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Bay of Souls
Robert Stone s remarkable new novel is a psychological thriller of razor-sharp mysterious, erotic, and deeply readable.
Michael Ahearn, a professor at a rural college, sheds his comfortable assumptions when he becomes obsessed with a new faculty member from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. An expert in Third World politics, Lara is seductive, dangerous — and in thrall, she claims, to a voodoo spirit who has taken possession of her soul.
Impassioned and determined, Michael pursues Lara to her native island of St. Trinity, heedless of the political upheaval there. Together they desperately attempt to reclaim all that Lara has lost. Yet island intrigue ensnares them. Lara sacrifices herself to ritual and superstition. Michael is caught unawares in a high-stakes smuggling scheme. In his feverish state of mind, the world becomes an ever-shifting phantasmagoria. He is, himself, possessed.
In Bay of Souls, readers will recognize the trademarks of Stone s greatest the American embroiled in Third World corruption, the diplomats and covert operatives, the idealists and opportunists. Yet here the author s sights are set inward, to a place where politics is superfluous, experience unreliable. Never before has Stone probed so powerfully the psychological depths of one man s mind. What he finds there defies expectations.
Michael Ahearn, a professor at a rural college, sheds his comfortable assumptions when he becomes obsessed with a new faculty member from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. An expert in Third World politics, Lara is seductive, dangerous — and in thrall, she claims, to a voodoo spirit who has taken possession of her soul.
Impassioned and determined, Michael pursues Lara to her native island of St. Trinity, heedless of the political upheaval there. Together they desperately attempt to reclaim all that Lara has lost. Yet island intrigue ensnares them. Lara sacrifices herself to ritual and superstition. Michael is caught unawares in a high-stakes smuggling scheme. In his feverish state of mind, the world becomes an ever-shifting phantasmagoria. He is, himself, possessed.
In Bay of Souls, readers will recognize the trademarks of Stone s greatest the American embroiled in Third World corruption, the diplomats and covert operatives, the idealists and opportunists. Yet here the author s sights are set inward, to a place where politics is superfluous, experience unreliable. Never before has Stone probed so powerfully the psychological depths of one man s mind. What he finds there defies expectations.
249 pages, Hardcover
First published April 22, 2003
20 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Robert Stone
30 books250 followersROBERT STONE was the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
March 5, 2009
it's like everyone in this book was in a Least Likable Character Ever contest.
May 24, 2009
In his eighth novel, novelist Robert Stone revisits familiar ground via similar characters, themes and settings. As with protagonists from earlier novels, Michael Ahearn, a teacher at a small Midwestern college, is a dissatisfied academic—a half-man, compartmentalized and walled off from hope, sliding into alcoholism and infidelity as he enters middle-age. To some extent he has had success in building a fragile, but comfortable world. Both he and his wife Kristin (a Chaucer expert) have their college jobs, a son, a house, and a dog.
Indeed, Ahearn has kept his life in a rough balance, though he does have an eye for the ladies and a taste for whiskey. However, as in all Stone novels, clouds are gathering on the horizon. In the novel's first pages, one senses a growing tension in the Ahearn household. The turn of the wheel begins when Michael and a couple of teacher buddies head out to go deer hunting. The hunting trip has its previously established ritual, with Michael insisting upon stopping at a hole-in-the-wall diner for a special unblended Irish whiskey. This little necessity illustrates clearly how Michael has spent his life encased in empty traditions and conducting tame suburban rituals.
At the diner, Michael safely slums a bit with the locals. Still, there is an edge, a blending of the real and surreal in this nowhere bar. Michael, while chatting up Megan, a young and hard barmaid, feels a faint brush of danger as he is mocked by others at the bar—though it is a brush he apparently enjoys. As Megan turns away to get his whiskey, he notices the forked tongue of a snake tattooed on the nape of her neck. It's a warning and signal of a darker world—its near boundaries. The coming danger is further reinforced by an incident in the woods. As Michael sits in his tree stand, he witnesses another hunter trying to move a deer's carcass through the underbrush with a wheel barrel. It's a grotesque scene, like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, which will later mutate into a more grotesque tableau before the novel's end. To some extent the entire hunting portion of the novel, with all its establishment of fateful symbols and patterns—right down to a dropped flashlight—contains some of the best writing in the book.
A phone call soon shatters the backwoods reverie of the teacher-hunters. Paul, Michael and Kristin's son, nearly dies in an accident. Though the boy lives, the cracks that were in Michael's world suddenly expand. Unlike Kristin, he has no faith to turn to. His has led an entirely superficial existence, right down to his church attendance, with its reliance on comforting and familiar traditions and rituals, but for him, without the spiritual underpinnings. It is a vague and unanchored need that dominates Michael's world. Additionally, an apparently indifferent God has nearly allowed his son to die. His drinking increases, and the friction with his wife begins to grow to an unbridgeable distance. Finally, enter Lara, a fellow teacher, who is a new and exotic addition to his life.
Lara is a complex figure. She's a femme fatale with killer looks and amoral sexual appetites, who is rumored to have slept with Castro and to have known Graham Greene. She's a shadowy figure with shadowy ties—through family and a previous marriage—to the intelligence community. Right-wing, left-wing, it's an ever-shifting cynical prism —the spy game's "Hall of Mirrors"—that the reader shouldn't even try to penetrate in hopes of understanding. However, Lara can also be fragile, even frantic. At times, this character's complexity breaks down into confusingly mixed signals. Which Lara is real? The fact that she reflects, just as disjointedly, the world and its intrigues perhaps provides an answer, though it leaves the reader with an ever-shifting symbol-of-the-moment more than a flesh and blood character.
