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Gringos
With an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd details that comprise your average American, Charles Portis brings to life Jimmy Burns, an expatriate American living in Mexico. For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing-person situation--whatever it takes to remain the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers. But Jimmy's laid-back lifestyle is being seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker named Louise, whose particular fascination with Jimmy is a mystery to him. Add to this a sudden wave of hippies led by a murderous ex-con guru in search of psychic happenings, archaeologists unearthing (illegally) the Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weirdo husband's quest for UFO landing sites, and Jimmy's simple south-of-the-border existence is facing clear and present danger.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Charles Portis
16 books661 followersCharles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. A newer film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010.
Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.
His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.
Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.
His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 238 reviews
February 25, 2011
Gringos isn’t exactly what I wanted from Charles Portis at this time. Yes, I realize Portis probably had his own literary agenda, but naturally I prefer mine: i.e., that he continue to write short, funny, meandering books about semi-enlightened rednecks. Gringos fits several of these bills if you want to quibble—and, as I’ve said before, you usually do—but its humor is a little more serious-minded than I wanted. I have the suspicion that all this rigmarole about crazy Americans trying to work out their neuroses and hang-ups in Mexico and Guatemala is intended to tell me something profoundly insightful about Americans—and perhaps about their childish devotion to myth, hocus-pocus, and the otherworldly because the world they’ve fashioned for themselves is so underwhelming and prosaic. But this feels too obvious, and Portis’s characters are a little too grotesque in this outing to serve as persuasive stand-ins.
This is all wild speculation, of course, because I’m not really sure what Portis’s point was. But I am strongly convinced that he had one. The story is too garrulous, overpopulated, and ornamented with recurring themes to be arbitrary or haphazard. Or is it? Maybe Portis is—just as I said in a previous review—a natural-born yarnspinner, and we literarily-minded saps are always still looking for a grand, metaphysical narrative behind the scenes. This is the kind of scrupulousness that makes dullards out of us. Let the novel stand there, on its own, and speak for itself. Was it enjoyable? Maybe that should be the main question. Enjoyability captures so many qualities under its umbrella that I should be content with saying, Yes, the novel Gringos by Charles Portis is mostly enjoyable. That is enough.
And yet it’s somehow not. It’s enjoyable but somewhat unsatisfying. Like if you sat down and spooned half a container of fat-free Cool Whip into your gaping maw. It lacks a substantiality that I craved right now. Gringos is, after all, Portis’s last novel—a statement implying that he’s dead, which he’s not, in the rigorous sense of the word anyway, but this novel was published in 1990, I believe. The juxtaposed evidence of his advanced age and the twenty-ones year since the publication of Gringos leads me to conclude that he’s thrown in the towel with this novel-writing business. Just call me Angela Lansbury. Writer’s Block, She Wrote. Or, worse, apathy. Discouragement. Plain old-fashioned tiredness.
I wanted Gringos, Portis’s swan song, to show him at the height of his powers. But no. Of the four (of five) Portis novels I’ve read, this is probably the depth of his powers. And yet it’s good. Just not good enough. It’s the story of Jimmy Burns, an American expatriate, who used to do archaeological things (I say ‘archaeological things’ because I’m not sure if he was a genuine archaeologist or merely a ruins scavenger) but now mainly does odd jobs for people. The story focuses on an American expatriate community in Mexico predominantly comprised of wackos, UFO enthusiasts, violent cult members, hippies, and general, non-categorizable eccentrics. There are about twenty thousand characters in this three-hundred-twenty page novel, and I had a hell of a time keeping them all straight—which resulted in several anguished searches through the early pages of the book searching for characters’ names. Late in the book, Jimmy tells us that a certain character has died, and given the attention devoted to this death, it seemed to be a somewhat significant event, yet I had no recollection of who he was. The name sounded familiar though. Either this book needs an index or my mind is progressing at a brisk clip toward its grand enfeeblement.
This is all wild speculation, of course, because I’m not really sure what Portis’s point was. But I am strongly convinced that he had one. The story is too garrulous, overpopulated, and ornamented with recurring themes to be arbitrary or haphazard. Or is it? Maybe Portis is—just as I said in a previous review—a natural-born yarnspinner, and we literarily-minded saps are always still looking for a grand, metaphysical narrative behind the scenes. This is the kind of scrupulousness that makes dullards out of us. Let the novel stand there, on its own, and speak for itself. Was it enjoyable? Maybe that should be the main question. Enjoyability captures so many qualities under its umbrella that I should be content with saying, Yes, the novel Gringos by Charles Portis is mostly enjoyable. That is enough.
And yet it’s somehow not. It’s enjoyable but somewhat unsatisfying. Like if you sat down and spooned half a container of fat-free Cool Whip into your gaping maw. It lacks a substantiality that I craved right now. Gringos is, after all, Portis’s last novel—a statement implying that he’s dead, which he’s not, in the rigorous sense of the word anyway, but this novel was published in 1990, I believe. The juxtaposed evidence of his advanced age and the twenty-ones year since the publication of Gringos leads me to conclude that he’s thrown in the towel with this novel-writing business. Just call me Angela Lansbury. Writer’s Block, She Wrote. Or, worse, apathy. Discouragement. Plain old-fashioned tiredness.
I wanted Gringos, Portis’s swan song, to show him at the height of his powers. But no. Of the four (of five) Portis novels I’ve read, this is probably the depth of his powers. And yet it’s good. Just not good enough. It’s the story of Jimmy Burns, an American expatriate, who used to do archaeological things (I say ‘archaeological things’ because I’m not sure if he was a genuine archaeologist or merely a ruins scavenger) but now mainly does odd jobs for people. The story focuses on an American expatriate community in Mexico predominantly comprised of wackos, UFO enthusiasts, violent cult members, hippies, and general, non-categorizable eccentrics. There are about twenty thousand characters in this three-hundred-twenty page novel, and I had a hell of a time keeping them all straight—which resulted in several anguished searches through the early pages of the book searching for characters’ names. Late in the book, Jimmy tells us that a certain character has died, and given the attention devoted to this death, it seemed to be a somewhat significant event, yet I had no recollection of who he was. The name sounded familiar though. Either this book needs an index or my mind is progressing at a brisk clip toward its grand enfeeblement.
February 13, 2011
If you only want to read one Portis novel, make it, of course, ‘True Grit.’ Two, add ‘Norwood.’ Three, it’s ‘Gringos.’
Portis writes with an unassuming air. Nothing monumental going on, except perhaps with ‘True Grit.’ That tossed-off, effortless feeling is not so easy to produce, if you want it to come across with any sense of authenticity. Ask anyone who’s tried writing like that.
Ask Portis. Here’s the narrator of ‘Gringos,’ Jimmy Burns: ‘Writing is hard—it’s a form of punishment in schools, and rightly so—and so I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put.’
You just know Portis sweats to craft such deceptively straightforward observation, so plain yet so elegantly witty.
Let him walk you down the length of a saloon:
‘Along the bar various claims to personal distinction were being made.
‘“I have a stainless steel plate in my head.”
“I am one-sixteenth Cherokeee.”
“I have never voted in my life.”
“My mother ate speckled butterbeans every day of her life.”
“I don’t even take aspirin.” ’
In six rather stark sentences, Portis demonstrates the beauty of the fiction form. There’s a whole little pathetic world there that’s pretty funny. A tracking shot would capture the author’s discerning ear for dialogue and eye for ne’er-do-well characters, but without the humor of his introduction.
‘Gringos’ would make an excellent movie, though.
Jimmy Burn is an ex-patriate in Mérida scraping out a living by trading and hauling whatever he can fit in his truck, as well as hunting down criminal fugitives hiding south of the border . He goes on the requisite Portis road trip, meandering through the exotic Yucatan jungle in a search for a vanished eccentric, meeting up with genuine archaeologists as well as kind of kooks whom readers of ‘Masters of Atlantis’ will recognize—the ones who’ve seen aliens, or at least find their traces in Maya ruins.
And the denouement of ‘Gringos’ features a satisfying dose of violent action, somewhat uncharacteristic for Portis. Plus there is a happy ending.
Come on, Hollywood.
Portis writes with an unassuming air. Nothing monumental going on, except perhaps with ‘True Grit.’ That tossed-off, effortless feeling is not so easy to produce, if you want it to come across with any sense of authenticity. Ask anyone who’s tried writing like that.
Ask Portis. Here’s the narrator of ‘Gringos,’ Jimmy Burns: ‘Writing is hard—it’s a form of punishment in schools, and rightly so—and so I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put.’
You just know Portis sweats to craft such deceptively straightforward observation, so plain yet so elegantly witty.
Let him walk you down the length of a saloon:
‘Along the bar various claims to personal distinction were being made.
‘“I have a stainless steel plate in my head.”
“I am one-sixteenth Cherokeee.”
“I have never voted in my life.”
“My mother ate speckled butterbeans every day of her life.”
“I don’t even take aspirin.” ’
In six rather stark sentences, Portis demonstrates the beauty of the fiction form. There’s a whole little pathetic world there that’s pretty funny. A tracking shot would capture the author’s discerning ear for dialogue and eye for ne’er-do-well characters, but without the humor of his introduction.
‘Gringos’ would make an excellent movie, though.
Jimmy Burn is an ex-patriate in Mérida scraping out a living by trading and hauling whatever he can fit in his truck, as well as hunting down criminal fugitives hiding south of the border . He goes on the requisite Portis road trip, meandering through the exotic Yucatan jungle in a search for a vanished eccentric, meeting up with genuine archaeologists as well as kind of kooks whom readers of ‘Masters of Atlantis’ will recognize—the ones who’ve seen aliens, or at least find their traces in Maya ruins.
And the denouement of ‘Gringos’ features a satisfying dose of violent action, somewhat uncharacteristic for Portis. Plus there is a happy ending.
Come on, Hollywood.
June 9, 2015
Charles Portis: the most underrated comic writer in America. This doesn't scale the heights of his masterwork DOG OF THE SOUTH, but it's enjoyable to accompany his eccentric characters as they drink in small town Mexican bars, trade notes on raiding Mayan tombs, track missing UFO experts through the jungle, and encounter hippie tribes awaiting the end of the world. There's a Robert Stone haze of menace floating around the edges of this tale and Pynchon-esque secret plots furtively winding through the story as well. But mostly it's pure Portis. He immerses you in his off-beat world with ease, tossing off hilarious one-liners so embedded in the action that at first you don't even notice them. Quentin Tarantino has talked about how certain movies - Dazed and Confused, Rio Bravo, his own Jackie Brown - were "hang out movies" where the principal pleasure was the company of the characters. And that's true here as well. Sadly, this was Portis's last book. There are no clues herein about the long and still unbroken literary silence to follow. Instead the book ends with a lovely grace note, a bloody memory transfigured, a lingering tune.
December 6, 2009
It occurs to me, upon my most recent re-reading of this novel a few weeks ago, that this novel sort of works as a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark (a movie I've seen maybe 45,000 times) and 2012 (a movie I did not see and have no intention of seeing, having already seen enough Roland Emmerich films to make my eyes bleed). But, you know, funny. Really really funny.
Also, this novel is great when you want to read random passages out loud to your friends' voice mail boxes. The only problem is that you need to not laugh while you're doing it, or you'll ruin the whole effect. This is difficult, I've learned, but not impossible. The trick is to repeat the passage over several times before you make the call.
Also, this novel is great when you want to read random passages out loud to your friends' voice mail boxes. The only problem is that you need to not laugh while you're doing it, or you'll ruin the whole effect. This is difficult, I've learned, but not impossible. The trick is to repeat the passage over several times before you make the call.
June 16, 2020
Charles Portis is one of the few American novelists who has any understanding of Mexico. I found that out when I read Dog of the South, and Gringos just confirmed it. Both books were great fun to read, and I plan to continue reading the remainder of his novels (including True Grit) and short stories.
Gringos is set in the parts of Southeast Mexico that I consider my stomping grounds in the Republic, namely the States of Yucatan and Chiapas. Jimmy Burns is a low key Gringo who tries to get along with the strange assortment of Yanquis who live in Mexico, many of whom are Hippie/New Age types. A dozen years before the supposed end of the world as forecast by the Maya in 2012, Portis prepares us for all the craziness that was to come.
This is an excellent read throughout, with some great characterizations of those Americans who have chosen to live south of the border.
Gringos is set in the parts of Southeast Mexico that I consider my stomping grounds in the Republic, namely the States of Yucatan and Chiapas. Jimmy Burns is a low key Gringo who tries to get along with the strange assortment of Yanquis who live in Mexico, many of whom are Hippie/New Age types. A dozen years before the supposed end of the world as forecast by the Maya in 2012, Portis prepares us for all the craziness that was to come.
This is an excellent read throughout, with some great characterizations of those Americans who have chosen to live south of the border.
June 2, 2019
At some point during grad school, passionate as I had always been about the most rarified highfalutin literary fiction and immersed in the kind of dense prose with which the academic is obliged to grapple, I developed a passion for two American writers of popular fiction to whom I continue to retain an abiding attachment, Charles Portis and Thomas Berger. These two writers struck me then as the finest I had ever read of fiction that was fun and accessible though of great intelligence and executed with dazzling panache, and they came into my life with lessons I needed at I time when I very much needed them. They are accessible, yes, but redoubtable stylists also. They excel at novelistic structure and wrest considerable humour from the ignoble folly of human striving. Though he is still around, probably still doing his thing down in Arkansas, Portis only wrote five novels, the last of which, GRINGOS, was published in 1991. Five eminently accessible novels, fundamentally populist, may seem a modest bequest to humankind. But lo! what a reserve of riches! It did not take me long to read those five novels. Naturally. I cannot recall the exact sequence in which I read them, though I know I started with the first, NORWOOD (from 1966), and finished with GRINGOS. I cannot recall precisely when I read GRINGOS, but assume it must have been shortly before I lent my copy to my father when we were staying in a Tuscan villa in 2003 (the year I finished my MA), an event I recall quite clearly. A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, I had many encounters as a young man, including many with books and films, concerning which I do not necessarily possess the strongest recall—sometimes I possess none—and generally I reread books when that recall is especially poor, but even though I cannot remember the exact context in which I read GRINGOS, I still remembered the basic plot and all manner of incidental detail when I decided to have another go at it here over the last few days. I return to GRINGOS simply because it is one of my favourite novels of all time, Portis’s foremost achievement as far as I am concerned. It does not seem likely ol’ Charlie is gonna provide us with any more masterpieces, so I suppose revisitations will have to suffice. The writer Wells Tower has written a nice appreciation of GRINGOS, available online; it is his favourite Portis as well and a book he regularly rereads. He remarks upon a favourite line from the book, in which the narrator remarks upon how easy it is to kill a man with a double-barrel shotgun: “I wasn’t used to seeing my will so little resisted, having been in sales for so long.” (Wells Tower published an absolutely tremendous book of short fiction in 2009 and nothing substantial since. Apparently he pissed off a bunch of people at a reading in Portland last year. I hope he is okay. A man with a major gift and presumably attendant troubles.) Portis is a master of deadpan ironic gags of the kind represented by that “having been in sales so long” jewel. His deceptively simple language is always rich in overtones. TRUE GRIT was the novel that made him and almost certainly made his early retirement workable. Most people know the film versions so cannot possibly know the work for what it originally was: a stunning performance with vernacular language sublimating its own metacommentary. The Coen Brothers’ adaptation of the novel is in some ways the more objectionable of the two movie versions by virtue of the horrible things Carter Burwell’s syrupy earnest score does to the tone. Portis is smart, maniacally entertaining, and always profoundly ironic. He marches us through his mechanics with a giddy lucidity. GRINGOS is my favourite Portis both because of the basic material and the level of consolidated perfection it demonstrates in terms of technique. It is, in short, simply perfect, practically declarative as such. Telling the story of Jimmy Burns, a veteran of the Korean War originally from Louisiana who has spent a number of years eking out a half-assed living on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, occasionally tracking