Feast Day of Fools (Audible Audio Edition) James Lee Burke Will Patton Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Download As PDF : Feast Day of Fools (Audible Audio Edition) James Lee Burke Will Patton Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town with a deep and abiding respect for the citizens in his care. Still mourning the loss of his cherished wife and locked in a perilous almost-romance with his deputy, Pam Tibbs, a woman many decades his junior, Hackberry feeds off the deeds of evil men to keep his own demons at bay.
Feast Day of Fools (Audible Audio Edition) James Lee Burke Will Patton Whole Story Audiobooks Books
I need to start off by saying that I've long been a fan of James Lee Burke. I have been enamored by his descriptive prose. I have enjoyed eccentric characters who speak in unlikely monologues of philosophy, theology and ethics. I have appreciated the dark tone and the complicated moral ambiguity of his novels. But....and I hate to say it.... sometimes too much of a good thing...is, well...frankly downright annoying.I really struggled to finish this novel. Seriously, how many eccentric characters can exist in one small Texas town? One (maybe two) characters who pontificate about the state of the world, the nature of humanity, and the path to redemption and spirituality can be clever, perhaps even `thought provoking', but when every character in a novel speaks in pretentious monologues and pages are filled with rambling introspection, it quickly loses its charm.
The fact that it's pretentious is a big enough problem, but it also seriously erodes the credibility of the novel. This isn't a light-hearted quirky South Florida crime novel in the spirit of Carl Hiaasen where eccentric characters combine with an outrageous plot in a hilarious satirical romp. This is a serious novel. It's filled with unrelenting despair and cruelty. The fact that none of the characters who populate the novel are believable was a huge problem for me.
Many have mentioned credibility concerns regarding Hack's age. The man is north of 80 but still manages to mix it up with his fists and in the bedroom. I picture Clint Eastwood whenever I think of Hack, but I'm not sure even Dirty Harry has that level of prowess. Personally, this didn't bother me nearly as much as other credibility concerns. One thought that occurred to me throughout this novel was how much it seemed like the events of the novel were happening in a strange bubble. There was no indication ever that Hack reported to anyone, that there was political pressure, media attention, or even a hint that there was a community outside the small circle of players in the novel.
Simply put, this novel tested my patience. I didn't believe that any of the bizarre characters; from the Preacher, to Krill, to La Magdalena, to the Cowboy Minister, to Hack himself were real. This novel is a rambling, tedious, and pretentious exercise in self-indulgence. I may have to give up on Burke. I'm honestly not sure I have what it takes to wade through the prose of another one of his novels.
In the words of Captain Kurtz: "The horror, the horror, the horror...."
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Feast Day of Fools (Audible Audio Edition) James Lee Burke Will Patton Whole Story Audiobooks Books Reviews
I have enjoyed Burke's work for 20 years but am tiring of his over-the-top caricatures of anything and anybody who works for the govt. His liberal preachiness is offputting. This will be the last of my JLB books.
In The Feast Day of Fools Burke mixes the best and the worst of his writing, weaving brilliantly colored threads into a tattered and richly-hued tapestry of characters and landscape. The first book featuring Hackberry Holland was much more consistent, much more disciplined (I haven't read Rain Gods). This one is lush and flawed.
In Feast Day Burke's some of characters are wonderfully filled out, very complex, but he can't leave them alone. At times he has most of them stepping out of themselves to become two-dimensional stereotypes or even just plain windbags. He is particularly weak with his handling of Mexicans. With their B-movie dialogue/dialect and their ridiculously described relationships, I can only picture them all with sombreros, exaggerated brims flapping; mariachi costumes and silver-toed boots with spurs. Maybe Burke means to be satirical, but that wouldn't be fair, because the story and the pain within it are not the stuff of satire. But Burke needs to learn a LOT more about Mexicans before he can write them as characters, satirical or otherwise.