Upon meeting Michael, there is a witty, allusive repartee between the two. Lara launches zingers about Michael's Norman Rockwell family, and Michael counters with his Anna Karenina response—and invitation— "Happy families are all alike." At this level, Lara works best. The affair begins and Michael is hardly subtle as he skates closer to the edge with Lara. He drinks more and stays out to all hours of the night, while neglecting the needs and company of his family. A price quickly begins to accrue.
Kristin isn't dumb. Though the accident with Paul now has her immersed in an upscale Bible study, she nevertheless remains suspicious of her husband. Paul is also picking up on changes in Dad and starts to act out. But Michael is in too deep now. There are rough sexual games, guns, and some mean racquetball. However, the recent death of a brother forces Lara to revisit her past, which is on an island near Haiti. This memory triggers Lara's disintegration. It seems her brother, on his island—St. Trinity—had stolen her soul, and she needs to get it back through a vudoun ceremony.
At this point, things are getting pretty cluttered in the novel. Does Stone wish his novel to be a noirish thriller or a black comedy? I suppose there's no reason why both can't be done—Jim Thompson proved that numerous times—but the jarring tone shift that occurs in the novel risks going beyond a narrative surprise. What had started out as an American tale of adultery and other small town darknesses transitions quite suddenly into a Hawthorne-like tale, with an international Goodman Brown moving down a phantasmagoric woodland path filled with monsters, both external and internal. Like the original, Michael has left behind his Faith—what little there was of it. How readers will respond to this shift will vary, no doubt creating camps of those that love Stone's experimentation and those that simply find it incoherent. There will also be those, like myself, who can stake out a middle ground by carefully following the author's thread through the murky night, while at the same time not letting the story become overwhelmed by the shadows.
For Stone's purposes, Lara's home, St. Trinity, is something of a generic “hotspot.” Although similar to Compostela from Stone's Flag for Sunrise, it lacks that novel's topical link to the troubles of the time. There are rumors of rebels, the CIA, Special Ops, Columbian drug runners—all roaming the countryside and armed to the teeth. In the hills, voudon drums constantly beat out the island's troubling heartbeat. The place is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. Somehow, knowledge of this rapidly growing, but seemingly remote, danger reaches Michael while stateside, as both he and Lara schedule to meet—and to dive—during the Easter break. He is also there to lend support to the suddenly weak Lara, who is frantic over her lost soul. The cast of characters is ludicrous and for the most part evil. Even the more neutral ones are over the top. For example, Liz McKie, a reporter, and probable CIA informant, has a manic, in-your-face air about her. She's like Dennis Hopper whooping it up over Kurtz while still insisting she's trying to do a job. Basically, like Michael, she digs the action and the danger. She is also not to be trusted.
Michael lands in this mess and undergoes something of a transformation. Gone is the drunk, lets-have-fun guy, and now comes the hero. A plane—seeking to get out before the balloon goes up—goes down in the bay with some valuable goods, which angers the resident Columbian drug lords. The connection between Lara's brother and the drug lords is only hinted at, leaving the reader to make guesses in the dark. Michael is dragooned—for love's sake, not to mention Lara's life, to make a night-time dive for the goods. This is another very effective and well-written section. Though different, it also recalls a similar scene from Stone's earlier Flag for Sunrise. Both Holliwell from Flag for Sunrise and Ahearn in Bay of Souls find themselves making an actual but also metaphysical descent into the unknown.
If Bay of Souls is about anything, it's about descent. Michael's chance, his opportunity, is only partially grasped. In the end, he plays Judas to both himself and Lara. When Lara earlier asks Ahearn whether he is with her —in the ranks of death,—he must ultimately answer "No"—not that far, baby. Lara, despite her jetsetting hipness, is indeed quite true in her passions. She does love Michael. In the end, it's Michael that hedges (before the cock crows?), though one can hardly blame him as he runs through a demon-filled night, dodging fire-drenched necklacing parties and dancing with a cigar-smoking vudoun witch. Transcendence has its price, and its price is harrowing.
What waits for him at home is not only diminished, it is gone. Kristin has found his hunting friend—and probable local CIA recruiter—to be more attuned to the dull life, while Michael's son is distant and disturbed. Even Megan the barmaid is changed, but in a way that suggests she has found her own walk on the wild side right in the U.S.A. Bay of Souls is not Stone's best work. It is largely a return to areas previously mined—and mined better—in earlier novels. Still, Bay of Souls is a good novel and worth a careful reading. (3 1/2 stars, which I'm rounding up.) Stone, as always, is the serious craftsman dealing with serious themes. It is a disturbing novel, filled with haunting images that resonate both in meaning and vividness long after the book is finished. Stone's nightmarish island in the sun will stand as that author's own small heart of darkness.