down runaways and wanted persons as a side gig, GRINGOS is to an extent engaged with genre fiction, combining elements of the western and the skip-trace-style detective yarn. The novel is narrated in first person by Jimmy. Because of his own caustic call-it-like-I-see-it jive and intolerance for excessive bullshit, Jimmy has something of the quality of a Southerner Philip Marlowe to him. He used to make his living illegally salvaging relics from remote Mayan tombs et cetera, but came to realize that the practice was somewhat risky and probably ethically indefensible. He remarks on the ironic dubiousness of the whole operation: “Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets.” Now he tracks down the occasional missing person and transports things for people in his truck. One of the many mantras that Jimmy shares with the reader warns that “if you have a truck your friends will drive you crazy.” There are pearls of wisdom aplenty. Writing is hard, believes Jimmy, “a form of punishment in school, and rightly so.” Approached in a bar by a man he has met before, now comparably much the worse for wear: “it seems to me you must let a haunted man make his report.” On the subject of his one-time short-term paramour Beth, a smart lady with a penchant for hooking up with poets, Jimmy notes: “Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.” Of course this gag tells us more about male insecurities than it does about “intellectual women.” When we first meet Jimmy Burns he is “the very picture of an American idler in Mexico” and receiving poison pen letters from an anonymous foe. There is Louise, the ninety-pound stalker, who “truly wished everyone well” and reminds Jimmy of his Methodist preacher grandfather “who included the Dionne quintuplets and the Postmaster General in his long, itemized prayers.” Louise is to wife to Rudy. Or is she? Rudy is an itinerant Ufologists come to “Mayaland” in hopes of making either contact or substantive discoveries pertaining to ancient extraterrestrial interference in earthly affairs. There are others of Rudy’s ilk about. There are also many archeologist or archeological wannabes, many of them as ridiculously puffed-up as is Rudy. Foremost among them is Dr. Richard Flandin, an elderly gentleman who has been working on his book on the Maya for many decades and who laments repeatedly and at length how he has been alternately robbed and ignored by the institution bozos. Also there are endless ragged groups of roving hippies, more specifically “real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children and the von Däniken people” (Von Däniken was the first of the Ancient Aliens gurus). Hippies such as a disreputable crew calling themselves the Jumping Jacks, searching for the Inaccessible City of Dawn, who insist with misleading innocuousness that they have “fled the madness and found the gladness.” They are led by a malevolent guy named Dan, sporting a tattoo which betrays his having spent at least some time in the Aryan Brotherhood. In the company of the Jumping Jacks is a little red-headed girl who Jimmy will discover, having consulted the Blue Papers comprising the current roster of missing or wanted, to be a runaway named LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Rudy, the alien fanatic, will go missing. Jimmy will go off in pursuit of Rudy and LaJoye Mishell Teeter. He will be handed a .45 automatic ‘pistola' on a literal platter. There is an old man known to the locals as El Obisbo who walks around Mérida, the town where Jimmy has nominally set up shop, muttering over and over a passage from Mark about human towers coming crashing down and who may or may not turn at night into a reddish fox-faced dog generally only seen about to disappear around a corner. Jimmy Burns sees the dog right before setting off in search of Rudy and the missing girl. Omen, portent. He sets of with his friend Refugio, a first-time-out-in-the-field archeologist named Gail, and Dr. Flandin. I am only drawing a cursory sketch here, this is a book with many characters and elaborate plotting, but suffice it to say that Jimmy and Refugio pursue their quarry to Likín, a hilltop ruin over the river in Guatemala, the named derived from the Yucatec Maya word for “east” and “sunrise.” That’s right: the Inaccessible City of Dawn. Hippies have gathered there, “this flock of migrant cockatoos,” for what they believe to be the imminent end of the world, some apparently in the hopes of preventing the apocalypse by way of a sacrifice of some kind. Someone named El Mago would appear to figure in all this somewhere. Arriving at Likín: “Monkeys were screaming back and forth at one another across the river. The lunatic monkeys knew something was up.” Matters come to a head. There is a sublime coda. We find out who has been writing the poison pen letters. There are many other surprising and delightful eventualities. I have not even mentioned the chaneques, diabolic jungle elves, the bodies of two of which turn up. Might they be extraterrestrial? Well, almost certainly not, but try telling that to some people. There are, in fact, all kinds of things I haven’t mentioned. I leave them for your discovery. I have probably given you a more than adequate lay of the land. The world of GRINGOS is practically outside of time proper, almost transcending specific historical considerations. The profusion of hippies might seem to help date it, but the novel is relatively free of historical markers. One matter stands out. Jimmy Burns was at some point a teenager fighting as a Marine in Korea. He is forty-one years of age during the events that take place in the novel. Because of this, we can be fairly certain that GRINGOS, published in 1991, and otherwise not forthcoming on the subject, takes place sometime in the 70s. Portis was also a Marine in Korea. It would seem clear that he identifies with Jimmy Burns. It would seem clear that to a certain extent he hands part of his own sensibility over to this congenial loafer, lax as the man is to a certain extent, sometime half misanthrope, but always more or less good-humoured and serious about his ethics, beholden to a code (a must for heroes of genre fiction). I have said that Jimmy Burns has an intolerance for bullshit. Indeed, but only to a certain extent. He isn’t about to buy into some lunatic’s outrageous malarkey, but he realizes that the malarkey of lunatics is not always without its charms. Sure, he understands that the UFO nuts are indeed nuts. “Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.” Amen. Defiance should always be fun. Above all else. Turn off, tune out, go south.
January 21, 2021
Portis is always good. I am sad he wrote so few novels. Now I've read them all.
March 19, 2023
I tore through Portis' other novels years ago, and saved this, his last, because I didn't want to be finished with him. I maybe expected some kind of grand final statement, but this isn't that, it's just another characteristically great Portis novel, funny and a few shades darker than most...and no less funny for that. The occasion is the publication of the Library of America collected works, and hallelujah, there are short stories and pieces of his journalism tucked in the back so while I'm finished with his novels I'm not yet finished with his writing.
September 18, 2022
Every paragraph is like a little present
March 27, 2013
Another classic by the master. This book is a little larger in scope than his previous ones, but still classic Portis. Jimmy Burns is the hero, a wise cracking reformed thief of Mayan antiquities turned long haul trucker and finder of runaways. Here he's searching for a UFO obsessed crackpot friend gone missing in the Mexican jungle with a host of strange and wonderful characters in tow. A must read! Charles Portis is one of the greatest writers America has ever produced!
December 30, 2009
I'm glad this book isn't longer than it is because every single paragraph is masterfully funny and demands re-reading. I struggle to find a comparison. Wodehouse? Kinda. Hasek? Getting warmer. Joseph Mitchell? A close relative.
August 26, 2021
I struggled with this book. I wanted to give it the extra mile (going beyond my general, 4o-page trial run 'rule') because Portis' 'Masters of Atlantis' is a remarkable work - it cemented my interest in his output. But I made it to the halfway-point of this and realized the struggle was too real. The book was what it was going to remain (it seemed) and I wasn't the intended audience.
What we have here is a sort-of stream of consciousness fashioned as a novel. We follow Jimmy Burns, a self-proclaimed "lugubrious bore":
Jimmy is an odd man out (of his own country). His relationship with Mexico and its people appears to be a love/hate one. He gets by by the seat of his pants, making ends meet by way of whatever comes up (anything from dealing in Mayan artifacts to trucking jobs to helping the police locate missing persons; you name it).
His noncommittal flexibility puts him in the path of any number of locals and those-passing-through. Portis populates this book with way too many disparate characters (archaeologists, hippies, UFO enthusiasts, etc.) coming and going with revolving-door regularity. A few are highlighted but the fuzzy connect-the-dot process proves exhausting.
Portis' tone here is rather like Vonnegut at his most idiosyncratic (which is why I gave up on 'Sirens of Titan' fairly early on). Like Vonnegut, Portis can still occasionally deliver wonderfully deadpan humor - even in a lesser work. But eventually the overriding meandering nature of this book did me in. A different kind of reader - someone with a more specific interest in the novel's terrain - could easily find it all hilarious and more engaging. I'm just not that reader.
