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    Paradise
    Paradise
    Paradise
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Paradise

    By Larry McMurtry

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Long considered to be the brilliant dark horse of literary nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize–winning Larry McMurtry delivers a searing and reflective exploration of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his Texas hometown.

    In 1999, Larry McMurtry, whose wanderlust had been previously restricted to the roads of America, set off for a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands in an old-fashioned tub of a cruise boat, at a time when his mother was slipping toward a paradise of her own. Opening up to her son in her final days, his mother makes a stunning revelation of a previous marriage and sends McMurtry on a journey of an entirely different kind.

    Vividly, movingly, and with infinite care, McMurtry paints a portrait of his parents' marriage against the harsh, violent landscape of West Texas. It is their roots—laced with overtones of hard work, bitter disappointment, and the Puritan ethic—that McMurtry challenges by traveling to Tahiti, a land of lush sensuality and easy living. With fascinating detail, shrewd observations, humorous pathos, and unforgettable characters, he begins to answer some of the questions of what paradise is, whether it exists, and how different it is from life in his hometown of Archer City, Texas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9781451608601
    Paradise
    Author

    Larry McMurtry

    Larry McMurtry is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. He has also written memoirs and essays, and received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain.

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    Reviews for Paradise

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Scandinavian crime writer Liza Marklund has created a strong but touchingly vulnerable heroine in the form of the indefatigable tabloid reporter Annika Bengtzon who starts this book, Marklund’s third although the second chronologically, as a copy editor on the night shift.When her senior male colleagues relegate her to fielding random phone calls, Annika is plunged into an intriguing story about Paradise, an organisation that can eradicate people’s pasts, making them impossible to trace. But is Paradise genuine or a money making scam, fleecing the social services? A refugee Annika sends to them is subsequently murdered by the Yugoslavian mafia and with the help of a civil servant and a disenchanted former Paradise client [Mia Eriksson, based on a real person whose story Marklund told in the 1995 non-fiction novel Buried Alive] she exposes the group and its founder. But in her efforts to assist a woman on the run, she has attracted the attention of a remorseless Mafia assassin, who is convinced she knows the whereabouts of a truckload of smuggled cigarettes – now a more profitable contraband than even cocaine. Amidst strains of romance, personal tragedy and political connivance, the bodies pile up, tension mounts and Annika’s life – and the story – takes several unexpected twists. It’s not surprising Liza Marklund became the second Swedish author to reach the number one spot on the New York Times best seller list – she certainly delivers the goods.
    • 4/5
      I read my first Liza Marklund book last year and quite enjoyed it. Reporter Annika Bengtson returns in Vanished. I hadn't read the books in between and found Annika in a different state of mind and place. She's at the newspaper, but is a copy editor, not out in the field. She lives in a stark apartment in a condemned building, simply existing, trying to deal with numerous tragedies in her personal life. But while editing a story on a recent double murder on the waterfront one night, a random call is routed to her desk and she finds herself immediately intrigued. Rebecka claims to be able to erase a person's past and set them up with a new identity and life. Annika's boss gives her the go ahead to pursue the story - he's happy to see her excited about something again. But The Paradise Foundation may not be everything Rebeckah claims. And when she discovers that the waterfront murders and the Foundation may have a connection, Annika is drawn in.... This was a very different Annika for me. At times I saw the strong, fearless reporter, at other times she was a puddle on the floor. I understood her grief, but the neediness shown at a certain juncture is well - obsessive. I had a hard time accepting that she could swing so far from one side to the other in such a short time. I found the idea of The Paradise Foundation fascinating. Office politics and ethics, Eastern Bloc Mafia, marriage, happiness and the Swedish social assistance program are also stirred into the plot of Vanished. There was a bit of proselytizing near the end that I did find myself skipping over. It was only as I read the end notes, that I discovered Marklund's basis for this book. While working as a night reporter on a Swedish newspaper, Marklund really did receive a call about a foundation exactly as described and ended up investigating it. I wonder how much of Liza Marklund is part of Annika? The pacing is a bit slower, with lots of personal story this time. Marklund ends the book with a good twist - identifying the author of small diatribes scattered throughout the book - one I did not see coming. All in all a good read. I'm intrigued by this character and will definitely read another in this series.