Indeed, Ahearn has kept his life in a rough balance, though he does have an eye for the ladies and a taste for whiskey. However, as in all Stone novels, clouds are gathering on the horizon. In the novel's first pages, one senses a growing tension in the Ahearn household. The turn of the wheel begins when Michael and a couple of teacher buddies head out to go deer hunting. The hunting trip has its previously established ritual, with Michael insisting upon stopping at a hole-in-the-wall diner for a special unblended Irish whiskey. This little necessity illustrates clearly how Michael has spent his life encased in empty traditions and conducting tame suburban rituals.
At the diner, Michael safely slums a bit with the locals. Still, there is an edge, a blending of the real and surreal in this nowhere bar. Michael, while chatting up Megan, a young and hard barmaid, feels a faint brush of danger as he is mocked by others at the bar—though it is a brush he apparently enjoys. As Megan turns away to get his whiskey, he notices the forked tongue of a snake tattooed on the nape of her neck. It's a warning and signal of a darker world—its near boundaries. The coming danger is further reinforced by an incident in the woods. As Michael sits in his tree stand, he witnesses another hunter trying to move a deer's carcass through the underbrush with a wheel barrel. It's a grotesque scene, like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, which will later mutate into a more grotesque tableau before the novel's end. To some extent the entire hunting portion of the novel, with all its establishment of fateful symbols and patterns—right down to a dropped flashlight—contains some of the best writing in the book.
A phone call soon shatters the backwoods reverie of the teacher-hunters. Paul, Michael and Kristin's son, nearly dies in an accident. Though the boy lives, the cracks that were in Michael's world suddenly expand. Unlike Kristin, he has no faith to turn to. His has led an entirely superficial existence, right down to his church attendance, with its reliance on comforting and familiar traditions and rituals, but for him, without the spiritual underpinnings. It is a vague and unanchored need that dominates Michael's world. Additionally, an apparently indifferent God has nearly allowed his son to die. His drinking increases, and the friction with his wife begins to grow to an unbridgeable distance. Finally, enter Lara, a fellow teacher, who is a new and exotic addition to his life.
Lara is a complex figure. She's a femme fatale with killer looks and amoral sexual appetites, who is rumored to have slept with Castro and to have known Graham Greene. She's a shadowy figure with shadowy ties—through family and a previous marriage—to the intelligence community. Right-wing, left-wing, it's an ever-shifting cynical prism —the spy game's "Hall of Mirrors"—that the reader shouldn't even try to penetrate in hopes of understanding. However, Lara can also be fragile, even frantic. At times, this character's complexity breaks down into confusingly mixed signals. Which Lara is real? The fact that she reflects, just as disjointedly, the world and its intrigues perhaps provides an answer, though it leaves the reader with an ever-shifting symbol-of-the-moment more than a flesh and blood character.
Upon meeting Michael, there is a witty, allusive repartee between the two. Lara launches zingers about Michael's Norman Rockwell family, and Michael counters with his Anna Karenina response—and invitation— "Happy families are all alike." At this level, Lara works best. The affair begins and Michael is hardly subtle as he skates closer to the edge with Lara. He drinks more and stays out to all hours of the night, while neglecting the needs and company of his family. A price quickly begins to accrue.
Kristin isn't dumb. Though the accident with Paul now has her immersed in an upscale Bible study, she nevertheless remains suspicious of her husband. Paul is also picking up on changes in Dad and starts to act out. But Michael is in too deep now. There are rough sexual games, guns, and some mean racquetball. However, the recent death of a brother forces Lara to revisit her past, which is on an island near Haiti. This memory triggers Lara's disintegration. It seems her brother, on his island—St. Trinity—had stolen her soul, and she needs to get it back through a vudoun ceremony.
At this point, things are getting pretty cluttered in the novel. Does Stone wish his novel to be a noirish thriller or a black comedy? I suppose there's no reason why both can't be done—Jim Thompson proved that numerous times—but the jarring tone shift that occurs in the novel risks going beyond a narrative surprise. What had started out as an American tale of adultery and other small town darknesses transitions quite suddenly into a Hawthorne-like tale, with an international Goodman Brown moving down a phantasmagoric woodland path filled with monsters, both external and internal. Like the original, Michael has left behind his Faith—what little there was of it. How readers will respond to this shift will vary, no doubt creating camps of those that love Stone's experimentation and those that simply find it incoherent. There will also be those, like myself, who can stake out a middle ground by carefully following the author's thread through the murky night, while at the same time not letting the story become overwhelmed by the shadows.
For Stone's purposes, Lara's home, St. Trinity, is something of a generic “hotspot.” Although similar to Compostela from Stone's Flag for Sunrise, it lacks that novel's topical link to the troubles of the time. There are rumors of rebels, the CIA, Special Ops, Columbian drug runners—all roaming the countryside and armed to the teeth. In the hills, voudon drums constantly beat out the island's troubling heartbeat. The place is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. Somehow, knowledge of this rapidly growing, but seemingly remote, danger reaches Michael while stateside, as both he and Lara schedule to meet—and to dive—during the Easter break. He is also there to lend support to the suddenly weak Lara, who is frantic over her lost soul. The cast of characters is ludicrous and for the most part evil. Even the more neutral ones are over the top. For example, Liz McKie, a reporter, and probable CIA informant, has a manic, in-your-face air about her. She's like Dennis Hopper whooping it up over Kurtz while still insisting she's trying to do a job. Basically, like Michael, she digs the action and the danger. She is also not to be trusted.
