Gringos
A Novel
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4.2 • 25 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A truly brilliant, wonderfully bizarre novel by one of our great American novelists, the author of the perennial bestseller True Grit
Jimmy Burns is an expatriate American living in Mexico who has an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd little details that comprise your average American.
For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Colombian 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 when Jimmy’s laid-back lifestyle is seriously imposed upon by a 90-pound stalker called Louise, a sudden wave of “hippies” (led by a murderous ex-con guru) in search of psychic happenings, and a group of archaeologists who are unearthing (illegally) Mayan tombs, his simple South-of-the-Border existence faces a clear and present danger.
“Gringos is Portis’s subtlest, funniest, and most valuable novel for its depth of inarguable wisdom.” —Wells Tower, GQ
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wild and woolly, offbeat ride through a quicksand Mexican-American mindscape, Portis's ( True Grit ; Norwood ) latest saga features Jimmy Burns, an idler from Louisiana transplanted to Mexico, where he ekes out a living finding missing persons and doing odd jobs. Equally odd are the other motley expatriates. Ninety-pound Louise Kurle, who's writing a book about benign space dwarfs, suspects her missing husband, Rudy, was abducted by UFOs. Big Dan, a paunchy ex-con guru/white supremacist/kidnapper, poses to his band of deranged hippies as El Mago, the wizard whom the Mayas predict will appear at the end of time. Murder, adventure and Indian lore animate a Mexico aswarm with New Age mystics, kooks, skinheads, graduate students, maverick archeologists and looters of shrines. For all these doings, the story doesn't really go anywhere, and Portis's uprooted dreamers and schemers here have a tiresome sameness.
