Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

Book Overview

The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. Terrain is unforgiving. 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. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565125924
• ISBN13: 9781565125926
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Wow, Olmstead does it again...

Olmstead, to me, continues to remain the premier ultra-talented master of realism who, some way some how, manages to wedge in descriptions that might seem experimental - you read some of his sentences twice or three times - they are so damn good, so damn unique and so damn vivid with an arrangement of rhetoric and vocabulary that sends most readers to reference material - moreover, it's scary to think that Olmstead bleeds and breathes like most of us, b/c his writing cannot be replicated. It's so pitch-perfect to the story's period, its places, circumstances and its characters. Olmstead and his work cannot be overstated. He keeps realism alive in a voice that is entirely original and extremely convincing.

Brutal, Lyrical, Beautiful

In a sense, it's unfair to an author as talented as Robert Olmstead to compare his writing to that of others; his voice is that distinctive. But in his brilliant, painterly eye, his love of words and of lost, staid rhetorical styles, the unblinking, unsentimentally graphic, cruelly beautiful depictions of war and atrocity, the deep attachment to all horse life, feral and domestic, with its distinctive trappings and vocabulary, and the sense of vastness he conjures, the immense vault of the firmament beneath which men work out their disparate histories and fates in an equally unsentimental and unforgiving universe - in all this Olmstead naturally calls to mind Cormac McCarthy, one of our greatest living American novelists, if not the greatest. That frequent comparison thus becomes for Olmstead a form of high compliment, putting him in an exalted league, and thus a tactic in encouraging others to read this author, a writer of superior skill and intelligence, of whom they've almost certainly never heard. Here Olmstead's canvas is Mexico, 1916. The US Cavalry is in hot pursuit of Pancho Villa. Within this manhunt, Olmstead unfolds the fate of an inconsequential cavalry detail, dispatched to hunt "wild beeves," led out by a seasoned warrior, Napoleon Childs (okay, okay: a name pregnant with metaphorical significance), and into Childs' story is woven the histories and the fates of the men assigned to that ultimately fateful detail, whose choices shape and propel the narrative and the aftermath. Olmstead spins these out with absolute control and economy of forces; Far Bright Star barely weighs in at 200 pages, but each page glisters like beaten gold, with great care invested in every phrase, every chosen word. Alternately exhilarating and harrowing, this is a novel of unusual power and poetry by a gifted writer, one who deserves much more attention than he seems to be receiving.

A novel about the West I guarantee you'll read more than once

This literary Western brought to mind Blood Meridian and In the Rogue Blood and No Country for Old Men. It is in that league. The language is as poetic as Blood Meridian and Cold Mountain. A perfect novel which has it all - language, setting, character, plot, theme. I loved it. My kind of book. I wish there were more. But, they wouldn't be special if there weren't so few.

Thank Heavens for this Novel

This beautiful and fearless novel recounts the journey of a seasoned horse soldier, Napoleon Childs, who leads an inexperienced group of cavalrymen on a search for Pancho Villa. Though it is a war story set in 1916, in Mexico, this book ultimately becomes a timeless odyssey that poses complex questions about how a human being recovers his sense of direction, both internal and external, after witnessing senseless acts of brutality that would horrify even the most war torn of veterans. Written in gorgeous, lyrical prose, the narrative becomes most soulful and heart wrenching during Napoleon's return from battle. Stripped of his clothes, his friends and his faith, Napoleon stumbles through the desert and the even starker landscape of his own wounded psyche, trying to recover his inner compass while searching for the physical place he once called home. Reading this book was a bit like reading Camus and Homer at once, though Mr. Olmstead's voice is singular. He is a writer who goes bravely, and refreshingly, into fictional territory that a lesser writer would not attempt to go, providing us with a great novel for our times, one that will appeal to anyone who has ever felt brutalized, alone or lost.

More and more

Far Bright Star is a perfect book. It drags the reader inside often perhaps against her will and washes over and through the senses with Olmstead's lush language. The language is reminescent of Falukner's Absalom, Absalom and readers of contemporary fiction will find that Olmstead's work has kindred spirit with both Cormack McCarthy and Kent Haruf. The story is harsh yet beautiful and gives one a might bit to consider about the place of war in this world and one's relation to the consumption and production of general meaness as well as how redemption might find us all.