Michael lands in this mess and undergoes something of a transformation. Gone is the drunk, lets-have-fun guy, and now comes the hero. A plane—seeking to get out before the balloon goes up—goes down in the bay with some valuable goods, which angers the resident Columbian drug lords. The connection between Lara's brother and the drug lords is only hinted at, leaving the reader to make guesses in the dark. Michael is dragooned—for love's sake, not to mention Lara's life, to make a night-time dive for the goods. This is another very effective and well-written section. Though different, it also recalls a similar scene from Stone's earlier Flag for Sunrise. Both Holliwell from Flag for Sunrise and Ahearn in Bay of Souls find themselves making an actual but also metaphysical descent into the unknown.
If Bay of Souls is about anything, it's about descent. Michael's chance, his opportunity, is only partially grasped. In the end, he plays Judas to both himself and Lara. When Lara earlier asks Ahearn whether he is with her —in the ranks of death,—he must ultimately answer "No"—not that far, baby. Lara, despite her jetsetting hipness, is indeed quite true in her passions. She does love Michael. In the end, it's Michael that hedges (before the cock crows?), though one can hardly blame him as he runs through a demon-filled night, dodging fire-drenched necklacing parties and dancing with a cigar-smoking vudoun witch. Transcendence has its price, and its price is harrowing.
What waits for him at home is not only diminished, it is gone. Kristin has found his hunting friend—and probable local CIA recruiter—to be more attuned to the dull life, while Michael's son is distant and disturbed. Even Megan the barmaid is changed, but in a way that suggests she has found her own walk on the wild side right in the U.S.A. Bay of Souls is not Stone's best work. It is largely a return to areas previously mined—and mined better—in earlier novels. Still, Bay of Souls is a good novel and worth a careful reading. (3 1/2 stars, which I'm rounding up.) Stone, as always, is the serious craftsman dealing with serious themes. It is a disturbing novel, filled with haunting images that resonate both in meaning and vividness long after the book is finished. Stone's nightmarish island in the sun will stand as that author's own small heart of darkness.
September 22, 2015
Robert Stone, one of my favorite authors, has written a novel which is clearly unworthy of his great talents. The book has a thrown-together quality, as one improbable incident follows another. The characters are not fully developed, and their motivation is unclear. It almost seems like Mr. Stone just decided that he wanted to write a book that was exciting, frightening, and sexy. Start with a sensitive family drama, then add a little in-the-know power politics, a near death experience while searching undersea for lost emeralds, some terrifying Colombian drug dealers, and end with wild voodoo ceremonies and the wreckage of his home life. What have you got? That’s the question.
October 26, 2008
A good novel. Stone is a good writer, but it did not knock my socks off. This is definitely one of his lesser works.
January 6, 2022
Author Robert Stone studied under Wallace Stegner and you can see Stegner's influence in Stone's crisp descriptive writing, particularily in the first third of the book. The middle third slides into that most tired of all topics, adultery in acadamia. But, before I tossed the book aside the plot quickly pivoted to one of foreign espionage, drug smuggling and voodoo. An often engaging read but an improbable plot. It seems as if it was written with the idea of it being made into a movie.
January 22, 2012
Life is too short to persevere with this book. I haven't read anything by this author before and don't know anything about him but it appears to be written by an english professor. Technically good but the characters are unbelievable and the plot make no sense to me. I usually finish books but this one is going back on the shelf half read.
October 21, 2010
God, I didn't even get very far. I wanted to give up by fifteen pages in. The main character is a whiny jerk, with whom I could not at all sympathize, and no one else was very likable, relatable, or even interesting either. It was just no fun to read.
October 24, 2017
While this book had some gems, overall this was a disappointing book.
Bay of Souls is about Michael Ahearn, a dissatisfied academic from the midwest who is struggling with his family life and is in general unhappy. After his son almost dies from exposure in an incident that is not explained in the slightest, he grows even more distant from his family and eventually begins an affair with the mysterious Lara Purcell.
Just as the cliches would lead you to believe, Michael and Lara begin a tumultuous affair that livens up his life. Lara then tells him that she needs to return to the (fictional) Caribbean island where she grew up to participate in a voudou ceremoney to retrieve her soul. While there, she and Michael get caught up in a web of intrigue related to third world corruption and the drug trade.
In the beginning, this book suffers from following a well worn path of a man having a midlife crisis. Then about halfway through Stone just adds EVERY SINGLE INSANE THING HE CAN THINK OF to make this *not cliche*. Events just didn't make sense and none of the characters except for Michael were well formed.
A big problem I had with this book is how Stone uses the stereotype of the third world country left in ruins as the backdrop for the second half of the novel, but none of it was terribly fleshed out. He wanted you to buy into every single assumption you've ever had about a poor Caribbean island in order to fill in the blanks of his strangely unbelievable story telling.
Also, Lara was white? But believed in voudou? Everything in this section read heavily of cultural appropriation in order to add to the manic pixie dream girl aesthetic of her character.
Despite these plotting issues, I would read another book of Stone's just because where he got the writing right it was AMAZING. The scene where Michael dove on the wrecked plane held my attention and I felt like I was there and he created an otherworldly amount of suspense. The description of the ill timed hunting trip at the beginning of the book was also incredibly well done, and I liked some of the parallels between the diving scene and the hunting trip.