What we have here is a sort-of stream of consciousness fashioned as a novel. We follow Jimmy Burns, a self-proclaimed "lugubrious bore":
Yes, that was me to a T, lugubrious and punctual and facetious, all at once, a combination I would have found tiresome in another person, if I had known one.The narrator throws out that already-sensed admission midway; the reminder didn't bode well for what might follow.
Jimmy is an odd man out (of his own country). His relationship with Mexico and its people appears to be a love/hate one. He gets by by the seat of his pants, making ends meet by way of whatever comes up (anything from dealing in Mayan artifacts to trucking jobs to helping the police locate missing persons; you name it).
His noncommittal flexibility puts him in the path of any number of locals and those-passing-through. Portis populates this book with way too many disparate characters (archaeologists, hippies, UFO enthusiasts, etc.) coming and going with revolving-door regularity. A few are highlighted but the fuzzy connect-the-dot process proves exhausting.
Portis' tone here is rather like Vonnegut at his most idiosyncratic (which is why I gave up on 'Sirens of Titan' fairly early on). Like Vonnegut, Portis can still occasionally deliver wonderfully deadpan humor - even in a lesser work. But eventually the overriding meandering nature of this book did me in. A different kind of reader - someone with a more specific interest in the novel's terrain - could easily find it all hilarious and more engaging. I'm just not that reader.
January 8, 2023
Portis maybe best known for
True Grit
, which I actually still have yet to read, but I very much enjoyed his
The Dog of the South
and
Norwood
.
This has a lot in common with the former, in that it’s a story of an Arkansas native in exile, Jimmy Burns, and amateur archaeologist, and with the latter, in the colourful set of characters he is surrounded by, and the imminent danger that he doesn’t realise he is about to face.
The protagonist, Burns, lives in the Yucatan, as a sort of tour guide, for the jungle and the Mayan ruins, and he also dabbles in a little illicit dealing of Mayan antiquities.
A bunch of threatening hippies arrive into town with the word on the street that they are involved with a recent kidnapping in the US, and on the run. Jimmy Burns’s life is about to change markedly.
Portis maybe be best known for True Grit, but his other work, and there is far too little of it unfortunately, is every bit as good.
This has a lot in common with the former, in that it’s a story of an Arkansas native in exile, Jimmy Burns, and amateur archaeologist, and with the latter, in the colourful set of characters he is surrounded by, and the imminent danger that he doesn’t realise he is about to face.
The protagonist, Burns, lives in the Yucatan, as a sort of tour guide, for the jungle and the Mayan ruins, and he also dabbles in a little illicit dealing of Mayan antiquities.
A bunch of threatening hippies arrive into town with the word on the street that they are involved with a recent kidnapping in the US, and on the run. Jimmy Burns’s life is about to change markedly.
Portis maybe be best known for True Grit, but his other work, and there is far too little of it unfortunately, is every bit as good.
Read
March 10, 2020what this lacks humorwise compared to norwood and d.o.t.s. it makes up for w/ that quality you see in the really primo robert stone stuff (see, e.g., hall of freakin mirrors), where intrigue & crime & lovecraftian horror all exist along a continuum where you can never be sure where one ends & the next begins. the trouble is that after the big apocalyptic confrontation the book putters on for another 70pp that are just kinda vestigial. masters of atlantis next!!
March 21, 2019
This is one of the last Portis books in my unread pile. It’s always a pleasure reading Portis—his humor and turns of phrase are wonderful and he taught George Saunders nearly everything he knows. This narrator is less hapless and more can-do than most of his men, with a strong streak of shiftless ne’er-do-well as well as a kind of understated saintliness that those around him never fail to exploit. Mexico and Guatemala provide a terrific setting for the typical Portis cast of bumblers, imposters, cynics, and mystics. The plot felt a little looser here than in some of his others, and I don’t know that anything will ever get near True Grit for a spot in my heart, but this was real enjoyable to read.
June 6, 2022
With a wide array of unique characters displaying a multitude of cultures and personalities, Gringos was able to create fantastic interactions as well as enhance some wonderfully interesting plot points. While this works for some of the book, I found that too many characters often became confusing and unfocused. The book was difficult to follow sometimes and I confused both minor and major characters for each other multiple times throughout. Maybe this says more about my reading ability, but it definitely impacted the flow of the book. Overall, I enjoyed the wonderfully described and interesting singular moments of the story, but it was difficult to get through due to a lack of cohesion.
June 30, 2011
Cut from similar cloth as the author’s Dog in the South, a story of ex-patriots (American) living on the Guatemala/Mexico border, and they are a truly eccentric bunch. Plot elements are wispy (another quest for a missing person) and languid, the sense of the comic turns alternately ominous, and the sentences are almost nearly all perfect. His finely pitched sentence after sentence keeps you reading despite the meandering narrative, on strength of the writing alone. A Manson family/ Jonestown type cult and hints of Guatemala’s civil war offer darker under currents.
February 18, 2013
Almost as good as Dog of the South, and thus probably Portis's second-best book. Stumbles slightly at the end. Slightly, surprisingly reactionary. But great.
May 14, 2020
The most satisfying square on hippie violence this side of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
April 23, 2021
When the pandemic started, I was rereading Gringos and just hanging out at home, so just for my personal kicks and as a service for my Portis fan friends I decided to write annotations for the entire novel. I finished this quite some time ago, but I dusted it off and am providing it for anyone who cares to consult it. There aren't any chapter headings, so I invented my own.
Chapter 1 (Christmas pancakes)
3 Cocina Economica -- a popular name for a cheaps eats place in Mexico, there are several with this name in Merida.
9 Calle 55 -- Jimmy is staying at Posada Fausto on this street. The Hotel Posada San Francisco at 446 Calle 55 looks almost identical to his description (Street View). It's three blocks north of the zocalo and about ten blocks east.
10 Paseo Montejo -- a broad divided boulevard, two lanes per direction, has museums, palaces, upscale restaurants and cafes, and of course, the tourist hotels
10 zocalo -- the main square is densely planted with trees, and the cathedral is on one side facing the square
11 Fud bacon -- still a very popular brand, can be found at Walmart here
13 the Dionne quintuplets -- were the first known to survive their infancy. The identical quints were born in Ontario, Canada in 1934, and two of them are still living.
14 Progreso -- the hippies are headed for this port city about 40 miles due north of Merida. Also a tourist destination.
15 copita -- what most Americans would call a sherry glass
16 Yamato -- presumably he means the massive Airstream motorhome with this nickname. The Yamato was the largest and most heavily armed battleship built by the Japanese just before WWII.
17 Panuco ferry -- presumably the story takes place before the Tampico bridge went into service in 1988. Before that, you needed the ferry to cross the Panuco to get into the city.
18 zopilote -- buzzard
Chapter 2 (Oil Change)
21 chismosa -- gossip
22 Louisiana plates -- Jimmy's home state?
23 chaneques -- in Aztec legend, small sprite-like beings, guardians of nature
23 Tuxpan -- a town south of Tampico, also on the Gulf
23 campesino trousers -- probably the loose-fitting peasant farmer pants, usually made of light cotton
23 toxico -- literally, poison, but the context makes clear they are druggies
23 green canvas jungle boots -- these were military issue for U.S. combat troops in Vietnam
24 Gulf of Molo -- it's possible that Dan is referring to that place at the island of Ithaca in Greece
25 El Mago -- the magician
25 Azazel -- the name represents a desolate place where a scapegoat bearing the sins of the Jews during Yom Kippur was sent
28 L.C. Smith shotgun -- a Smith Hunter Arms Side-by-Side, 30-inch damascus barrel
29 mingitorio -- as the context suggests, a urinal
Chapter 3 (Chiapas)
33 Chiapas -- Jimmy is heading first for Palenque, which about a seven hour drive from Merida (536 km).
33 Bonar College -- fictional college located in Illinois
34 Ocosingo -- a raw cheese from the village of the same name in Chiapas, it's a multi-layered ball with notes of papaya and pineapple
34 Servel gas refrigerator -- stopped production in 1956; the government in 1998 warned of the dangers of using them because of carbon monoxide leakage
35 Champoton -- this town on the Gulf would be about 3 hour into Jimmy's trip along route 180
35 Palenque -- has some very impressive, but smaller Mayan ruins, built between 200 B.C. and 800 A.D.
36 Usumacinta River -- named after the Howler monkeys, it forms the border with Guatemala.
37 abrazo -- hug or embrace
42 Tres Zapotes -- a major Olmec archaelogical site near the Gulf in Southern Mexico
43 Ektun -- fictional.
43 Villahermosa -- the capital of Tabasco, about a 3 hour drive north of where Refugio's place is.
Chapter 4 (Ektun)
47 Caddo Parish -- another clue as to Jimmy's origin, this parish includes Shreveport.
48 Bonampak -- about 145km southeast of Palenque, this is a very remote area, and the road still ends there.
48 Tabi River -- presumably fictional
50 Tumbala -- is in the opposite direction, southwest of Palenque. Portis either gets this wrong, there's another place called that, or he invented it; one major archaeological site on the river is Yaxchilán. Another more minor site is at Piedras Negras.
