Port Tropique

Revolution is simmering in the heat of the battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an “intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of self-willed failure” (The New York Times). The ineffectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the zócalo and occasional nights involved in an ivory-smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege, yet always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz’s mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him.The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, and one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world.

“Gifford uses the charged story of . . . an apprentice smuggler as an occasion for his own literary and cinematic smuggling—from Conrad, Hemingway, Camus, John Hawkes, Howard Hawks, Welles and Ozu, among others—and to discover a new literary form.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A poet’s nuanced prose runs through Port Tropique . . . a spellbinding story.”—The Washington Post

“A strange, disturbing . . . intriguing . . . impressionist painting of a book.”—San Francisco Chronicle