This was disappointing, but it was worth reading for the dive scene alone.
Bay of Souls is about Michael Ahearn, a dissatisfied academic from the midwest who is struggling with his family life and is in general unhappy. After his son almost dies from exposure in an incident that is not explained in the slightest, he grows even more distant from his family and eventually begins an affair with the mysterious Lara Purcell.
Just as the cliches would lead you to believe, Michael and Lara begin a tumultuous affair that livens up his life. Lara then tells him that she needs to return to the (fictional) Caribbean island where she grew up to participate in a voudou ceremoney to retrieve her soul. While there, she and Michael get caught up in a web of intrigue related to third world corruption and the drug trade.
In the beginning, this book suffers from following a well worn path of a man having a midlife crisis. Then about halfway through Stone just adds EVERY SINGLE INSANE THING HE CAN THINK OF to make this *not cliche*. Events just didn't make sense and none of the characters except for Michael were well formed.
A big problem I had with this book is how Stone uses the stereotype of the third world country left in ruins as the backdrop for the second half of the novel, but none of it was terribly fleshed out. He wanted you to buy into every single assumption you've ever had about a poor Caribbean island in order to fill in the blanks of his strangely unbelievable story telling.
Also, Lara was white? But believed in voudou? Everything in this section read heavily of cultural appropriation in order to add to the manic pixie dream girl aesthetic of her character.
Despite these plotting issues, I would read another book of Stone's just because where he got the writing right it was AMAZING. The scene where Michael dove on the wrecked plane held my attention and I felt like I was there and he created an otherworldly amount of suspense. The description of the ill timed hunting trip at the beginning of the book was also incredibly well done, and I liked some of the parallels between the diving scene and the hunting trip.
This was disappointing, but it was worth reading for the dive scene alone.
October 9, 2019
Sento che la strada per il blocco del lettore è vicina, sono combattuta come sempre fra il lasciarlo o continuare ma, devo tutelarmi e non posso farmi bloccare quindi credo che lo lascerò a pagina 69.
La baia delle anime di Robert Stone, dal titolo mi aveva colpito molto perché aveva un qualcosa di misterioso.
Parla di Michael, un professore dalla vita normale.
Sposato,con un figlio, amici con hobby per la caccia (che io odio) e parliamone di questi amici, odio anche per loro.
È un libro da capire, parla spesso di cose politiche e per quanto riguarda me, non è proprio il mio genere.
Michael conosce ad un certo punto una professoressa dall'aspetto molto intrigante, iniziano una specie di storia e lei lo condurrà in un viaggio a Santa Trinità, un isola caraibica e città natale di essa e fra riti vudú e affari loschi politici Michael avrà nuove consapevolezze di se e degli altri.
Parlando di questa donna, mi è stata antipatica fin dall'inizio. Magari sto giudicando troppo velocemente ma vedo Michael come un uomo debole sia per aver mancato di rispetto a quella che è sua moglie e poi perché a sensazione mi sembra un uomo proprio senza polso.
Quindi in parole povere, odio i suoi amici molto snob e altezzosi, odio la caccia, lui non lo capisco proprio, la sua vita coniugale nemmeno, antipatica la sua amante... Direi che il risultato è chiaro.
La baia delle anime di Robert Stone, dal titolo mi aveva colpito molto perché aveva un qualcosa di misterioso.
Parla di Michael, un professore dalla vita normale.
Sposato,con un figlio, amici con hobby per la caccia (che io odio) e parliamone di questi amici, odio anche per loro.
È un libro da capire, parla spesso di cose politiche e per quanto riguarda me, non è proprio il mio genere.
Michael conosce ad un certo punto una professoressa dall'aspetto molto intrigante, iniziano una specie di storia e lei lo condurrà in un viaggio a Santa Trinità, un isola caraibica e città natale di essa e fra riti vudú e affari loschi politici Michael avrà nuove consapevolezze di se e degli altri.
Parlando di questa donna, mi è stata antipatica fin dall'inizio. Magari sto giudicando troppo velocemente ma vedo Michael come un uomo debole sia per aver mancato di rispetto a quella che è sua moglie e poi perché a sensazione mi sembra un uomo proprio senza polso.
Quindi in parole povere, odio i suoi amici molto snob e altezzosi, odio la caccia, lui non lo capisco proprio, la sua vita coniugale nemmeno, antipatica la sua amante... Direi che il risultato è chiaro.
January 15, 2018
This my third Robert Stone read. I started reading him because of something I read: something positive, I thought. While there are lots of authors with awards and time on Short Lists that I find no reward in reading, I thought Stone would be different after reading several blurbs for his books. I guess there's a reason I had to search for those blurbs and had never heard of Stone: he can't create believable characters (much less likeable ones), he's lazy about his choices advancing his plots, and he wastes words on what might be subplots except that he leaves them unfinished or lazily brought to a close. I think I've got one more of his lying around, but I hold zero hope that it will provide entertainment or enlightenment. Too bad I can't award zero stars--that's the award it deserves.
July 12, 2019
Robert Stone writes another personal drama -- partly set in the tropics -- with geopolitical aspirations, a mold previously perfected and now overused by . . . Robert Stone. Short version: he's done it before and he's done it better. If you've never read any of his books before, cancel this one and go read Dog Soldiers and/or A Flag for Sunrise. Both masterpieces, and mined for spare parts (along with Outerbridge Reach) to build this mediocre-by-comparison novel, which rumbles along well enough.
