Gorgeous East
A Novel
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping tale of love and redemption, honor and war, Robert Girardi's Gorgeous East follows three French For eign legionnaires of very different backgrounds from the cliffs of Mont Saint-Michel to Istanbul's ancient alley ways, from raucous Parisian bars to the desolate Sahara. Gorgeous East takes us on an epic and unfor get table ad ven ture with the wonderful John Smith, a lost Brooklynite they call the Handsome American Cowboy; Colonel de Noyer, the elder statesman slowly going mad; and Cap tain Pinard, whose past is so hideous he can't find love outside the Legion's walls. When a mission in the Sahara goes horribly wrong, one legionnaire must wage battle against a rogue terrorist group and rescue his brothers-in-arms. In this tremendous return to form, Girardi show cases his sheer love of language and lumi n ous sense of place to deliver a masterful novel of the hearts and minds of soldiers of fortune.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A well-researched tale of the modern French Foreign Legion, Girardi's first novel in seven years (after The Wrong Doyle) is a major disappointment that, marred by purple prose ("The pain... blotted out everything courage, honor, love and he lay on the sandy ground in the grips of this blackness, moaning weakly") and undermined at key points by parody, fails on every level. The plot centers on three legionnaires: Phillipe de Noyer, an aristocratic officer; Evariste Pinard, a reformed Quebecois thug; and John Smith, an American musical theater actor who joins the legion after his selfishness leads to the murder of his ex-girlfriend. The three men become involved in the legion's battle against an uprising in the western Sahara led by Al-Bab, a portly false prophet. After an attack on one of the legion's desert forts, de Noyer and Smith become Al-Bab's prisoners, and Pinard is dispatched to rescue them. But by the time Al-Bab's actual identity is revealed (a sequence that is, simply, silly the vital clue is a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal) and the prisoners are rescued, all but the most masochistic readers will have put this down.
