King Bongo : A Novel of Havana (Vintage Contemporaries)

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Noir, Soon To Be A Classic
Review: I loved King Bongo! I just finished it and loved every word of it. It would make a fantastic movie. I highly recommend this book. Thomas Sanchez is one of my favorite authors. He is a master. Every character sparkles with life, every scene is explosive. I'm speechless.

And what is the author of the first customer review talking about? It seems as if he or she knows Thomas Sanchez and has a personal vendetta against him. It reads more like a jealous lover's hate letter than a sincere review. How could he or she have read the book and written an obviously edited piece on April 22nd when the book wasn't available until the same day? It seems as if the customer-reviewer wrote the piece without reading the book unlike the brilliant reviewers from Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. And to say that Thomas Sanchez is copying Ellroy's style is uneducated because Sanchez wrote the great noir novel Zoot-Suit Murders in the 1970's which effectively predates Ellroy. Also, just because King Bongo is set in the tropics doesn't mean that it has to be the same book as Mile Zero. How does that make any sense? Thomas Sanchez is a master of many styles and is one the greatest authors around. You will love King Bongo.

Rating:
Summary: Begging for a Movie
Review: It's rare that I think a book should be longer. Most current American novels seem like vegan fare, lacking not only meat but anything substantial at all. On the other end are those so bloated that you wonder if the editor was ordered out of the building at gunpoint. King Bongo is somewhere in between, and is unlike Sanchez' earlier work in that it seems to have been written to be made into a movie. Not unusual - Richard Russo did the same thing with Empire Falls. And not necessarily a bad thing. Just not what I expected from Thomas Sanchez.

There is a good story here, but it lacks depth. There are plenty of complications of plot and plenty of atmosphere. I know nothing about Havana, but I felt as if I could see and hear and feel and smell it. And considering the barely 300 pages of length, he does a good job of exploring a few of the characters. But I wanted more - more about the childhood of King and his sister, more about the relationship between Zapata and the Panther, more about the Armstrong woman, and especially more about Sweet Maria, whose transvestitism seemed to be thrown in as an afterthought.

One of the major problems I had with this novel was the character of King Bongo himself. He didn't seem like any insurance agent I could ever imagine. A private detective, yes; but as an insurance agent, surely he was a failure. Where were his clients? And for pete's sake, where did he get the money he paid out to Mrs. Armstrong?

I also had a little trouble with the occasional remarks that indicated that most of the people were actually speaking Spanish, and the English dialogue in the book was actually a "translation." Of course this made sense in the context, but I kept wondering why he couldn't have just mixed more Spanish in with the English.

Still, this is a good solid story and I would definitely go to see it as a movie. Good acting could supply a lot of the "back story" that Sanchez barely hints at. It's a good enough book that I will read it again in a few months, and see if it grows on me some more.

Rating:
Summary: Glorious Film Noir on the Written Page
Review: King Bongo is an insurance agent with a private eye license in 1957 Cuba. The bearded ones are in the hills, putting pressure on the corrupt government. A cross dressing assassin is hunting the president. Two goons from America are hunting the Assassin. King Bongo is hunting his missing sister. Everybody seems to be hunting King Bongo.

Sometimes this book seems to be going where it isn't, but there's nothing you can do about that, because Sanchez grabs you right from the beginning and keeps tugging at you all the way through the story as you find yourself driving that Oldsmobile Rocket with Bongo as he tries to track down his beautiful, but missing sister.

Bongo is such a wonderful smuck who is afraid of nothing. His friends are loyal. His enemies formidable and the story is glorious. Circles within circles, prose to die for, characters you'll never forget. Books just don't get better than this.

Reviewed by Olivia Louise Louis

Rating:
Summary: I loved it!
Review: Thomas Sanchez has created in KING BONGO a post-modern legendary novel, rich and mythological. Like Graham Green in his time, Sanchez has the courage to write about how politics shaped a particular cultural moment . Don't be misled that the politics are the author's, as some will mistakenly present them to be, in the same way that Green was often misinterpreted. Sanchez did not write a revisionist history, seen from a half-century on. He wrote about high and low society and everything in between, about politics both personal and self serving, about dreams, desires and obsessions, tossing them all into the conflicted boiiling stew that was Havana in the mid-1950s. This book is for those with open minds and prepared for an unforgetable wild ride.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible and enjoyable
Review: When I pointed it out to a friend, she took a long look at the slick retro Cuban 1950s dust cover art of this novel and said it looked "too cool" to her to be serious. Then I pointed to the author, whose first novel "Rabbit Boss," now 30 years old and still in print, is increasingly being included on retrospective "best of" lists. "Rabbit Boss" is literature distilled, sometimes an exasperating challenge (like, say, William Faulkner), but whereas a lot of novels today are little vanity solos, this saga of the Nevada-California Washoe Indian tribe is the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Now comes "King Bongo," a one-of-kind novel of Cuban in the Fifties, at the height of its poisoning by the worst aspects of American culture. In this book the characters do what Faulkner said characters ought to do, which is "stand up on their hind legs and howl" [with life]. Sanchez is a kind of prose poet, which can make it necessary to read a passage over two or three times now and then before you fully get the point. (You are always rewarded for your effort.) What I appreciate most of all about his writing is Sanchez' extraordinary insight into life's essential unfairness, and the follies and yearnings of men and women. His humor is not coy, but earthy. He understands absurdity, but doesn't strain to be literary, no more than Mark Twain did. What he does is focus on the Human Comedy, which of course also means the Human Tragedy. What I also respect about his writing, including the marvelous 1989 novel "Mile Zero" which seems a spiritual cousin to "King Bongo" and came famously within a hair of winning the Pulitzer Prize -- besides the virtuoso use of language and the sheer wonderful circus of the characters he brings to life in it (often at some risk, because they are not familiar cutout cliches that seem to hook so many critics like a trout going for a fly) -- is his political sensibility. Sanchez is a writer of deep compassion and it shows in the ways he portrays his characters. This is masterful storytelling. As usual with Sanchez, there's much more here than meets the eye, and that's the joy of it. Norman Mailer said long ago that of all the things that can make a writer fail, the worst is probably artistic cowardice. You'll find not a trace of that here -- Sanchez is as bold as they come, and bravo for that.