53 Professor Camacho Puut -- this character has not been introduced yet.
54 First Marine Division -- Portis served in this division in the Korean War, arriving just a few weeks before the truce in July, 1953
57 Lacondon -- either a misprint, or Portis error. Lacandon are a Mayan people native to Chiapas
61 Flaca Peralta -- another character who has not been introduced
63 chiclero -- one who extracts gum from wild trees
63 Nahautl -- the Aztec language, and those who speak it, live in central Mexico
72 leaded Nova - Between the 1950s and 1970s, four types of gasoline were marketed in Mexico: Mexolina (70 octane), Super Mexolina (80 octane), Gasolmex (90 octane) and Pemex 100 (100 octane). In the 1980s, Nova Plus (81 octane) and Extra Plus (92 octane) petrol arrived, which reduced lead.
74 Casita Lola -- a popular name for residences and hotels, there are several variations on Lola in Merida.
Chapter 5 (Back to Merida)
77 pastelitos -- Cuban baked puff pastry
78 900,000 Faros cigarettes -- a Mexican cigarette, whose colorful package features a man smoking a cigarette on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with apparently a lighthouse offshore
81 Gamma Bulletin -- no known publication of this name exists
87 Valladolid -- a city about 160km east of Merida
88 Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan -- most people know of the famed feathered serpent of Aztec myth, but Kukulcan is the name given to it by the Maya.
Chapter 6 (Doc Flandin)
93 St. Charles Avenue -- nearly 5 miles long, shaded by trees and lined with mansions
96 curandera -- a healer who uses folk medicine and natural methods
Chapter 7 (Shep's)
109 inhumaciones -- burials
110 pulque -- liquor made from fermented sap of the agave, looks like milk, and has sour yeasty taste
113 gachupin -- a Spaniard
113 Diario del Sureste -- local newspaper in Merida
122 Ciribiribin -- an Italian ballad from 1898 that Harry James made his theme song
Chapter 8 (Rudy is missing)
133 bulla -- noise
136 Peten -- usually refers to the northernmost part of Guatemala
14 Naroody -- no references can be found
144 kuche -- no references found
Chapter 9 (El Zopilote in jail)
147 Louvre -- there are currently at least 7 restaurants in Merida with Louvre in their name, none of which are on the zocalo
Chapter 11 (Loading up the Mennonite's PVC pipe)
174 pobrecita -- poor girl
175 Tzeltzal -- typo? should be Tzeltal, highland Mayan people of Chiapas
176 Escarcega -- a small town about halfway between Refugio's ranchita and Merida
Chapter 12 (Ektun and searching for Rudy)
180 palanca -- an asper, native to central and south America; females can reach 2.5m in length; potentially lethal
184 Yoro -- no known place in Mexico or Guatemala
184 Tenosique -- about 25 miles east of Palenque on the Usumacinta
188 chultun -- an example of Portis' vast knowledge of the Mayan culture
189 chamacos -- kids
190 cuchillazo -- slash
191 chiflados — crackpots
193 Likin -- no known place
196 Chupa -- no known place
201 Sayache -- spelling should be Sayaxche; perhaps route 307 in Mexico had not be built then, as it would have been much closer to this section of the Usumacinta; however, the main channel becomes Rio Chixoy, and Pasion is more of a tributary, and it's about 60 or 70 miles upriver from Yaxchilan.
202 baktun --consists of 20 katun cycles of the Maya calendar, equal to 394 tropical years; the 13th actually should have ended on December 12, 2012. Gail's correlation references are too involved to describe here; suffice to say, there are many interpretations of how the Mayan calendar corresponds to modern dates.
205 coup de poing -- Lower Paleolithic stone hand axe
Chapter 13 (Down the Usumacinta to Yoro)
207 Lamanites -- one of the four ancient peoples described as having lived in the Americas according to the Book of Mormon
209 tortuga note — presumably a banknote that might have been private issue issued by a bank in Tortuga, island of Haiti
214 Temple of Dawn — presumably the hippies had been reading the Gamma Bulletin article or learned from Dan about the event. Later, Jimmy refers to it as the “City of Dawn”. Tulum, on the Yucatan coast has been called the City of Dawn (in Mayan, Zama), an indicator of its facing the sea.
Chapter 14 (The hippies at Likin and the end of Dan)
224 paseo — ride
231 Prince of Asturias — heir apparent to the throne of Spain
233 Bremerton Navy Yard -- now called the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, after WWII it was used mostly to modernizing existing aircraft carriers and during the Korean War busy with activating ships
241 palo blanco -- a type of acacia, narrow with few branches, and white peeling bark
241 sapodilla -- an evergreen tree native to southern Mexico, it is dominant in the Peten forest
244 Balam Akab -- or B'alam Agab -- a rainbow creating deity in Mayan mythology, one of four gods who created man; the Night Jaguar
248 cabron -- asshole
249 fregado -- scouring or scrubbing
Chapter 16 (Back in Merida)
266 Chetumal -- on the Caribbean side of Yucatan and on the northern border with Belize, almost a five hour drive from Merida; has the Museum of Mayan Culture
267 gitanos — male gypsies
267 Anglo-Scot — Belize was formerly British Honduras, British colony from 1749 to 1964. Renamed Belize in 1973.
267 guayabera shirt — a four-pocket embroidered linen shirt, usually formal.
268 de guagua — for nothing; free
269 mal del pinto — blotchy skin
270 Ogon — Japanese for gold
273 “Let Me Be Your Salty Dog” — popular Flatt & Scruggs tune, aka “Salty Dog Blues” from the early 1900’s
276 der schatzgräber — literally “treasure hunter” in German, it’s also known as codename of the Nazi weather station in the Arctic built in 1943
277 tau-cross — a cross shaped like the Greek letter tau, also known as St. Anthony’s cross; a variation of the crucifixion cross
278 San Cristobal blanket — the town in Chiapas is known for its weavings
279 breakbone fever — Dengue fever; transmitted via mosquito in the tropics, can be life-threatening
281 platillos voladores — flying saucers
289 Hunab Ku — the One God, the colonial period Mayan reference to the Christian God
289 Chacs/Bacabs — should be Chaac, the Mayan rain deity, and the four giant brothers in Mayan mythology, blowing the four directions of wind. Chac is also the name of the east wind brother
300 bastante - quite
Chapter 17 (The Wedding)
311 Sarstun — river forming part of the border of Belize and Guatemala
Chapter 1 (Christmas pancakes)
3 Cocina Economica -- a popular name for a cheaps eats place in Mexico, there are several with this name in Merida.
9 Calle 55 -- Jimmy is staying at Posada Fausto on this street. The Hotel Posada San Francisco at 446 Calle 55 looks almost identical to his description (Street View). It's three blocks north of the zocalo and about ten blocks east.
10 Paseo Montejo -- a broad divided boulevard, two lanes per direction, has museums, palaces, upscale restaurants and cafes, and of course, the tourist hotels
10 zocalo -- the main square is densely planted with trees, and the cathedral is on one side facing the square
11 Fud bacon -- still a very popular brand, can be found at Walmart here
13 the Dionne quintuplets -- were the first known to survive their infancy. The identical quints were born in Ontario, Canada in 1934, and two of them are still living.
