Customer Reviews

A Far Country

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Your enjoyment of this novel may depend on how fast you bond with the main character, Isabel. She had me at "Hello."

A FAR COUNTRY has elements of a quest novel, but it could also be a "Coming of Age" novel. Isabel is sent to the city because a drought has devastated her homelands. She takes a "perch," a flatbed truck surrounded by a railing that looks rather like a birdcage. Isabel hopes to find her brother, Isaias, who left for the city to become a musician. If you have ever been lost in a big city, you will feel for Isabel. The address she has for her cousin, for whom she will babysit during the week, doesn't mean much to the people she asks for help. When she finally finds "The settlement" it's a scary place indeed.

Isabel finds a weekend job working as a flag-waver for a political candidate. That's where she meets Josiane, who could be an American teenager. She's into boys, discotheques, and movie magazines. She sets out to corrupt Isabel. She also provides the comic relief in the novel.

Meanwhile Isabel continues her search for her brother. Some will be bothered by the number of coincidences involved, but Daniel Mason has done a great job suspending disbelief. As a young girl in the backlands, Isabel had a mystical ability to find her brother in the sugar cane fields, no matter how well he hid. This makes what happens later more believable.

Mason never does tell the reader where in South America the action occurs. But he does drop some hints. Brazil has innumerable sugar cane fields. Mason also tells us the city Isabel goes to has ten to twelve million people, and there are "settlements," in the big city, a euphemism for slums. Isabel's boyfriend also takes her to a huge beach. Ipa Nima? I may be wrong but it was fun to gather clues.

It's hard to believe that a Californian can write this well about South America. Mason knows the backlands. The people eat cactus and ants, as well as mixing soil with what little food they have to stave off starvation. There is a huge dump outside the big city that the people can "The Mountain." Isabel rides by it in a bus. When she takes a closer look she sees people clamoring over the mountain scavenging. It is a godsend to people who have nothing else.

I am an unapologetic bookworm. Usually I'm lucky if I can find one great book during the year, but this year I've already read two. This one and THE TERROR by Dan Simmons. I can't wait to read Mason's THE PIANO TUNER. It's supposed to be better than this one. That's hard to believe.

Are you the type of person who can sit alone contentedly for a many hours merely observing and sensing the world around you? Are you the type of person who delights in reading words put together so creatively and carefully that they come to life on the page and in your mind? Are you the type of person who reads in order to better comprehend the human condition and, in particular, the currrent state of the world at this, the beginning of the 21st century--at this dangerous tipping point in earth's history where mankind finds itself entering a century of possible global climate and ecological disaster? If you are, then you might enjoy getting to know Isabella, the main character in Daniel Mason's second novel "A Far Country."

Isabella is the teenage daughter of present-day peasant farmers in an unnamed, most-likely South American country. Her people are cane-cutters. The family lives in a dirt-floored hut and sleeps hip-to-hip in hammocks slung together in a single tiny room. There is a small town nearby, but they are a good four-days' journey, "by perch" (a crowded flat bed truck filled to overflowing with dusty migrant travelers) from the big city (a megametropolis of over 14 million).

Isabella is a contented, quiet, gifted child, extremely close to her older brother Isaias. She idealizes him; for Isabella, Isaias is perfect in every way.

As the result of a long cataclysmic drought, first the brother and then the sister must leave their village for the big city. Almost the entire novel is taken up with Isabella's quest to find her brother in the city. The book is full of vivid observation and sensing. The author has the gift of making it possible for you live inside Isabella's mind. As a result, the civilized world takes on otherworldly and alien dimensions.

The plot moves slowly to the climactic scene in which Isabella finally finds her brother. It is worth reading this book for no other reason than to experience this one scene--to live inside Isabella's head when she finally finds Isaias. This is an experience you will not forget; mark my words, it will haunt you. You will find yourself thinking about it long after you've finished the book.

