Trip Fiction: Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk

For my Caribbean read I chose the story of Norman Paperman, middle aged New York press agent, who in the grips of a mid-life crisis runs to the islands to reinvent himself as a hotelier in paradise. This book by Herman Wouk inspired the collaboration with Jimmy Buffet on a musical of the same name. I read it with a hand over one squinting eye as Paperman falls, rung by rung, down a ladder of mishaps. His gut wrenching follies are mostly self-inflicted by his own vanity and hubris, but for someone who’s both built and done business as an expat in ‘paradise’, I feel deeply for this misguided hero. The cast of characters, the setting, the language, every aspect of this book is lush, disorienting like a few rum punches, and affected in the best possible way.  I wish it was a movie.

This is not the Pulitzer Prize winning writing of Wouk’s Caine Mutiny or War and Remembrance, but his words are just as wonderful in this lighter, looser genre. Paperman, Iris and everyone at the Gull Reef Club will live rent free in my head for a long time to come.

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Have you read this book? Love it/hated it? Read other good books set in Ecuador or have fun travel/fiction stories from there? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below