The women are often peculiar. Burke has much affection for them but can't seem to come up with a way to keep them from seeming stiff. Pam, Hack's deputy, keeps getting dragged into playing Tonto to Lone Ranger. Anton Ling, who shares the spotlight with Pam (and both serve as handmaidens to the ghost of Hack's dead wife) appears to exist as a series of still photos Here she is La Virgen; here she is the Stoic Asian; here she is Wonder Woman, etc.
Something my English teachers told us never to do was to use characters as mouthpieces. It is good advice. Instead of dialogue at times Burke gives his heroes and villains not just single paragraphs but whole pages in which to philodophize and pontificate and bemoan and to remember a war in a that should be the meat of a novel instead of a distraction from one. It's not that the themes aren't interesting they are, and they are also very important. But a novel just isn't the place and undisciplined verbiage should never, never be the medium. These rambles into the thickets of war and the big issues of life seriously damage the flow of the story and my attachment to the characters.
The settings into which Burke puts his characters are spectacular in real life. But here, too, he goes overboard with lists of colors and repeating imagery as if he couldn't imagine that his readers would pick up on a subtler palette. This is really sad because the landscape deserves better. As he moves towards the end of the book, his landscape descriptions, generally one of his fortés, improve.
Burke's various story lines are fine, though I think he ignores them too often to indulge in speechifying via his characters. When they are a vehicle for his great writing, they work well.
And once in a great while, his agenda becomes both crystal clear and beautifully expressed, fully embedded in the novel itself and about as ironic as anything you can imagine, as when he has Hack think
"But Hackberry knew that if there was any lesson or wisdom in his toughts, he would not be able to pass it on. The only wisdom an old man learns in this world is that his life experience is his sole possession. It is also the measure of his worth as a chuman being, the sum of his offering to whatever hand created him and the ticket he carries with him into eternity. But if a man tries to put all the lessons he has learned on a road map for others, he might as well dip his pen into invisible ink."
I need to start off by saying that I've long been a fan of James Lee Burke. I have been enamored by his descriptive prose. I have enjoyed eccentric characters who speak in unlikely monologues of philosophy, theology and ethics. I have appreciated the dark tone and the complicated moral ambiguity of his novels. But....and I hate to say it.... sometimes too much of a good thing...is, well...frankly downright annoying.
I really struggled to finish this novel. Seriously, how many eccentric characters can exist in one small Texas town? One (maybe two) characters who pontificate about the state of the world, the nature of humanity, and the path to redemption and spirituality can be clever, perhaps even `thought provoking', but when every character in a novel speaks in pretentious monologues and pages are filled with rambling introspection, it quickly loses its charm.
The fact that it's pretentious is a big enough problem, but it also seriously erodes the credibility of the novel. This isn't a light-hearted quirky South Florida crime novel in the spirit of Carl Hiaasen where eccentric characters combine with an outrageous plot in a hilarious satirical romp. This is a serious novel. It's filled with unrelenting despair and cruelty. The fact that none of the characters who populate the novel are believable was a huge problem for me.
Many have mentioned credibility concerns regarding Hack's age. The man is north of 80 but still manages to mix it up with his fists and in the bedroom. I picture Clint Eastwood whenever I think of Hack, but I'm not sure even Dirty Harry has that level of prowess. Personally, this didn't bother me nearly as much as other credibility concerns. One thought that occurred to me throughout this novel was how much it seemed like the events of the novel were happening in a strange bubble. There was no indication ever that Hack reported to anyone, that there was political pressure, media attention, or even a hint that there was a community outside the small circle of players in the novel.
Simply put, this novel tested my patience. I didn't believe that any of the bizarre characters; from the Preacher, to Krill, to La Magdalena, to the Cowboy Minister, to Hack himself were real. This novel is a rambling, tedious, and pretentious exercise in self-indulgence. I may have to give up on Burke. I'm honestly not sure I have what it takes to wade through the prose of another one of his novels.
In the words of Captain Kurtz "The horror, the horror, the horror...."
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