Far Tortuga (45 page)

Noon.

A man in a blue boat. Blue sky and breeze.

A loggerhead, rude shell awash, holds its ancient head at a hard angle; its eye reflects the sun as the blue boat passes.

Gone.

evening star

morning star

The sun, coming hard around the world.

Green seas of the continental shelf roll west toward the mainland.

At first light the trade wind freshens and the solitary man raises his head. Mangrove radicels, copra husks and half-sunk fronds of palm float in a milky sea.

The man balances the turtle on the gunwales. He rests a little, then cuts the flipper thongs and eases the turtle over the side.

Still upside down, the turtle sinks, the blank face of its calipee pale in the deep. When it rights itself, the pale face vanishes.

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of
The Paris Review
. Besides
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published four other novels, including
Far Tortuga
. Mr. Matthiessen’s unique career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous and widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them
The Tree Where Man Was Born
, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and
The Snow Leopard
, which won it. His other works of nonfiction include
The Cloud Forest
and
Under the Mountain Wall
(which together received an Award of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters),
The Wind Birds, Blue Meridian, Sand Rivers, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, Men’s Lives
, and, most recently,
African
Silences
. His new novel is
Killing Mister Watson
.

edited by McKay Jenkins

In this single-volume collection of the distinguished author’s nonfiction are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen’s vision. Comprehensive and engrossing,
The Peter Matthiessen Reader
celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature’s noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world—as well as ourselves—truthfully and clearly.

Nonfiction

In
Lost Man’s River
Matthiessen returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestseller
Killing Mister Watson
. In 1910 a sugarcane planter named E. J. Watson was gunned down by a group of his neighbors, perhaps in cold blood, perhaps in self defense. Years later, E. J.’s son Lucius tries to discover the truth of his father’s life and death. And even as Lucius tries to redeem his half-lost life by gathering the testimony (and braving the threats) of poachers and renegades, he struggles for the future of the remote country in which they live.

Fiction/Literature

A powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. Through Peter Matthiessen’s eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies.

Current Events/Travel

In a malarial outpost in South America two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local
comandante
. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual existence and the politics of cultural genocide.

Fiction/Literature

And Other Stories

“Mr. Matthiessen proves himself here to be a connoisseur of coiled tensions, between men and women, between people of different social classes, and, repeatedly, between races.… There is something almost mysterious about his achievement … qualities for which one can think of only classical or old-fashioned words: gravitas, grandeur, beauty.”

—The New York Times

Fiction/Literature

Killing Mister Watson
is a fictional masterpiece, the first novel of the Watson trilogy, written at the peak of Peter Matthiessen’s powers as a novelist. Drawn from fragments of historical fact, it brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.

Fiction/Literature

“Matthiessen’s portrayal of a disappearing way of life has a biting eloquence no outside reporter could command. The fishermen’s voices—humorous, bitter, bewildered, resigned—are as clear as the technical procedures of their work and the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.”

—
Newsweek

Literature

“Far Tortuga
is a singular experience, a series of moments captured whole and rendered with a clarity that quickens the blood.… From its opening moment … the reader senses that the narrative itself is the recapitulation of a cosmic process, as though the author had sought to link his storytelling with the eye of creation.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Literature

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