    Book preview

    Paradise - Larry McMurtry

    I

    My Parents and

    Polynesia

    I AM IN PUNAAUIA, Tahiti, in a thatched bungalow with a twenty-foot ceiling. My bungalow sits at the end of a clattery wooden walkway, built over Punaauia’s perfect blue lagoon. The South Pacific, here in its gentlest mode, laps a few feet below my bed. In effect I sleep on the most soothing of water beds, one whose blue waters slap and sigh, untrapped.

    THE ARTIST PAUL GAUGUIN lived in Punaauia for a short time in the 1890s, on the second of his forays into Tahitian life. Earlier, not long after he had arrived in the Society Islands for the first time, hoping to scare up some portrait work, a disturbing thing had happened. One night, while waiting for Paul to return from an errand in town, his young Tahitian mistress, Teha’amana (sometimes spelled without the apostrophe, sometimes spelled Tehura, or in other ways), grew terribly frightened of the night spirits. Since the time of Bougainville and Cook, Tahitian women had been prized for their quiet ease, their serenity of soul; but Teha’amana’s serenity had deserted her on this night. She was then thirteen or fourteen, a young girl living with a Frenchman three times her age, grown fearful, suddenly, in the deep tropical darkness.

    It is doubtful that Paul Gauguin, a French artist with little reputation and less money, newly arrived from Europe—where he had left his Danish wife and their five children—was the ideal person to allay Teha’amana’s terrors; but at least her fear made a deep impression on him. He painted what amounts to a note about it, an oil called Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching)—now in the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York—in which we merely see a scared girl lying facedown on a bed. But Gauguin soon followed this up with a whole series of variants on the scene, focusing now on Teha’amana’s innocence, rather than just her fear. These studies—in pen and ink, in pastel, in woodblock, in transfer drawings, and in oils—he called Parau na te varua ino (Words of the Devil); he insisted on keeping the title in Tahitian, to the puzzlement and irritation of the Parisians who were expected to buy these strange works. In the pastel—on the front cover of this book—Teha’amana, a startled young girl, realizes she has lost something. Too late, she covers herself. The sun sets quickly in the tropics; no less quickly, innocence goes. In the oil, though (on the back cover)—it is in the National Gallery, in Washington—Teha’amana is smiling a mysterious, Evelike smile; it’s the blue devil behind her who is in some sort of blank-eyed shock—pussywhipped, it may be. This quiet, smiling young woman has somehow bested the devil; she will go on to become the imposing woman in two of Gauguin’s greatest portraits: Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower) and Vahine no te vi (Woman with a Mango); in the latter she is pregnant. Gauguin, as he is uneasily aware, has taken a child to wife—does he have her, or does she have him? When he is not making love to Teha’amana he is drawing her, sketching her, painting her, hoping that the mystery of his young Eve will reveal itself to his eye or submit to his line.

    In some of Gauguin’s later work his Eves have faces like fish, as if he is pursuing the problem of innocence back to an earlier life stage. Does Teha’amana have no knowledge, or does she have too much? Paul Gauguin was still worrying that question when he died, much as the aging Yeats worried in Leda and the Swan:

    Being so caught up,

    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

    Did she put on his knowledge with his power

    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

    Paul Gauguin knew many women, but it is doubtful if any one of them left as deep a mark on his art as Teha’amana, betrothed to him by her parents when she was thirteen—a young girl who lived in paradise.

    I HAVE COME to the same paradise—Tahiti—a place whose beauty neither writers nor painters nor mariners have ever managed to overstate, in order to think and write about my parents, Hazel and Jeff McMurtry: there they are, as a young couple, in the frontispiece to this book. The whole of their forty-three-year marriage was spent well inland, in Archer County, Texas. Many people like Archer County, and a few people love it, but no one would be likely to think it an earthly paradise.

    It is hard to think of Tahiti in any other terms, though I know, of course, that if I left my well-tended French hotel and wandered around Papeete long enough I would discover a multitude of social and political problems—problems of the sort that are likely to occur in any colony, however well administered.* In 1987 there was a strike by sailors and dockworkers that got way out of hand, with much property loss. The French were forced to send in many soldiers to settle the Tahitians down.