14 Progreso -- the hippies are headed for this port city about 40 miles due north of Merida. Also a tourist destination.
15 copita -- what most Americans would call a sherry glass
16 Yamato -- presumably he means the massive Airstream motorhome with this nickname. The Yamato was the largest and most heavily armed battleship built by the Japanese just before WWII.
17 Panuco ferry -- presumably the story takes place before the Tampico bridge went into service in 1988. Before that, you needed the ferry to cross the Panuco to get into the city.
18 zopilote -- buzzard
Chapter 2 (Oil Change)
21 chismosa -- gossip
22 Louisiana plates -- Jimmy's home state?
23 chaneques -- in Aztec legend, small sprite-like beings, guardians of nature
23 Tuxpan -- a town south of Tampico, also on the Gulf
23 campesino trousers -- probably the loose-fitting peasant farmer pants, usually made of light cotton
23 toxico -- literally, poison, but the context makes clear they are druggies
23 green canvas jungle boots -- these were military issue for U.S. combat troops in Vietnam
24 Gulf of Molo -- it's possible that Dan is referring to that place at the island of Ithaca in Greece
25 El Mago -- the magician
25 Azazel -- the name represents a desolate place where a scapegoat bearing the sins of the Jews during Yom Kippur was sent
28 L.C. Smith shotgun -- a Smith Hunter Arms Side-by-Side, 30-inch damascus barrel
29 mingitorio -- as the context suggests, a urinal
Chapter 3 (Chiapas)
33 Chiapas -- Jimmy is heading first for Palenque, which about a seven hour drive from Merida (536 km).
33 Bonar College -- fictional college located in Illinois
34 Ocosingo -- a raw cheese from the village of the same name in Chiapas, it's a multi-layered ball with notes of papaya and pineapple
34 Servel gas refrigerator -- stopped production in 1956; the government in 1998 warned of the dangers of using them because of carbon monoxide leakage
35 Champoton -- this town on the Gulf would be about 3 hour into Jimmy's trip along route 180
35 Palenque -- has some very impressive, but smaller Mayan ruins, built between 200 B.C. and 800 A.D.
36 Usumacinta River -- named after the Howler monkeys, it forms the border with Guatemala.
37 abrazo -- hug or embrace
42 Tres Zapotes -- a major Olmec archaelogical site near the Gulf in Southern Mexico
43 Ektun -- fictional.
43 Villahermosa -- the capital of Tabasco, about a 3 hour drive north of where Refugio's place is.
Chapter 4 (Ektun)
47 Caddo Parish -- another clue as to Jimmy's origin, this parish includes Shreveport.
48 Bonampak -- about 145km southeast of Palenque, this is a very remote area, and the road still ends there.
48 Tabi River -- presumably fictional
50 Tumbala -- is in the opposite direction, southwest of Palenque. Portis either gets this wrong, there's another place called that, or he invented it; one major archaeological site on the river is Yaxchilán. Another more minor site is at Piedras Negras.
53 Professor Camacho Puut -- this character has not been introduced yet.
54 First Marine Division -- Portis served in this division in the Korean War, arriving just a few weeks before the truce in July, 1953
57 Lacondon -- either a misprint, or Portis error. Lacandon are a Mayan people native to Chiapas
61 Flaca Peralta -- another character who has not been introduced
63 chiclero -- one who extracts gum from wild trees
63 Nahautl -- the Aztec language, and those who speak it, live in central Mexico
72 leaded Nova - Between the 1950s and 1970s, four types of gasoline were marketed in Mexico: Mexolina (70 octane), Super Mexolina (80 octane), Gasolmex (90 octane) and Pemex 100 (100 octane). In the 1980s, Nova Plus (81 octane) and Extra Plus (92 octane) petrol arrived, which reduced lead.
74 Casita Lola -- a popular name for residences and hotels, there are several variations on Lola in Merida.
Chapter 5 (Back to Merida)
77 pastelitos -- Cuban baked puff pastry
78 900,000 Faros cigarettes -- a Mexican cigarette, whose colorful package features a man smoking a cigarette on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with apparently a lighthouse offshore
81 Gamma Bulletin -- no known publication of this name exists
87 Valladolid -- a city about 160km east of Merida
88 Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan -- most people know of the famed feathered serpent of Aztec myth, but Kukulcan is the name given to it by the Maya.
Chapter 6 (Doc Flandin)
93 St. Charles Avenue -- nearly 5 miles long, shaded by trees and lined with mansions
96 curandera -- a healer who uses folk medicine and natural methods
Chapter 7 (Shep's)
109 inhumaciones -- burials
110 pulque -- liquor made from fermented sap of the agave, looks like milk, and has sour yeasty taste
113 gachupin -- a Spaniard
113 Diario del Sureste -- local newspaper in Merida
122 Ciribiribin -- an Italian ballad from 1898 that Harry James made his theme song
Chapter 8 (Rudy is missing)
133 bulla -- noise
136 Peten -- usually refers to the northernmost part of Guatemala
14 Naroody -- no references can be found
144 kuche -- no references found
Chapter 9 (El Zopilote in jail)
147 Louvre -- there are currently at least 7 restaurants in Merida with Louvre in their name, none of which are on the zocalo
Chapter 11 (Loading up the Mennonite's PVC pipe)
174 pobrecita -- poor girl
175 Tzeltzal -- typo? should be Tzeltal, highland Mayan people of Chiapas
176 Escarcega -- a small town about halfway between Refugio's ranchita and Merida
Chapter 12 (Ektun and searching for Rudy)
180 palanca -- an asper, native to central and south America; females can reach 2.5m in length; potentially lethal
184 Yoro -- no known place in Mexico or Guatemala
184 Tenosique -- about 25 miles east of Palenque on the Usumacinta
188 chultun -- an example of Portis' vast knowledge of the Mayan culture
189 chamacos -- kids
190 cuchillazo -- slash
191 chiflados — crackpots
193 Likin -- no known place
196 Chupa -- no known place
201 Sayache -- spelling should be Sayaxche; perhaps route 307 in Mexico had not be built then, as it would have been much closer to this section of the Usumacinta; however, the main channel becomes Rio Chixoy, and Pasion is more of a tributary, and it's about 60 or 70 miles upriver from Yaxchilan.
202 baktun --consists of 20 katun cycles of the Maya calendar, equal to 394 tropical years; the 13th actually should have ended on December 12, 2012. Gail's correlation references are too involved to describe here; suffice to say, there are many interpretations of how the Mayan calendar corresponds to modern dates.
205 coup de poing -- Lower Paleolithic stone hand axe
Chapter 13 (Down the Usumacinta to Yoro)
207 Lamanites -- one of the four ancient peoples described as having lived in the Americas according to the Book of Mormon
209 tortuga note — presumably a banknote that might have been private issue issued by a bank in Tortuga, island of Haiti
214 Temple of Dawn — presumably the hippies had been reading the Gamma Bulletin article or learned from Dan about the event. Later, Jimmy refers to it as the “City of Dawn”. Tulum, on the Yucatan coast has been called the City of Dawn (in Mayan, Zama), an indicator of its facing the sea.
Chapter 14 (The hippies at Likin and the end of Dan)
224 paseo — ride
231 Prince of Asturias — heir apparent to the throne of Spain
233 Bremerton Navy Yard -- now called the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, after WWII it was used mostly to modernizing existing aircraft carriers and during the Korean War busy with activating ships
241 palo blanco -- a type of acacia, narrow with few branches, and white peeling bark
241 sapodilla -- an evergreen tree native to southern Mexico, it is dominant in the Peten forest
244 Balam Akab -- or B'alam Agab -- a rainbow creating deity in Mayan mythology, one of four gods who created man; the Night Jaguar
248 cabron -- asshole
249 fregado -- scouring or scrubbing
Chapter 16 (Back in Merida)
266 Chetumal -- on the Caribbean side of Yucatan and on the northern border with Belize, almost a five hour drive from Merida; has the Museum of Mayan Culture
267 gitanos — male gypsies
267 Anglo-Scot — Belize was formerly British Honduras, British colony from 1749 to 1964. Renamed Belize in 1973.
267 guayabera shirt — a four-pocket embroidered linen shirt, usually formal.
