9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I loved this book, May 31, 2006
This review is from: Back to Wando Passo: A Novel (Hardcover)
I haven't read anything quite like it. In places, Payne goes on a little longer than I wish he had, but the truth is, this book wrecked my life for two and a half days. I resented everything that took me away from reading it. After finishing, I sat speechless for thirty minutes. It's that rare combination of both literary and a page turner. Gorgeous prose, a compelling plot, marvelously full, flawed characters, and such original ideas. I love the way he handles issues of mental illness, the beauty and pain of marriage, dreams lost and redesigned, and most of all what he's saying about race, which feels not just interesting, but important. And the sex scene. I'll say no more.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Splendid, June 2, 2006
This review is from: Back to Wando Passo: A Novel (Hardcover)
If I'm lucky, I find one great novel each year -- a big meaty novel I fall upon and into, give up days of my life for, finish reading but never really emerge from. Think of novels like The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
Now read Wando Passo, best described as two novels intertwined and two unforgettable characters: Ransom Hill, a hyper-charged 21st-century man desperate to regain his wife and reform his life; and Adelaide ("Addie") DeLay, a Civil-War-era Southern wife intent on finding what is forbidden, that is to say love.
Mystery, love story, culture clash -- all that, plus Payne's gorgeous lyric prose, particularly, to my taste, in Addie's story.
Wando Passo might cost you a week, and afterward more weeks if you've not read Payne's earlier novels, including my favorites, Ruin Creek and Early for the Dance.
What a joy to know that American publishers can still recognize a great novel.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Couldn't-Put-It-Down Gratifying Ride, June 15, 2006
This review is from: Back to Wando Passo: A Novel (Hardcover)
Talk about central character Ransom Hill having a journey...reading the two intertwined stories of David Payne's novel BACK TO WANDO PASSO was an absorbing, enlightening, entertaining, instructive, deeply intriguing journey for this reader with a thrilling concluding event in chapter fifty-nine. Mr. Payne demonstrated what the sages have been saying for eons -that life is an interconnected web of relationships in this corporeal realm as well as in other realms, whether we are aware of it or not. Shakespeare said as much in The Tempest, "what's past is prologue".
Mr. Payne has thrown just about everything in this book - love, sex, marriage, violence, mystery, parenting, war, passion, a new twist on the proverbial kitchen sink - a pot.....and that always sensitive, ever-present, often explosive, confusing, emotional and frequently under-discussed topic, race - America's third rail and vulnerable solar plexus.
The humanity in this novel is profound and his observations of human frailties are penetrating and beautifully, often poetically, expressed. Mr. Payne doesn't shy away from its dicey complexity and he articulates their many facets clearly.
Most especially, I appreciated the spirituality running throughout his story and the questions he raises about how to live and how to treat "the other". He puts his finger right on the shame of the South's legacy and calls it by its first name.
I'm from Massachusetts and my own brief seven-year experience living and working as a theater artist in the South in Richmond, Virginia (the belly of the beast?), Montgomery, AL, Southeast Florida and throughout North Carolina affirms what I believe Mr. Payne's novel lays out - that for many, black and white, the lingering imbalance in the regla (proper order) of the relations between them ruptured so long ago is still a live, pulsating thing needing to be addressed.
Inferred in this novel is, I believe, a plea for a better way, a return to regla, perhaps no better expressed than in the words of poet Qwendolyn Brooks:
"We are each other's harvest
We are each other's business
We are each other's magnitude and bond."
BACK TO WANDO PASSO is a substantial work of artful storytelling and is a gem.
Benny Sato Ambush
Profesional Stage Director, Producer, Educator
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