April 28, 2019
I read this book in Dutch. The three parts are unrelated and the scenes all seem to come out of the blue. Another reader noted truthfully that "the caracters acted as if they were into a competition of most unlikeble persons". I agree, with the exception of son Paul.
Despite I still don't know why the author wrote this book, and what his message would be, I did want to continue readig because I wanted to know what would happen next.
Despite I still don't know why the author wrote this book, and what his message would be, I did want to continue readig because I wanted to know what would happen next.
September 19, 2021
As in Children of Light, Stone continues to mine his fascination with crazy women and obsessive creole vodoun. If Stone could have been said to have an MO, it would be: characters who make a conscious choice to abandon safety, sanity and get sucked into a vortex populated by very bad people. This is not to say he's formulaic. He's far too gifted a writer for such a dismissal. If nothing else, it's one of the reasons we love to read Stone--bad things happen to his characters and they don't always survive.
But what I love about Stone's writing, aside from the conceptual brilliance, is the sentences and the oft-understated, unexpected humor. He's a writer's writer. One of the best of all time. It's a small club: James Salter, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff--and for sure, Robert Stone.
But what I love about Stone's writing, aside from the conceptual brilliance, is the sentences and the oft-understated, unexpected humor. He's a writer's writer. One of the best of all time. It's a small club: James Salter, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff--and for sure, Robert Stone.
May 6, 2025
Short visit to Hell
Unstated trouble always lurks under the surface of Stone’s novels. When it emerges it’s often worse than expected. The build-up here, in titillating scenes, lulls until reality manifests itself in some heart-stopping danger. The walk on the wild side always demands some payment.
Unstated trouble always lurks under the surface of Stone’s novels. When it emerges it’s often worse than expected. The build-up here, in titillating scenes, lulls until reality manifests itself in some heart-stopping danger. The walk on the wild side always demands some payment.
January 25, 2019
Engaging enough once it got its sea legs, but I was bothered throughout by the whiffs of misogyny. The prose was hard going at times—willfully obscure, I thought, sometimes overreaching—with moments of lyricism that kept me coming back for more.
October 30, 2020
Starts off great, and then it slowly evolves one ridiculous twist after another, without any real rhyme or reason. Probably shouldn't have made this my first Stone read, but oh well. Hopefully it gets better from here.
December 15, 2017
Not so good.
Bland prose, bland plot.
Bland prose, bland plot.
May 30, 2023
Robert. Stone.
March 24, 2024
Couldn’t get I to it at all, it was almost impossible to get on with the characters and connect with them in any way. Won’t be finishing this one unfortunately
April 10, 2010
About a decade ago Richard Dreyfuss starred in a short-lived television show called “The Education of Max Bickford.” Dreyfuss played Bickford, an aging professor at a small New England college. Fairly comfortable in his academic position, Bickford still felt unfulfilled emotionally and found that he had lost touch with the Jewish faith of his youth.
Imagine now Russell Crowe in the Dreyfuss role and his college transplanted to the Midwest, or, as he refers to it at one point, “Flyover Land.” In Stone’s novel, the professor’s name is Michael Ahearn and the faith from which he feels estranged is Catholicism. Ahearn feels a growing emptiness inside, as well as a growing alienation from his wife and son. Even the near death by overexposure of his son doesn’t bring them closer, rather just the opposite.
The only things that Michael seems to enjoy are drinking and hunting with some fellow academics. Even at those points the pleasure is mixed as Ahearn often doesn’t even fire his rifle, allowing the others to do the work of killing.
Into Michael’s life steps Lara Purcell, a new political science professor with a mysterious past. It’s not long before Michael and Lara are lovers, but there is more to Lara’s past than simply an absent husband. Lara and her late brother were not only involved in espionage, but also drug smuggling and voodoo. In fact, Lara believes that her brother had given her soul away to a voodoo priestess when she was a child. Now that he is dead she wants to get it back.
Stone is best known for his novel “Dog Soldiers,” which was turned into the film “Who’ll Stop the Rain” with Nick Nolte. As in that novel, Stone allows his protagonist to be drawn into a situation that not only places his life in danger, but also forces him to learn things about himself that he may not have wanted to know.
While a number of reviewers and critics find comparisons to Hemingway and Graham Greene in Stone’s writing, I personally think any such similarity is a stretch. He does touch upon their themes of an outsider caught in an exotic and dangerous situation, but fails, for the most part, in bringing the reader a real sense of place. In the case of Hemingway, at least his stories remained coherent, no matter how introspective he allowed his protagonist to become.
Unfortunately, Stone can’t bring any of these characters to life, and the book reads like a morality play. Reminiscent of the early Peter Benchley, Stone is at his best in the few action scenes. In those sections, especially those cinematic chapters dealing with a night dive to recover lost property in a downed airplane, it is easy to see why the author does have a loyal following. Overall, though, this reads like the early draft of a longer novel Stone wasn’t able to complete before his deadline.
Imagine now Russell Crowe in the Dreyfuss role and his college transplanted to the Midwest, or, as he refers to it at one point, “Flyover Land.” In Stone’s novel, the professor’s name is Michael Ahearn and the faith from which he feels estranged is Catholicism. Ahearn feels a growing emptiness inside, as well as a growing alienation from his wife and son. Even the near death by overexposure of his son doesn’t bring them closer, rather just the opposite.