268 de guagua — for nothing; free
269 mal del pinto — blotchy skin
270 Ogon — Japanese for gold
273 “Let Me Be Your Salty Dog” — popular Flatt & Scruggs tune, aka “Salty Dog Blues” from the early 1900’s
276 der schatzgräber — literally “treasure hunter” in German, it’s also known as codename of the Nazi weather station in the Arctic built in 1943
277 tau-cross — a cross shaped like the Greek letter tau, also known as St. Anthony’s cross; a variation of the crucifixion cross
278 San Cristobal blanket — the town in Chiapas is known for its weavings
279 breakbone fever — Dengue fever; transmitted via mosquito in the tropics, can be life-threatening
281 platillos voladores — flying saucers
289 Hunab Ku — the One God, the colonial period Mayan reference to the Christian God
289 Chacs/Bacabs — should be Chaac, the Mayan rain deity, and the four giant brothers in Mayan mythology, blowing the four directions of wind. Chac is also the name of the east wind brother
300 bastante - quite
Chapter 17 (The Wedding)
311 Sarstun — river forming part of the border of Belize and Guatemala
July 23, 2022
The master's last novel, something I'd saved for a couple years since reading through the others. All of the classic Portis stuff is there: road trips, car trouble, working on your car, metaphysical con artists, failed academics, women, memory. Jimmy Burns is a former Marine, like Portis, and a former tomb raider, assisting foreign academics and amateurs in pillaging the Mayan ruins of Yucatán. Now he spends his days at the perpetually-for-sale Posada Hotel, tending to the needs of various eccentric fellow gringos around the town of Mérida, most of whom have crank theories of their own regarding the religion, art, and provenance of the extinct Mayan Empire. He confronts some hippie-cult members who are up to no good. Of course we need to get him on the road, and he is tasked with bringing one such gringo to a dig, which mutates later into a rescue mission. The mysticism of Mayan stuff connects the present volume to Masters of Atlantis, road trip stuff to all the other three.
Just like in other road books like True Grit and Dog of the South, Portis puts lots of memorable and weird characters in the way. A lot of them, including the Méridan gringos, are extremely thinly sketched, but he gets good mileage from everything. Jimmy Burns loves Mexico and loves the mysteries of the Maya; he's skeptical of his fellow gringos, particularly the ones who aim to uplift or edify the locals. His traveling companions are perhaps not quite as funny as Dr Symes in Dog, but then who could be? The dramatic confrontation at the end is reminiscent of nothing so much as True Grit, but for all its violence it's over quickly.
It's hard to pin down the Portis charm, which seems to come out of sentences that are mundane and shopworn. Unlike in previous books, he seems to put a bit of his philosophy of writing into this book. "Writing is hard---it's a form of punishment in school, and rightly so---and I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put." Another: "One night at Camp Pendleton I heard Colonel Raikes say that the key to it all was "frequent inspections." How right he was too." All those effortless lazy sentences may have been the result of an artist submerged in the everyday chitchat of scam artists and shade tree mechanics.
Just like in other road books like True Grit and Dog of the South, Portis puts lots of memorable and weird characters in the way. A lot of them, including the Méridan gringos, are extremely thinly sketched, but he gets good mileage from everything. Jimmy Burns loves Mexico and loves the mysteries of the Maya; he's skeptical of his fellow gringos, particularly the ones who aim to uplift or edify the locals. His traveling companions are perhaps not quite as funny as Dr Symes in Dog, but then who could be? The dramatic confrontation at the end is reminiscent of nothing so much as True Grit, but for all its violence it's over quickly.
It's hard to pin down the Portis charm, which seems to come out of sentences that are mundane and shopworn. Unlike in previous books, he seems to put a bit of his philosophy of writing into this book. "Writing is hard---it's a form of punishment in school, and rightly so---and I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put." Another: "One night at Camp Pendleton I heard Colonel Raikes say that the key to it all was "frequent inspections." How right he was too." All those effortless lazy sentences may have been the result of an artist submerged in the everyday chitchat of scam artists and shade tree mechanics.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 5, 2020
A hilarious mix of Joseph Heller absurdity and Coen Brothers farce. As always, Portis is effortlessly funny and fills his story with wonderfully eccentric characters: a man who has "the opposite of paranoia", a guy who was a communist in Spain and a fascist in Mexico, a doctor whose mantra, "well, everything is a cube", is not understood by a single person. It's hard to review Gringos without simply recounting my favourite lines.
June 9, 2022
*** Mild Spoilers***
Charles Portis is the funniest American writer currently at work—I hope. Gringos, published in 1991, seems to be his last entrada, as Doc Flandin calls his voyage into the selva throughout the book. And while True Grit may be his best novel and Masters of Atlantis and The Dog of the South tied dead even for his funniest (or the funniest by anyone, anywhere), Gringos is my favorite.
I had the chance to teach the novel for a few years when I was teaching high-school AP Literature. One day, a student said to me, “Admit it—you want to be Jimmy Burns.” She had me there, dead to rights. Prufrock knew he was not meant to be Hamlet—but who could? That’s like aspiring to be Beowulf or Bond: the task is too great for any normal person. But Jimmy Burns is at least visible on the horizon of literary heroes one could emulate. He’s tough, he’s ironic, and he’s a good man. He gets himself into one situation after another because he’s trying to help other people and he only complains to the reader. A month doesn’t go by without my quoting him or thinking, “This is right out of Gringos.”
Gringos, like life, seems to read as an episodic series of set pieces, unlike True Grit which barrels along at a fast pace and ends in a terrific shootout. But, again like life, when one looks back at the action, one senses a pattern in all of it. Jimmy prides himself on his keen powers of observation, working for Gilbert, finding fugitives, but there are other things he can’t see, such as Alma’s opinion of him or the nature of Rudy and Louise’s relationship.
And, for all of the jokes, the novel is one of the most realistic I’ve ever read in terms of how the major moments are handled. When Jimmy realizes that Big Dan and the Jumping Jacks are behind the City of Dawn business and that Red is a runaway in over her head, he prays—mid-paragraph, mind you—in a way wholly convincing:
We have no reason to assume Jimmy is insincere—and he keeps his promise of not taking any money. A similarly realistic moment is the shooting that occurs atop the pyramid. Thousands of other authors would have offered some banter, some ironic detachment in that scene, but Portis is too good. The shooting happens, and then the characters begin screaming at each other because their adrenalin has been increased a hundredfold.
Other moments are exactly like these in tone and spirit: Jimmy’s visit to Doc’s house when he learns of Doc's illness, the gathering of vets and the hippies at Shep's, the ways that Beth patronizes Jimmy, the barroom attempts at "marks of distinction," Jimmy’s quoting Art and Mike, and Jimmy’s marriage. How he gets married makes perfect sense and the couple at the end of the book strikes me as far more believable—and likable—than others found on other pages. Jimmy reasons, “You had to plant a tree somewhere,” and this novel of how a 41 year-old man ends up planting his tree is a masterpiece. This is probably the tenth or eleventh time I've read it from start to finish. My only regret is that the Coen brothers can’t make it because the man born to play Jimmy Burns, Tommy Lee Jones, has aged out of the role.
Charles Portis is the funniest American writer currently at work—I hope. Gringos, published in 1991, seems to be his last entrada, as Doc Flandin calls his voyage into the selva throughout the book. And while True Grit may be his best novel and Masters of Atlantis and The Dog of the South tied dead even for his funniest (or the funniest by anyone, anywhere), Gringos is my favorite.
I had the chance to teach the novel for a few years when I was teaching high-school AP Literature. One day, a student said to me, “Admit it—you want to be Jimmy Burns.” She had me there, dead to rights. Prufrock knew he was not meant to be Hamlet—but who could? That’s like aspiring to be Beowulf or Bond: the task is too great for any normal person. But Jimmy Burns is at least visible on the horizon of literary heroes one could emulate. He’s tough, he’s ironic, and he’s a good man. He gets himself into one situation after another because he’s trying to help other people and he only complains to the reader. A month doesn’t go by without my quoting him or thinking, “This is right out of Gringos.”
