farfetched and schmaltzy and eventually it simply peters out as some spuriously idyllic razzamatazz.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVELY character development. Great story, captivating read.