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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F KLAY | 31478010149541 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC KLAY | 32114002599646 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION KLAY | 31330008953014 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | FICTION/KLAY | 33934004351715 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F KLAY | 32117002035156 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/KLAY | 31480011403323 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC KLAY | 32120001320959 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC KLAY | 32121000838132 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC KLAY | 30470001855138 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC KLAY, PHIL | 32122002908782 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC KLA | 31549004799978 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F KLA | 32125001314514 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F KLAY | 32126001758239 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | KLA | 32127001257867 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC KLAY P | 32128003879062 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC KLAY | 32129002494309 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC KLA | 32130000977634 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F KLAY | 31990004916560 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION KLAY, PHIL | 32136003554197 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year
"Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn't shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world." --Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New York Times Book Review
"A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the 'rational insanity' of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature." -- The Wall Street Journal
The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries , Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America's long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans' presence and navigating a viper's nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable.
Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Klay's ambitious debut novel (after the National Book Award--winning collection Redeployment) plunges the reader into war-torn Colombia, where allegiances are uncertain and tremendous violence is an everyday reality. The story follows the four characters: there is Abelito, a Colombian forcibly conscripted into a militia commanded by the infamous terrorist Jefferson, and who hopes to save the woman he loves from his murderous commandants. American journalist Lisette Marigny, meanwhile, is embedded in Afghanistan until she is dispatched to Bógota to report on gang activity, only to be kidnapped by guerrillas. En route from the Middle East is Mason, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces medic reassigned to fight paramilitary narcos in Colombia, which he naively imagines will be a "good war." He befriends Juan Pablo, a weary commando who frets at being little more than a common mercenary and reflects on his early ambition to join the priesthood. Through these four protagonists, Klay unravels the complexity of interventionist American operations abroad, from Kabul to Medellín. While the novel suffers from a surfeit of tedious subplots and can feel overwhelmed by Klay's exhaustive research, the prose is consistently staggering, whether in the characters' moments of self-reflection or unflinching descriptions of brutality ("A chainsaw appeared, and suddenly everyone who had watched, confused and amazed... knew what was about to happen"). Even though the whole thing doesn't quite tie together, it's quite a ride. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Suffering trauma, boredom and shame from covering over-optimistic US military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq, American reporter Lisette Marigny whimsically asks a search engine: "Are there any wars right now that we're not losing?" The algorithm claims the answer to be "Colombia", where, in 2015, US troops are supporting a national rebuilding and peace process after half a century of intersecting civil wars between government forces, terrorists, revolutionaries and drug barons. Lisette contrives an assignment there, intersecting with Major Mason Baumer, a Marine medic who, haunted by catastrophic casualties he saw in the same wars that unnerved the journalist, has taken what he hopes will be a more constructive posting as a special forces liaison officer at the Bogotá embassy. Klay, a Marine veteran, wrote about men at war in his award-winning 2014 short story collection Redeployment, the awful authenticity of which is also evident in Missionaries, his debut novel. Many details feel memoir-real, either experienced or observed: a ruined school still bears a sign boasting that it was donated by the United Nations; a humanitarian group called Clowns Without Borders seeks to cheer up war-zone children. Phone calls from tours of duty are agonisingly stilted because military advice to service personnel is to say nothing of the conflict, while loved ones have been warned not to burden them with domestic dismay. If the book were a movie, it would have an 18 certificate for the battlefield scenes alone. Enemy explosives and bullets, Mason tells us, often target the intestines because of the double indignity of a dying body losing blood and shit. Some guerrilla weapons contain chemicals mixed with faeces, so that burns or wounds become rapidly infected. This excretory imagery embodies the book's depiction of humanity turned inside out in conflict. While Mason's experiences are close to what Klay has known and described in Redeployment, the novel also advances into more distant gender and geographical territory than his briefer fictions, presenting (mainly in the first person) the perspectives not only of Lisette, but Abel, a poor Venezuelan; Juan Pablo, a rich Colombian; and Diego, a Chilean mercenary. In the current debate over the scope and ownership of fiction, Missionaries makes a strong case for expansive imagination of other lives. In this effort, Klay may have taken courage from his main fictional