The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Starred review from July 29, 2013
In Shacochis’s powerful novel of sex, lies, and American foreign policy, 1990s Haiti, Nazi-occupied Croatia, and Cold War–era Istanbul are shown as places where people are pulled into a vortex of personal and political destruction. After leaving Haiti’s Truth Commission, lawyer Tom Harrington returns to Florida and family routine until a private investigator asks him to help a client accused of murdering his wife, Renee Gardner, whom Harrington knew in Haiti as Jackie Scott. Harrington once took Jackie to a voodoo priest so she could ask him to restore her soul, and in flashbacks we discover why. First, Shacochis shows Jackie’s father, Stjepan, as an eight-year-old Croatian boy during the German occupation who witnesses his father’s beheading and his mother’s torture. Forty years later, a teenage Jackie, then called Dorothy Chambers, learns the meaning of secret service from her father, who’s serving as an American diplomat in Turkey. A brutal American-style le Carré, Shacochis details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul. Gritty characters find themselves in grueling situations against a moral and physical landscape depicted in rich language as war-torn, resilient, angry, evil, and hopeful. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman.

April 15, 2013

In his first fiction in 20 years, National Book Award-winning author Shacochis moves from World War II Dubrovnik to 1980s Istanbul to late 1990s Haiti, where cool but seductive photojournalist Jackie has been found murdered. To understand her death, humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigates her long-ago break with her father, a Cold War spy. Classic Shacochis: tough moral questions in a significant political/historical frame.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
National Book Award winner Shacochis (Easy in the Islands, 1985) delivers a beautifully written, Norman Mailerlike (see Harlot's Ghost, 1991) treatise on international politics, secret wars, espionage, and terrorism. The woman is Jacqueline Scott, aka Renee Gardner, aka Dorothy Chambers n'e Dorothy Kovacevic. Jacqueline is in Haiti (which Shacochis reported on in 1999, with The Immaculate Invasion), ostensibly as an uncredentialed photojournalist, but what she says to her guide, Tom Harrington, a humanitarian lawyer, is that she has lost her soul and seeks to find it through voodoo. She befuddlesand frustratespoor Tom, who later returns to the island in the company of a (CIA?) spook to unravel the mystery of Jackie's death. Turns out that behind her several identities is her father, an berspy who, as a child in Croatia, witnessed the beheading of his freedom-fighter father and the rape of his mother at the end of WWII. These awful events inspire Steven Chambers' lifelong crusade against communism and then against Islamic terrorism, with various schemes in various wars, from Vietnam through Bosnia. Often with weird, incestuous overtones, Chambers recruits his daughter to bring down enemies in elaborate sting operations, so that wars against narcotrafficking and terror become a family saga. The good guys of Chambers' powerful elite are all super-Christian, suggesting that at base we aren't any better than our enemies. The exception may be Eville Burnette, a Special Forces operative and an honorable, if conflicted, man. He and sad Dorothy fall in love and together find their souls. More or less. A brilliant book, likely to win prizes, with echoes of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carr'. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Shacochis' first novel in 20 years is a major literary event and will attract attention across the book world. Fortunately, the novel proves well worth the wait and justifies the attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2013
National Book Award--winning novelist Shacochis (The Immaculate Invasion, 1999, etc.) makes a long-awaited--indeed, much-anticipated--return to fiction with this stunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost. The wait was worth it, for Shacochis has delivered a work that in its discomfiting moral complexity and philosophical density belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Tom Harrington is a humanitarian lawyer whose path takes him into difficult country: Haiti in the wake of dictatorship and storm, for one. He is unsettled and lonely, even as his stateside wife is one of those blessedly ignorant Americans who "pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life"--a comfortable life that would be much more attainable were Tom someone who cared about money. He is not saintly, though. Into his orbit has come a fetching, utterly mysterious journalist whom Tom has met more than once along the trail of good deeds done by sometimes not so good people. Her murder sends him reeling into a long, arcing story of discovery that becomes ever more tangled as Shacochis spins it, taking it across decades and oceans. Among the players are a tough-as-nails Delta Force combatant who surely knows that he's being played as a pawn by the likes of an unlikable senior spook who lives for opera, cocktails and deception; even so, the soldier takes pride in his role in what he calls "Jihadi pest control," just as the spy takes pride in what he did in all those dark corners during the Cold War. These characters are bound to one another, and to Jackie, by blood or elective affinities. Either way, Shacochis would seem to suggest, their real business is to hide themselves from the world, while the business of the world is to help them disguise their subterfuge. Everything in the landscape is secret and forbidden, potentially fatal, doomed to fail--and yet everyone persists, presses on, with what they believe their missions to be. Shacochis is a master of characterization; his story, though very long, moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written: " 'Cleopatra spoke nine languages, ' Jackie informed him with a distinctly peevish rise to her voice for what she obviously considered a set series of infinitely tiresome challenges to the perception of her specialness, the unfair excesses of her drop-dead good looks or intellect or courage or God knows, her very birth, as if she had somehow stolen those laudable parts of herself from someone else, an imaginary deprived person." An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.

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Starred review from August 1, 2013

A skilled journalist and the author of National Book Award-winning fiction (Easy in the Islands), Shacochis thinks big, and his new novel (his first in two decades) is truly magisterial. It opens with humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigating the death of Jackie Scott, a feisty photojournalist who once whipped him around in Haiti. But Harrington turns out to be a relatively minor player in large-scale story dating back to the end of World War II, as the beheading of young Stjepan Kovacevic's Iron Cross father signals coming changes in the Balkans and the world at large. Thus are sown the seeds of Stjepan's hatred for all things communist, Muslim, and, finally, not gloriously righteous Christian West. Flash forward, and Stjepan is U.S. diplomat Steve Chambers, training the teenage daughter he covets to shift personas in the act of serving her country. Eventually, she's the woman who loses her soul, as "America...at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets" has lost its soul. Throughout, we see how policy is shaped by both the historical and the blindingly personal. VERDICT Densely detailed yet immensely readable, this eye-opener (which could have been titled "Why We Are in the Middle East") is essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.