Customer Reviews

The Road to Esmeralda: A Novel

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

 

 

Ms. Nicholson does a great job of conveying the tone of a south of the border escape as such it almost is suffocating at times and doesn't let the characters breathe in the opening moments of the book. But as the story progresses, it becomes obvious that the intent of the author is to show the characters and how they are being suffocated by where they are headed, metaphorically, spiritually, and morally.
Well written and one of the most absorbing books I have read in a while.

Book Review:

The Road To Esmeralda:

The book begins with what appears to be a simple vacation for a
seemingly happy and contented couple: Nick, frustrated writer, but hopeful idealist, and Sarah, a graphic artist, and the supportive, caring, and emotionally stable girlfriend. Together, they embark on a journey to bring them closer to each other and themselves.

Their road trip takes them to Mexico, which offers them a gateway to creative and emotional freedom. What they find instead is anger and resentment against them, not as people, but as Americans. This bitterness and hostility comes from all angles; fellow tourists and locals alike, are ready to confront the America imperialists who are the cause of all the world's woes.

In an attempt to escape the onslaught, Nick and Sarah travel further and farther away, until they land at a quiet beach-front guesthouse in Esmeralda, a beautiful Yucatan enclave. Their hosts, the Von Tollmans, are German ex-patriots, and committed to living lives which excludes involvement
with polluted people and societies, while living off and tending to their land, which caters to this eutopic lifestyle.

Quickly immersed in the owner's fight to save their land, highly coveted by greedy local and foreign businessmen alike, Nick and Sarah become deeply entrenched in the political forces that will soon destroy their personal undertakings and ambitions. The only problem though, is that Nick and Sarah find themselves on opposing sides.

Al, the guesthouse handyman, has his own questionable and sordid agenda. Al, almost sociopathic, begins finding conflict in his own seemingly non-existent moral makeup, while Nick's morals slowly dissolve in an aborted attempt to save his relationship. Sarah and the Von Tollmans, in doomed attempts to maintain their ideals, become prey to the social and political conspirators.

And there the book takes us: down a windy road filled with intrigue, personal digression, moral conflict and disillusion, that soon involves local thugs and drug smugglers, the Mexican and American governments, and the personal and cultural agendas that ripen the conspiracy plot.

This is a story of disintegration, personal dilemmas and fears,
emotional disillusion, and human ambition, both altruistic and sordid. It is a macrocosm with archetypal characters living in their own personal microcosmic world. Each suffering from their own human frailties, and subject to personal fears, they are lost and disconnected. The characters exemplify qualities that supersede nationalism or xenophobia; they are basic and base, each confronted with their own truths and lies, and the bitterness of their own futility.

A great read. Profound. Layered. A good adventure both inward and outward.

Ellen Vinitsky - August 15, 2005

What really struck me about this book was the deceptive charm of almost every character, which is what makes the story such an intense and intimate experience. In reading it, you feel like you're finding out secrets about your friends, colleagues, neighbors and fellow humans-secrets you really hoped weren't true. There's Karl, a seemingly kind old German hippie who's created his guesthouse utopia in the Yucatan, a retreat among the lush tropical flowers and gentle surf; there's his handyman Al, the ostensibly harmless beach bum dropout and scrappy ex-pat who picks up work in whatever country he finds himself; there's the brothers, a couple of colorful corrupt local officials. Enter tortured Nick from L.A., tormented by his unfinished novel, and his young idealistic wife, Sarah, who wants to save the planet, do the right thing, be good. Sound enticing? Sound too good to be true? Oh it is, and Nicholson masterfully, with impeccable timing, plots a story of one eerie revelation after another, until you literally shudder at the monstrosity of the human heart. Mexico is the perfect setting for such a tale, too, with its pretty surface that hides all the demons of globalism: corporate violence and profiteering, drugs, shifty ex-pats, hapless `good' Americans and Europeans who drive the engine of evil with their denial and mass consumption of drugs and resources. We are all part of the problem and have to face it, because in this book-and maybe this is the larger message-the heroes and the villains are the same people. Tough medicine. But empowering too. This is an important and profound book, and Nicholson's mind and writing are like a sharp knife-beautifully clean, relentlessly sublime and ruthlessly frank. She'll cut you, but the scar will be something you're glad you have and a reminder that good writing is an awesomely powerful way to communicate hard truths.

This book found its way into my Amazon.com inbox after *The Tribes of Palos Verdes*, Ms. Nicholson's first novel, came into my mind "out of nowhere," seven years after I read it. I consider long-term memory retention an indicator of a good story.

I bought *The Road To Esmeralda* because I found Ms. Nicholson's style engaging in her first novel. I like to read things in little pieces. I like to be able to put a book down for 72 hours, pick it up again, and resume the dream with minimum brain boot-up time. (I suspect this comes from my own experience as a technical editor.) When I flipped through the pages of this most recent novel, I saw that it is written in the same structured way as *Tribes*. It is also divided into parts, code named by colors of the spectrum as the wavelength increases. Cool! This reminds me, for some reason, of Solzhenitsyn.

The book's main protagonist, Nick Sperry, is a "frustrated male drunk in the tropics." Ms. Nicholson sure got that tune right! (Here is a female author who knows how the male mind works, at least when it is not operating properly.) The other protagonists all have serious problems, too, with the most eccentric of the lot, Karl, evidently the least insane. The interaction among characters is balanced, and flashbacks are well done. As a non-fiction scribbler more comfortable with manipulating equations and generating schematic diagrams than visiting with the muses of fiction, I have the profoundest respect for Ms. Nicholson. She's one of the best authors I have ever stumbled across.

And now, a warning! If you want an uplifting book, this is not it. It starts out dark, and gets darker all the way. Is there a "moral"? Maybe. One might read politics into it; one might see it as xenophobic. The ending goes "over the top." However, it is by no means an impossible scenario in this paranoid new world. But let's not kid ourselves. Many factors contributed to the ruin of Nick Sperry, but alcohol abuse was the root cause. If there is a message here, I suspect it could be, "Stay sober when traveling in foreign countries."

This isn't the usual type of book that I would read and in fact I found it incredibly boring for the first hundred or so pages. What kept me reading was the way the book was written rather than the plot itself. Simple sentences had so much meaning and depth, it really made me think. As the novel moves on and some plot finally begins to develop I became intrigued in the characters. Throughout the book I was not able to take sides with one character over another. Yet, I kept reading because I wanted to learn more about each one of their attributes and the reasons of why they did certain things. I was more interested in the character development rather than the plot to be honest. In fact the ending really fell flat.

I started the book because I like Mexico stuff. However I discovered shortly that I couldn't bond with the characters. So I eighty-sixed it. It could be a very good book. Or not. What was really cool was the blurbs on the back cover. Jerry Stahl used "riveting," "searing" and "wire-taut" in one sentence. Wow! Stokes Howell used the word "hallucinatory." (I guess since he used it Jerry couldn't.) The picture of Joy in the back reminded me of that girl in the French movie that found that box of old toys. A little older though, obviously.