    I did drift around Papeete long enough to discover some slummy parts; and yet so gracious is the climate, the flowers, the fruits, the sea that even the slums of Papeete seem mainly to partake of the gentle seediness common to almost all littorals, even the best groomed. In a recent book called Roads I put my case for littorals thus:

    One beneficent characteristic of oceans is that they tend to relax the people who live by them. Worldwide, in my experience, littorals are apt to have a wait-and-see, gentle seediness. Even the most manicured littorals—Malibu, Lanai, Cap d’Antibes—have a touch of it. The force of huge money may keep the beaches looking neat for a mile or two, but neatness and the seashore don’t really go together; only one hundred feet or so past the great resorts the old casual seediness begins. The structures lean a little, and the people who inhabit them don’t worry too much about dress codes. The sea, eternal, shelters and soothes them, saves them for a time from the ambitious strivings that drive people who live far removed from the ocean.

    One thing worth thinking about, while in an earthly paradise such as Tahiti, is whether there can be gradations within paradise—if not, does this lack of grade or lack of contrast mean that for most humans, paradise really doesn’t work?

    The boat I am to take, the Aranui, is a freighter which makes the trip from Papeete to the Marquesas Islands thirteen times a year. The writer Paul Theroux traveled on it about a decade before me; there’s a fairly neutral mention of it in his book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. Paul Theroux had a rubber boat with him, which he used to make his own investigations of several island groups.

    The Aranui makes deliveries at all of the seaside communities in the six inhabited islands of the Marquesas. It also stops at a neighboring archipelago, the Tuamotus, where the French have a nuclear installation, or testing ground. De Gaulle himself witnessed the first test, which took place in 1966.

    The Aranui is a supply ship, delivering all manner of staples and bringing back copra, dried coconut meat, a crop subsidized by the French throughout the several island groups now known as French Polynesia. Copra is a word that once evoked all that was romantic about the South Seas: coconut palms dropping their fruit on beaches of brilliant white sand; welcoming young women such as Teha’amana wandering topless under these same palms: writers on the order of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, or Somerset Maugham occasionally dropping in. This, of course, is romance-for-export: to the islanders copra is just a crop the French will pay them for, no more romantic than soybeans.

    IF THERE IS a reason why I have come to the South Seas to write about my parents, a link of some sort between them and Gauguin’s young native wife, Teha’amana, it is innocence: not sexual innocence but innocence within history. Teha’amana knew only her island; my parents, only their ranch and one small town. My father lived through more than three quarters of the twentieth century, my mother through more than nine-tenths of it, and yet, like Teha’amana, they never left the garden. My father enlisted in World War I but it ended before he could be trained: he was too old for World War II. The battles, the camps, the hundred million European dead, the gulag, China, famine, epidemic never touched them. Rural life in west Texas was harsher than island life in the South Seas, but it was also more protective. There were no French around to explode atomic weapons.

    I CHOSE TO travel on the Aranui to the islands it visits because I wanted to spend a little time in a culture that is neither American, European, nor Asian: the culture of the sea places, of Oceania. What I hope is to escape for a bit from the culture of overachievers, and the Tahitians I am first among do not disappoint. They aren’t lazy, but neither are they harried. They seem happy, competent, friendly, talkative. I feel a little indignant, on their behalf, that their beautiful sea-circled world is known to citizens of the rest of the planet because of the European overachievers who happened to stop off here: Captain Cook, Melville, Maugham, Michener, Gauguin.

    In fairness to the latter it must be said that even a few days in Tahiti will raise one’s appreciation of his art. He captured as no one else has the gravity beneath the gaiety of Tahitian women; he saw the shadow of melancholy that lurks even in the flower-strewn glades of paradise. Though perhaps it isn’t melancholy as such. Perhaps it’s merely a sense that paradise, too, can be wearying, in its own peculiar way.

    WHEN THE GREAT TROPICAL clouds scud through, the sea turns briefly gray with shadow; for most of the day, though, it is a deep blue. A mile out from my bungalow the waves break forever against the reef, throwing up perfect sequences of brilliant whitecaps against an equally perfect sky. A few miles across the strait the mountains of Moorea loom as a backdrop, keeping the eye from being lost in the blue of the sea.

    In the shallows the water is green. Beneath my little porch I can watch a multitude of fish noodling around

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