Don't Stop the Carnival: A Novel
by Herman Wouk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Herman WoukEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-05-15
ISBN: 0316955124
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of Don't Stop the Carnival: A Novel
Book Review: JUST AS GOOD AS THE DAY IT WAS WRITTEN....One funny and entertaining read you need to revisit.
Summary: 5 Stars
There are novelists, writers, natural story tellers and alas, people who scribble. Fortunately for us we are blessed with individuals like Herman Wouk who is not only a novelist, but a true story teller who leaves the scribblers to their own little corner of the world. On the other hand, unfortunately for us, we readers tend to have the attention span of ferrets after 10 cups of strong coffee and so many of us leap to the latest and the greatest in the world of publishing, and seemingly forget that which was good several years ago, is still as good and fresh as the date it was written. Don't Stop the Carnival is one of those works that is becoming lost in the scramble and is being consigned to the bottom shelves of libraries and used book stores, as the literally hundreds of new books are being published each day...what a pity! We need to slow down a bit and give many of these older works a reread now and then. We are missing so much!
Not only is Herman Wouk a good story teller; I was first hooked on his work with The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar years ago, but he is also a very funny man, and probably one of the best builders of fictional characters we have been fortunate enough to have had amongst us for the past fifty years or so.
I note in the reviews here that the plot of this story has been done to death and there are quite a number of very nicely done reviews that give us a great overview. Briefly though, we have a rather tired New York PR man who has absolutely had it with his life and does what most of us have wanted to do at some point in our lives; some of us have had several of these episodes, and at the same time is going through major big time midlife crises. He does what many dream of and few actually do...he packs up and heads for the Islands! Always keep in mind that Norman Paperman, or antagonist, is a very, very flawed man! I ask though, who of us in not?
Through an odd set of circumstances, Norman Paperman ends up running a hotel on the island of Amerigo (a fictional island) in the West Indies. Sounds like the novels we read where a rich Englishman dumps it all for a hotel or home in Tuscany doesn't it? Well, Wouk is not only a great writer, but he is also a very, very funny man and if you couple this with his sheer genius for character development, you have a very potent combination of a wonderful read. This work is simply dripping with realistic, funny and quirky individuals who make up a rather unique island society...we get a glimpse of the good, the bad and the ugly but for the most part all hilarious.
Now the reader or potential reader needs to keep a couple of things in mind when picking this work from the shelf. First is that the setting is in the very late 1950s and very early 1960s. Indeed much has changed since then. We as a people have done our best to muck about a mess things up; but to state that this book is invalid due to being "dated" boarders on ludicrous. That is like saying that Pride and Prejudice, Emma and books of that time and ilk are no longer valid because they are "dated." Give me a break! Secondly, the silly claim that the book contains a note of racism is equally ridiculous. We in this country tend to take great offense if an author portrays our region as being anything but East Coast or West Coast sophisticated urban. Silly, silly, silly. Most of use to not have the accents of the talking heads we see on T.V. each night on the evening news (boring, boring, boring) and the majority of us have certain regional traits, ideas and beliefs. This is a good thing. I live in the hills of the Missouri Ozarks. For me to run around an pretend that I have the same attitude, social background and outlook on life as some upper crust Bostonian is simply unrealistic and not being true to what I am...for better or for worse. Also, keep in mind that this is a FICTIONAL WORK, and not a study of indigenous people and non-indigenous tourists, scallywags abound, loveable and unlovable people inhabit this story and are mixed together in a fictional setting.
Enough editorializing...
This is one fine read. Wouk is able to pull off what many writers simply would be unable to make believable. Just when you think that things could not get worse and cannot figure out how the author could possible make it worse or funnier, Wouk does and does it with class. It is funny, has great characters and will keep you turning pages way past the time when you should be in bed sleeping; for the most part chuckling while doing so. Like many, I was not overly fond of the ending, but hey, it was not my book and if I want a book with an ending I personally want, then I figure I should go out and write my own book.
For a entertaining read, I can hardly name a better work nor can I name a better work that will stick with you for quite some time after its completion.
Don Blankenship
The Ozarks
Summary of Don't Stop the Carnival: A Novel
It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.)
It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.
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