model. Identifying as a Catholic novelist, in writing fiction set in foreign war zones he makes a second genuflection to Graham Greene. Both Lisette and Mason fear, like Greene's Querry in A Burnt-Out Case (1960), that they have lost the ability to feel, and must seek it in new experience, although Klay makes this torpor of the senses grimly broader. Lisette becomes convinced that her war reports have little impact in her homeland because "no matter how jaded I've become, I'll never be as jaded as the average American". Missionaries also includes a character, rare outside Greene, who believes that humans bear the curse of "original sin", while the writer of The Heart of the Matter might be tempted to the sin of envy by the doleful local atmospherics - "a city after a bombing is like coming upon the decayed body of an animal in the woods" - and would surely have loved a scene in which a character confesses to a priest all the people he has killed but is told that he is absolved by God because the brutality was done for his country. Klay's novel has the feel of a knowing coda to American fiction of the Vietnam war, such as Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974), Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), and Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn (2010). In the book's biggest US-set scene, Lisette visits her Uncle Carey, a Vietnam veteran who has never recovered from his missions there; we guess that his niece, in searching for a "good war", is attempting to redeem both him and her nation. But while the Americans in Missionaries want to be involved in a success story overseas, readers will bet that this dream will be hard to achieve. In a pivotal passage, Lisette reflects that all the US's post-Vietnam military adventures - Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia - are, in fact, "the same war ¿ related to the demands of America's not-quite empire". That is one of the places where the novel contains more insight into the theory and practice of war and politics than many hefty histories. Mason's American creed that "you must accept that the true will of the people aligns with whatever the central government believes" is challenged by a South American reality in which ideological loyalties can be bewilderingly fractured. The novel's structure subtly reflects this: the perspective of the first section is divided between two characters; the second alternates a different pair; and the third, after a shocking thriller plot twist, shuffles the voices with desperate momentum. As the available storytellers are cruelly reduced, the choice of the last speaker feels true to the meaning of the story. In an Afterword, Klay alludes to the difficulty in stretching from stories to novels. But this sweeping, searing, wrenching and wise addition to the great literature of America's postwar imperialism ends absolutely as mission accomplished.
Kirkus Review
A host of journalists, mercenaries, soldiers, and well-meaning innocents are thrust into a quagmire in Colombia. Klay's first novel, the follow-up to Redeployment, his stellar 2014 story collection about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, gives his concerns about intractable violence a broader scope. Early on, he introduces characters in alternating chapters: Among them are Abel, a young foot soldier in the gruesome battles among drug cartels, soldiers, and guerrillas in northern Colombia circa 1999; Lisette, a jaded journalist covering the war in Afghanistan; Juan Pablo, a Colombian military officer hoping to shepherd his country to a deal ending decades of conflict; and Mason, a former medic in Afghanistan now serving as a Special Forces Liaison in Colombia. By 2016 these people's lives will intertwine, but not before Klay has gone deep into the violence and fogs of confusion they witness and sometimes create. In Colombia, Abel witnesses a defiant mayor get strapped to a piano and chainsawed in half; Mason hastily patches up the wounded in similarly visceral scenes. So it's clear things will be messy when Lisette requests to be transferred to "any wars right now where we're not losing" and is sent to Colombia. The challenge before any serious war novelist is to bring order to chaos without succumbing to a tidy narrative. It's to Klay's credit that he creates ambiguity not through atmospheric language or irony (Redeployment had its share of Heller-esque gallows humor) but through careful psychological portraits that reveal how readily relationships grow complicated and how even good intentions come undone in the face of humanity's urge to violence. That means plotlines get convoluted in the late stages, but the dispiriting conclusion is crystal clear: It's not just that war is hell, but that war brings hellishness to everything. An unflinching and engrossing exploration of violence's agonizing persistence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
National Book Award-winner Klay (Redeployment, 2014) displays his signature virtuosity in this richly textured, masterful mosaic of modern Colombia. A small village serves as both backdrop and microcosm of the country's ongoing turmoil. The struggle for survival is deftly juxtaposed with the struggle for power, and the varying gradations of each are explored through multiple perspectives with nuance, grace, and poignancy. Abel, a young boy who joins the revolutionary group that slaughtered his family, is recognized for his intelligence and quickly rises through the ranks. American journalist Lisette is burned out from covering war in the Middle East and asks to be reassigned to "a good war" in Colombia. Colonel Juan Pablo is a high-ranking government functionary whose daughter is enamored of Che Guevara. Each character is rendered in psychologically astute moral complexity and must interrogate his or her own complicity in a corrupt and often violent system. Ultimately, all are pawns in the chess match of deep-state machinations masquerading as diplomacy. As the characters' lives begin to intersect in a rewarding, yet tension-filled denouement, the author's prodigious skill and deep understanding of the region provide the scaffolding to explore essential questions of human dignity and sacrifice. A triumphant achievement that elevates Klay to the top echelon of contemporary writers.