The only things that Michael seems to enjoy are drinking and hunting with some fellow academics. Even at those points the pleasure is mixed as Ahearn often doesn’t even fire his rifle, allowing the others to do the work of killing.
Into Michael’s life steps Lara Purcell, a new political science professor with a mysterious past. It’s not long before Michael and Lara are lovers, but there is more to Lara’s past than simply an absent husband. Lara and her late brother were not only involved in espionage, but also drug smuggling and voodoo. In fact, Lara believes that her brother had given her soul away to a voodoo priestess when she was a child. Now that he is dead she wants to get it back.
Stone is best known for his novel “Dog Soldiers,” which was turned into the film “Who’ll Stop the Rain” with Nick Nolte. As in that novel, Stone allows his protagonist to be drawn into a situation that not only places his life in danger, but also forces him to learn things about himself that he may not have wanted to know.
While a number of reviewers and critics find comparisons to Hemingway and Graham Greene in Stone’s writing, I personally think any such similarity is a stretch. He does touch upon their themes of an outsider caught in an exotic and dangerous situation, but fails, for the most part, in bringing the reader a real sense of place. In the case of Hemingway, at least his stories remained coherent, no matter how introspective he allowed his protagonist to become.
Unfortunately, Stone can’t bring any of these characters to life, and the book reads like a morality play. Reminiscent of the early Peter Benchley, Stone is at his best in the few action scenes. In those sections, especially those cinematic chapters dealing with a night dive to recover lost property in a downed airplane, it is easy to see why the author does have a loyal following. Overall, though, this reads like the early draft of a longer novel Stone wasn’t able to complete before his deadline.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 23, 2014
"The whole world of otherness was waiting for him there [...] It was no place for him." That's what Robert Stone writes about the protagonist of his novel "Bay of Souls" who visits a Caribbean island. Unfortunately, this "world of otherness" makes the novel no place for me. I am heavily allergic to possessions of souls by evil spirits, soul reclaiming rituals, and most of all, to Caribbean vodoun. Of course, many readers enjoy supernatural elements in literature; they will probably like the novel more than I did.
Michael Ahearn is an English professor at a mid-Western university. He lives a relatively happy if boring life with his wife and son. A beautiful and mysterious Caribbean-born Lara joins the faculty. Michael becomes totally infatuated with her and a frenzied love affair commences. When Lara asks Michael to accompany her to her native island of St. Trinity to participate in traditional rites on the occasion of memorial service for her brother, he readily agrees. The island is torn by political unrest, and corruption and drug smuggling are rampant. And then we have the whole thing with vodoun, rites, evil spirits and places where "untended souls await visitation, salvation, home." Gritting my teeth I managed to get through the St. Trinity episode (over 100 pages); enjoying only the passages on diving (no souls here, just the good old real life). Back in mid-West Michael faces the consequences of his transgression.
I really like the fragments of the novel that happen outside St. Trinity. There are some powerful and well-written scenes. The memorable wheelbarrow incident during the hunting trip and the post-St. Trinity passages show that Mr. Stone is an accomplished writer. I just wish there were no Lara in the novel. In a way the book reminds me of "Deer Hunter", the famous movie about Vietnam War. I vividly remember the magnificent pre-Vietnam and post-Vietnam sequences in the film. Nothing else.
Two stars.
Michael Ahearn is an English professor at a mid-Western university. He lives a relatively happy if boring life with his wife and son. A beautiful and mysterious Caribbean-born Lara joins the faculty. Michael becomes totally infatuated with her and a frenzied love affair commences. When Lara asks Michael to accompany her to her native island of St. Trinity to participate in traditional rites on the occasion of memorial service for her brother, he readily agrees. The island is torn by political unrest, and corruption and drug smuggling are rampant. And then we have the whole thing with vodoun, rites, evil spirits and places where "untended souls await visitation, salvation, home." Gritting my teeth I managed to get through the St. Trinity episode (over 100 pages); enjoying only the passages on diving (no souls here, just the good old real life). Back in mid-West Michael faces the consequences of his transgression.
I really like the fragments of the novel that happen outside St. Trinity. There are some powerful and well-written scenes. The memorable wheelbarrow incident during the hunting trip and the post-St. Trinity passages show that Mr. Stone is an accomplished writer. I just wish there were no Lara in the novel. In a way the book reminds me of "Deer Hunter", the famous movie about Vietnam War. I vividly remember the magnificent pre-Vietnam and post-Vietnam sequences in the film. Nothing else.
Two stars.
August 26, 2016
If there's one particular plot that has a tendency to write itself whether anyone wants to read it again or not, it's the one where a man cheats on his wife with an unbelievably sexy woman who transitions from an almost feral cool to 100% freakshow crazypants right around the time he decides to fully bail on his marriage. One doesn't even have to seek these sorts of books out, they just bubble up everywhere, like a sunburn on a redhead. You wade through them, tolerating the portions where he impotently struggles with whether or not he should pretend to feel guilty, waiting for the part where he makes some terrible decision to sneak a weekend away with his perfect little time bomb. What will the confrontation be like? How will his young son react to the news of his father's choices? In the hands of a great author, this sort of tedium can be skillfully redeemed by the characters, the setting, even the prose itself. It's heavy lifting, but it can be done, and Robert Stone is a heavy lifter.