Mason took a leave of absence from his medical studies at UCSF to write this second novel. He was urged to do so after the considerable success of his first novel, "The Piano Tuner." He wrote the novel while living and traveling in Brazil. Much of the people and locations have the feel of Brazil.

There were times in this novel when I thought it was taking place in the near future. There are frequent descriptions of major climatic trouble: widespread drought; city-engulfing dust storms and floods; and ocean storms devouring coastlines. There are descriptions of epic migrations of rural poor fleeing drought to find any type of living in the big city. A man in the city tells Isabella that these migrations from drought-plagued lands are happening all over the world. If it was Mason's intent to place this book in the near future, I wish he had developed this idea more fully.

I enjoyed this novel, and hope that Mason will continue to make room within his medical career for more writing. If so, I will seek it out and read it.

I love this book! A huge fan of Mason's, The Piano Tuner, I ran out and bought this the day it was released. I was not disappointed! Mason's writing is addicting and with the descriptive story line and vulnerable characters, especially Isabel, it's tough to put down. Read this book. A++++

Not as good a read as the Piano Tuner but worth the price at any rate. Daniel Mason's prose is quite descriptive and allows your mind to see and experience the emotions he is writing about.

This book started a little slow for me. I was almost to the point were I thought about giving up (something I hate to do) when the story and pace picked up and I found myself getting totally engrossed.

There is a "cut to the chase" quality about the writing that I really enjoyed. There is no unnecessary dialog and description, just enough to put you in the moment. I particularly liked the fact that there is no clearly defined time and place in which this story is happening (although the President Kennedy reference leads the reader to believe it's the early 1960's.) This story could be taking place anywhere - a South American country, the Dominican Republic or a southern US state.

I liked the character of Isabel a great deal. You can really feel her desperation and loneliness. She'll stay with me for a long time. A four star recommendation only because of the slow start.

This is a far different tale than the author's first, bestselling book, The Piano Tuner, although it shares some elements like the search through a jungle, and a sense of loss. This book is about the young girl Isabel and her search for her beloved brother, Isias, who has left home to seek his fortune in the big city.

It is also a clear, unyielding look at the lives of subsistence farmer in a hot country, where one year, rains may bring in a bountiful sugar harvest, and the next, a crop-killing drought which starves the people. The country is never named, but it has a vaguely South American air with its description of "the cane," and the lives of the poor in the country's interior contrasted with the coastal cities, where the people must go and seek work during dry years. There is even a description of a large port city with a huge cross on the mountains around it. The peasants from the plains are not welcome in the cities; they are seen as job thieves and worse, and must live in separate quarters called the Settlements.

Isabel is devoted to her brother Isias and believes he is capable of great things--until eventually he believes it too. During a particularly severe drought, he goes away to the "the city" to seek his fortune by playing his guitar. Isabel `misses him severely.' Then one day when he has stopped writing or phoning his family (there is one phone in their village, and everyone uses it on the weekends), she sees the chance to go and find him. Her mother agrees that the family must have more money for food, and sends Isabel to help her cousin Manuela raise her new baby-and look for her brother.

This is a novel of simple, lucid prose, yet it brings home how very tenuous the subsistence farmers' hold is on life, and how dependent they are on Nature. It is also a story of faith--one girl's faith that she can find her brother and the people's faith that the rains will come again.

Armchair Interviews says: A moving story with a special glimpse into the lives of people different than us in their way of life, yet in their emotions and family loyalties, very much the same.

I loved the Piano Tuner and have waited a long time for Mason to write another book. It was well written and the characters were compelling, but the story took a long time to reach a conclusion that didn't really satisfy...and didn't make me feel that it was worth the effort (though that's not a very good word for what I mean) it took to get there. All in all, disappointing.

Daniel Mason's haunting THE PIANO TUNER left an indelible imprint on my memory, which helped to launch a never-to-be forgotten visit to Southeast Asia in 2004. Such can be the power of a gifted writer --- that the potency of his words can open doors and windows of the mind to seek further information on the subject, learn more about the circumstances in the book, or even to book passage to lands far away. So it was with great hopes when Mason's newest, A FAR COUNTRY, became available, and I grabbed it without hesitation.

