Later, Portis returns to Mexico and rents an apartment in San Miguel de Allende. An eight-day, nearly 1,200-mile midsummer journey brought them to La Paz, just short of the tip of Baja. His vehicle, a gray Studebaker truck named “Diamondback Rattler,” could easily be the protagonist since the narrative centers around multiple repairs due to challenging road conditions. In “An Auto Odyssey Through Darkest Baja,” he guides the reader through a hot and torturous trip with a friend from Los Angeles to Mexico. Portis left his promising journalism career to write novels and essays instead. Then, as rioting begins, “it took four hours to stop, and then just short of gunfire,” he writes, adding that Police Chief Jamie Moore held back gun use for crowd control. In “How the Night Exploded into Terror,” Portis describes an incident where The Ku Klux Klan met, followed by the bombing of the Gaston Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, headquarters of Black leaders. His reporting was notable for details, such as in his coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Portis, who was born in 1933 in Arkansas and died there in 2020, was initially a journalist. The novel depicts the journey of a fourteen-year-old girl who treks into the Choctaw Nation to avenge her father’s death. The Library of America offers homage in a new collected works edition to American author Charles Portis, whose notoriety springs from his novel, “True Grit,” that was transformed into a popular 1968 feature film starring John Wayne.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |