This relatively short novel packs a potent emotional wallop. It takes place in the Mexican desert during the 1916 buildup to World War I. The spare, often poetic prose conveys the raw violence, brutality, and quixotic actions of people at war. More than a slice of life but less than an epic, the tale centers on the leadership and (through flashback and dreams) past life of Napoleon Childs, an American cavalryman. Charged with turning raw recruits into cavalrymen in preparation for America’s entry into WWI, Childs leads them in searches for Pancho Villa through the canyons and arroyos of a bleak yet lyrically rendered landscape. The third-person narration, largely from the point of view of Childs himself, lends itself to acute characterization yet leaves a lot of room for hypothetical thinking and reader speculation. Childs’ foreshadowing aside, the climax still shocks with cruelty: the resolution is realistic and limns a case of extreme rough justice. Give this to Olmstead groupies, western fans, and lovers of refined, focused writing. --Ellen Loughran --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Described by the Dallas Morning News as a "thinking-reader's western," Olmstead's latest novel, which features some characters from Coal Black Horse, is not for the faint of heart. Still, critics were riveted by this gruesome, bloodcurdling, and thoroughly masculine book, where women are virtually nonexistent and war is a constant, prevailing theme. Critics hailed Far Bright Star as a tightly woven tale with terse, dispassionate prose, characteristics that may also be used to describe the laconic Napoleon. Reviewers also compared Olmstead favorably to acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road). Only the Oregonian felt that the novel was "over-written" and "congested" in parts. But overall, Far Bright Star is a masterful, mesmerizing portrait of one man facing oblivion. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Sandra Dallas It is 1916, and an expedition of American soldiers has been dispatched to Mexico in search of Pancho Villa. They are a sorry lot -- "freebooters, felons, Christians, drifters, patriots . . . surgeons, mechanics, assassins," writes Robert Olmstead at the opening of this intense, short novel. "They claimed to be marksmen and veterans of battles no one ever heard of. . . . They [are] the future dead." The soldiers have their own reasons for being in Mexico. The expedition is "a stage for so many men to play out their ambitions and imaginations," observes their leader, a laconic veteran named Napoleon. (Don't be so quick to laugh at his name; his brother is Xenophon.) Only one other soldier, called Extra Billy, is seasoned. The others are greenhorns, men Napoleon wouldn't choose for battle, men like Preston, who is educated but arrogant and wants to add a human being to his list of animal kills. They are the luck of the draw for Napoleon, who must lead them into the harsh Mexican desert, into a land hardened by the sun, into an ambush that most of them will not survive. Napoleon and Extra Billy see the signs that something isn't right, but preparing the men for battle, Napoleon doesn't tell them they are second-raters. "I wouldn't have no other company for it, not for all the tea in China," he reassures them as they are about to be overwhelmed by an enemy he doesn't recognize. The foes who trap them are not Villa's people, but who are they? A ragtag band of guerrillas? Sly villagers who mix with the expedition in camp and then stalk the Americans in the desert? Whoever they are, they slaughter almost all the ambushed troopers. Napoleon is stripped naked and left to die in the searing rays of the sun. His tongue swollen, his feet shredded by rocks and cactuses, he struggles to survive with only his hat and a gun. "I must live . . . I still think I can and I still think there is a reason to," he tells himself. "I'd rather not go just yet," he says to the stranger who appears in a hallucination. In his crazed state, he ponders the viciousness of the attack, making no sense of it beyond the wickedness of men. He remembers past battles from the Indian wars to the Philippines and a career as a warrior. He recalls his boyhood and wonders whether it all has been worthwhile. Nonetheless, "for all the horror of this world it was still his own and he was not done and he'd not give himself over," Olmstead tells us. So Napoleon stumbles on, not knowing reality from delusion, not sure if he is alive or dead. "Far Bright Star" makes the reader bleed with the characters and sweat with the intensity of the sun. The unexplained evil and the cheapness of life are offset by the humanity and dignity of both Napoleon and Xenophon. There is a bond between these two men, set in boyhood. And of course, there is a bond between Napoleon and his horse. After all, Olmstead is the author of that moving tribute to equine loyalty, "Coal Black Horse." In this, his seventh book, Olmstead writes with a gritty style as sparse as the landscape itself: "It's surely gonna be hot today," says one of the soldiers to another. "Don't talk about it." "It's gonna be hot enough to put hell out of business." "What'd I say?" And Olmstead's humor is as dry as the sunbaked land, too. Early in the book, Napoleon rescues an old man suffering from sun, starvation and an infected finger that has to be cut off. Before the crude surgery, the soldier shares a can of tuna fish with the old coot, who asks, "Do you have any coconut pie?" Such moments of levity grace a dark story filled with harshness and brutality. As good as that story is, however, it's Olmstead's knife-edge paring of words that makes "Far Bright Star" such a fine work of fiction.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover
The year is 1916. The enemy Pancho Villa, is elusive. The terrain is unforgiving, the intense heat and dust both relentless and overpowering. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches.
Napoleon has weathered the storms of battle with a toughness that has become like a second skin, with the Rattler, a horse who s as flinty and seasoned as he. But this time, Napoleon can t control one of his young soldiers who has a penchant for reckless, dramatic actions and who singlehandedly, in his desire to prove himself, makes a move that is the beginning of the end. Before long, Napoleon s patrol is at the mercy of an enemy who is intent not only on killing Napoleon s men but on something much bigger: avenging a brutal act.
Robert Olmstead describes the experience of battle so viscerally that the reader feels the fear, the danger, and the dread. With the precision of a master, he tells the harrowing and transfixing story of the last of these intrepid warriors. "
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review
"Tautly written and laced with tension . . . Riveting visual effects . . . Olmstead offers a sort of 'thinking-reader's' western . . . Verbal precision and historical accuracy combine with a poetic distillation of a tragic event presented in a solidly captivating reading experience that haunts the mind long after the final page is turned.” —The Dallas Morning News
(The Dallas Morning News )
"Gleaming, spellbinding fiction . . . Terrifying and abruptly beautiful, the new novel gleams with a masculine intensity; it is hard to read and hard to put down . . . i did succumb, yet again, to the strong spell of Olmstead’s storytelling."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
(The Cleveland Plain Dealer ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Robert Olmstead is the author of six previous books. Coal Black Horse was the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the Ohioana award and was a #1 Book Sense Pick and a Borders Original Voices selection. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant, he is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
![Far Bright Star by [Robert Olmstead]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41TFAgu6l0L._SY346_.jpg)