Isabel is the 14-year-old daughter of a farm laborer and his wife, living next to a sugar cane plantation in an unnamed equatorial America country, quite likely Brazil. Her older brother Isaias is a talented violinist who chafes at the idea of being forever tied to seasonal work cutting cane or loading river barges, the occupation of villagers for generations. Drought and the increasing attacks by raiders as poverty spreads among the displaced peasants drive Isais to join the growing Diaspora of young people who drift hopefully toward the city in the south. On his infrequent returns home, he talks glowingly of gaining fame as a musician, always going back to the city and sending small amounts of money to help out his impoverished family. His visits stop, replaced by occasional phone calls, and then he simply vanishes.

Isabel yearns for her brother, and when she is needed to babysit for a few weeks for her cousin in the same city that has swallowed Isaias, she is eager to follow him. With little more than a few dollars and a meager lunch, she embarks on a journey via "parrot perch" --- riding in an open flatbed truck on a four-day journey to the South. She arrives, after much travail, in The Settlements. She has directions to her cousin's apartment in a neighborhood called Eden, a name that turns out to be a cruel joke. Eden is nothing more than an endless sprawl of tin-roofed shanties, baking in the tropical heat, indistinguishable from hundreds of other neighborhoods housing millions of displaced camposinos in pursuit of work and shelter. When she finally locates the apartment, she is distraught to find that Isaias, whom she expected to be there to greet her, has not been seen for weeks.

And so begins Isabel's search through the teeming city for her brother, with baby Hugo, her cousin's son, on her hip. Isabel was born with a second sight, an ability that frightened her parents to the degree that they had her exorcized by a holy woman. But she still feels the uncanny, compelling presence of her brother, which drives her to find him. She enters the world of people looking for "the disappeared" --- the tens of thousands who come to the city and are never heard from again. Yet she feels that he is close at hand, watching over her, and cannot abandon her quest.

A FAR COUNTRY is a bittersweet journey of the heart; a story of family love yearning for security and survival. Mason's brilliant lyrical prose carries the reader along in a mixture of fantasy and reality. While the story verges on magical realism, it is not in the mystical realm of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. Yet the surreal location and Isabel's ability to find lost objects and people whom she loves lend itself to the genre.

While A FAR COUNTRY doesn't quite achieve the magic and panoramic exotica of Mason's first triumph, it still offers the lyrical prose and powerful sense of place, which is quite enough if armchair travel to other places through a good book is your goal.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea

I absolutely loved The Piano Tuner, so couldn't wait to get my hands on A Far Country. I read the first third of the book and just could not get into it. The first third could have been condensed into a page as far as I was concerned. I finally skipped to the last few pages where she's finally reunited with her brother. It was a horribly boring, tedious book. HOWEVER, I WILL give this author another try because I enjoyed The Piano Tuner so very much.

This is a beautifully written book! It is very simply written, the accumulation of specific details sketching a reality that is very different than ours, and letting us enter into it, and understand it.

The heroine, Isabel, grows up in a hard-scrabble rural community periodically ravaged by drought and hunger. She is close to her brother Isaias, a naturally-talented musician, and is able to sense his presence, wherever he is. Isaias leaves for the Big City to pursue his fortune.

Drought engulfs Isabel's community and she is sent to the Big City to live with her cousin because her family can no longer support her. She goes to "The New Settlements." She tries to understand this new city and tries to find her brother. We are inside her mind as she learns about the city and about urban life.

This book gripped me with its vision. It made me understand those struggling to simply exist in our world. It made me begin to understand those people outside my experience - people in the "third world," the "developing world."

[...]

I enjoyed reading "The Piano Tuner" immensely, and enjoyed reading this book as well. This book is very different than the previous book, but equally gripping. I am in awe of Daniel Mason's talent.