Gringos, like life, seems to read as an episodic series of set pieces, unlike True Grit which barrels along at a fast pace and ends in a terrific shootout. But, again like life, when one looks back at the action, one senses a pattern in all of it. Jimmy prides himself on his keen powers of observation, working for Gilbert, finding fugitives, but there are other things he can’t see, such as Alma’s opinion of him or the nature of Rudy and Louise’s relationship.
And, for all of the jokes, the novel is one of the most realistic I’ve ever read in terms of how the major moments are handled. When Jimmy realizes that Big Dan and the Jumping Jacks are behind the City of Dawn business and that Red is a runaway in over her head, he prays—mid-paragraph, mind you—in a way wholly convincing:
But my poor head was so muddled that I didn’t work it out until that moment in the pyramid steps. It came to me all at once. I stopped dead in my tracks and took off my hat in this driving rain and offered up a prayer of my own. I asked God to let me find the little girl, LaJoye Mishell Teeter, promising to not let her out of my hands this time. I promised not to take any money for her recover. The wind was fierce up here against the forest canopy.
We have no reason to assume Jimmy is insincere—and he keeps his promise of not taking any money. A similarly realistic moment is the shooting that occurs atop the pyramid. Thousands of other authors would have offered some banter, some ironic detachment in that scene, but Portis is too good. The shooting happens, and then the characters begin screaming at each other because their adrenalin has been increased a hundredfold.
Other moments are exactly like these in tone and spirit: Jimmy’s visit to Doc’s house when he learns of Doc's illness, the gathering of vets and the hippies at Shep's, the ways that Beth patronizes Jimmy, the barroom attempts at "marks of distinction," Jimmy’s quoting Art and Mike, and Jimmy’s marriage. How he gets married makes perfect sense and the couple at the end of the book strikes me as far more believable—and likable—than others found on other pages. Jimmy reasons, “You had to plant a tree somewhere,” and this novel of how a 41 year-old man ends up planting his tree is a masterpiece. This is probably the tenth or eleventh time I've read it from start to finish. My only regret is that the Coen brothers can’t make it because the man born to play Jimmy Burns, Tommy Lee Jones, has aged out of the role.
March 4, 2021
True Grit will always be Portis's masterpiece, but Gringos is a better example of Portis's overall writing style and thematic focus. In my opinion, it's the epitome of both of those elements - his truest masterpiece. The debate between the two (or between TG and any other of Portis's books, for which you can always find an advocate) reminds me of people who cite The Road as their favorite Cormac McCarthy novel: it's a fantastic novel, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone their affection for it, but it's such an outlier among his other works that it's impossible to compare them. The same goes for TG and (for me) Gringos. Both amazing, but the latter shows the evolution of Portis's writing style into its ultimate form and the former is more of a one-off success.
In Gringos, Portis comes back to a first-person narrative and a single protagonist, both of which he had abandoned in Masters of Atlantis (to its detriment, in my opinion). He also comes back to Central America as a backdrop, which I think was part of what made Dog of the South so good. That said, Jimmy Burns is no Ray Midge - he's every bit as capable, I'd argue, but much more in control of himself, which makes the cast of characters surrounding him that much more interesting. He's the straight man, so to speak, and everyone else is just a little bit of a buffoon in comparison, but buffoons it's easy to revere in the same way Burns does. Throw that together with Burns's casual, explanatory narration (he uses Spanish throughout, but almost always remembers to translate for us - the inexperienced reader - right afterwards) and it makes for great writing with Portis's signature voice (what Jay Jenning's describes as "deep knowledge worn lightly").
If I had a gripe about the book it's the pacing - I think the big search takes up too few pages. While Merida is obviously the focus of so much of Jimmy's day-to-day life, the search reveals his purpose - really, the purpose for him to be telling us his story at all - and so it deserved more breadth in the book. But otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing.
In Gringos, Portis comes back to a first-person narrative and a single protagonist, both of which he had abandoned in Masters of Atlantis (to its detriment, in my opinion). He also comes back to Central America as a backdrop, which I think was part of what made Dog of the South so good. That said, Jimmy Burns is no Ray Midge - he's every bit as capable, I'd argue, but much more in control of himself, which makes the cast of characters surrounding him that much more interesting. He's the straight man, so to speak, and everyone else is just a little bit of a buffoon in comparison, but buffoons it's easy to revere in the same way Burns does. Throw that together with Burns's casual, explanatory narration (he uses Spanish throughout, but almost always remembers to translate for us - the inexperienced reader - right afterwards) and it makes for great writing with Portis's signature voice (what Jay Jenning's describes as "deep knowledge worn lightly").
If I had a gripe about the book it's the pacing - I think the big search takes up too few pages. While Merida is obviously the focus of so much of Jimmy's day-to-day life, the search reveals his purpose - really, the purpose for him to be telling us his story at all - and so it deserved more breadth in the book. But otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing.
September 12, 2017
Another comic caper by Charles Portis cast in the same mold as "Norwood" and "The Dog of the South." These three novels are really the same story with different characters, which is quite all right with me; in fact, I wish he had 10 more of the same lying around. I would read them all with gusto.
This time the action takes place in the jungles of Chiapas, our red-faced muttering narrator on the trail of both a malevolent hippie (with two yards of fine linen wound around his head) and a UFO-tracker (with a City Planning degree and a broken pedometer). Our fussy bounty hunter finds himself saddled with a truckload of strange companions, including the canine Ramos, head of the 1st War Dog Platoon, and the only one who knows where he is going.
This time the action takes place in the jungles of Chiapas, our red-faced muttering narrator on the trail of both a malevolent hippie (with two yards of fine linen wound around his head) and a UFO-tracker (with a City Planning degree and a broken pedometer). Our fussy bounty hunter finds himself saddled with a truckload of strange companions, including the canine Ramos, head of the 1st War Dog Platoon, and the only one who knows where he is going.
August 21, 2019
A little bit Apocalypse Now, a little bit Alex Cox, but every inch Portis. Perhaps to a fault- this absolutely reads as the final novel it presumably is, a refinement of past works into a singular whole that's of such consistent quality that it almost feels like a greatest hits collection, Portis on autopilot. Non-issue to me, Portis on autopilot is more satisfying than much of what you could hope to read, but it doesn't quite feel as startlingly original as his other works- just the old themes and places and ideas polished to perfect clarity. Maybe his best (and I mean that "maybe"- Masters of Atlantis is tough competition), but definitely more of a capstone to a corpus (or a farewell to the novel, at least) than a standalone work.
August 10, 2022
reading Charles Portis makes me feel im in the presence of a real writer, a writers' writer. Charles Portis is the type of writer who makes you feel, makes you think 'well i'm in the presence of a real writer here'.
and reading a Charles Portis novel, 'hi, im charles portis. you may know me from such titles as'
good old Charles Portis is a type writer! just think how it would feel to get his titles as presence.
and reading a Charles Portis novel, 'hi, im charles portis. you may know me from such titles as'
good old Charles Portis is a type writer! just think how it would feel to get his titles as presence.
December 20, 2013
I like that Doc wanted to die out there on a dig with a little statue in his mouth
January 16, 2014
I wanna go to Mexico and join a cult.
December 8, 2023
Portis' last novel, and possibly his easiest to read.
The narrator/protagonist is a Dick Frances type of likable hero of high moral values who spends his time helping other people out of trouble. But then he can go all Dirty Harry on you if pressed. So there's that
To make the story interesting, it takes place in a Banana Republic and the protagonist is a Mayan Grave Robber gone straight.
Very funny at times.
The narrator/protagonist is a Dick Frances type of likable hero of high moral values who spends his time helping other people out of trouble. But then he can go all Dirty Harry on you if pressed. So there's that
To make the story interesting, it takes place in a Banana Republic and the protagonist is a Mayan Grave Robber gone straight.
Very funny at times.
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