This one seems to have gotten away from him. There's moments--blips, really--where the terminology of international espionage miscelleny and alcoholic journalism expand the pages outward into a better story, as if they were an old fashioned fireplace bellows of seriousness. Snuck in by characters that ring of cliche--a cocky reporter or a death-drenched cartel kingpin--you'll sense a tale of more depth, but it leaves as abruptly as their behavior was introduced. The finest portion of the book, where Charles Dicken's Madame Defarge is recast as a voodoo priestess who is also, somehow, the long arm of druglords, isn't even graced with an ending, it's just abandoned. You're stuck riding around in the back pocket of another cranky professor-type with a 40-something hard-on lost in a world his academia didn't prepare him for. If you aren't tired of those yet, fine. But if you aren't tired of those yet, you probably don't read that much in the first place.
This one seems to have gotten away from him. There's moments--blips, really--where the terminology of international espionage miscelleny and alcoholic journalism expand the pages outward into a better story, as if they were an old fashioned fireplace bellows of seriousness. Snuck in by characters that ring of cliche--a cocky reporter or a death-drenched cartel kingpin--you'll sense a tale of more depth, but it leaves as abruptly as their behavior was introduced. The finest portion of the book, where Charles Dicken's Madame Defarge is recast as a voodoo priestess who is also, somehow, the long arm of druglords, isn't even graced with an ending, it's just abandoned. You're stuck riding around in the back pocket of another cranky professor-type with a 40-something hard-on lost in a world his academia didn't prepare him for. If you aren't tired of those yet, fine. But if you aren't tired of those yet, you probably don't read that much in the first place.
June 26, 2015
Robert Stone is a master writer and Bay of Souls is one of his later novels. Michael Ahern is a professor who goes off on a hunting trip with a few colleagues and comes back to a family crisis. Ahern struggles with the aftermath and continues the duties of his professorship, which includes supervising a beautiful, young doctoral student, Phyllis Strom. Phyllis needs a committee to review her work and she requests that he reach out to another professor, Lara Purcell. Lara is brilliant and athletic, truly a femme fatale. Ahearn is drawn to her and soon gets caught up in the mystery life that grows from her past. She convinces him to join him for a visit to an island which is in the throes of revolution, a place she'd lived when she was growing up. Ahearn soon realizes he's caught up in politics and strange ceremonies he doesn't understand and Lara seems to be a different person when unmoored from the world of academia. The story moves quickly but in mysterious ways and Ahearn is forced to make choices for which he has no roadmap. Stone brings the reader into this heart of darkness and we sense that Ahearn's life will change forever as he follows Lara along this twisting path.
March 2, 2016
The most enjoyable moment for me was removing the bookmark to end the attempt to read this story. A writer usually weaves some bit of interest into the story to give the reader a reason for turning a page. It became clumsy, jumbled words on a page, many of which I reread to be sure I wasn't distracted and missing the point. I truly enjoy reading books of various genres and envy the talent of authors to be able to commit a story to words. I forced myself to read exactly half of the story before coming to the decision that there was not one reason to continue. Even with the not-so-great books I've read, I still finish them because I want to know how it ends. Not so with this book. My apologies to the main character, the wife, the son and the lover for leaving their stories unfinished for this reader but apathy won a rare victory. I acquired this book in a library used book fundraiser event. Had I paid full price, I would feel worse. As it is, one dollar was overpriced. In fairness I have seen others review this author with positive comments on his other books. I will keep an open mind.
December 6, 2015
Minor Stone, but even his lesser work is better than most other authors' best. Bay of Souls is a short book, but it takes a while for the Stone to get the gears of the book in motion. The early sections feel both underfed and overwritten, including an embarrassingly overheated sex scene, complete with a politically charged bout of auto-asphyxiation.
Once the book moves to St. Trinity, a troubled Caribbean island roiled by a U.S.-backed junta, Stone is on surer ground.
Once the book moves to St. Trinity, a troubled Caribbean island roiled by a U.S.-backed junta, Stone is on surer ground.
August 14, 2016
Stone is up to his old tricks here, with dramatic effect. It's an odd story though...an adulterous Midwestern academic transported to the world of Caribbean voodoo -- or some variation thereof. I personally could not credit the material on spirit worship with the necessary gravitas I believe Stone needs to make this novel work. For avid Stone fans only.
November 17, 2007
Hmmm. I want to say "pointless", but I'm not sure I mean that. Although there really wasn't much point to that story - not that a story needs a point, but considering the beginning and the middle (unrelated. UNRELATED! so weird.) of this one, the end was a major anti-climax.
August 20, 2008
What starts as a solid narrative foundation falls into the same old Stone song-and-dance, with heroines speaking in tongues and the Protagonist being shuttled about adrift in political and hallucinogenic chaos for the last 40 pages or so. Consumed mostly on the return leg from North Carolina.
September 7, 2008
Halfway between an existential midlife crisis academic novel and an intelligence community thriller ... not sure it all ties together the way it should. But Damascus Gate by the same author is great.
November 2, 2012
not sure how or why this ended up on my read list...not interested at all in this book and didn't read it.
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