Don't Stop the Carnival

If you are ever remotely tempted by the idea of running a hotel in the Caribbean, read this book first!

Norman Paperman, a New York executive, decided to run a hotel in fictional Amerigo, said to be Grenada. He had heart problems and believed the more relaxed lifestyle would be just the ticket. Idyllic, yes, but before he could pick up his first Planter's Punch he ran into problems. The financing arrangement came as a shock and too late to do anything about it, the barman/accountant ran off with the departing owner, water storage was primitive, water supply even worse, and the renovation was ... well, you know what trouble a reno can be at the best of times.

This book was funny, the characters were well-developed - coming from the show more author of The Caine Mutiny this was to be expected. There were occasional dated attitudes, typical in 1965 when the book was written, but all in all an enjoyable read. It was inspired by the personal experience of Wouk and his wife who ran a hotel in the Caribbean. Like the Wouks, Norman and Henny Paperman survived the adventure. show less

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/01/dont-stop-carnival-by-herman-wouk.htm....

I struggled to finish Herman Wouk's Don't Stop the Carnival, not because it was hard to read, but because it was too familiar. In fact, a couple years ago it went into the Did Not Finish pile, and only recently was re-exposed to the light of day.

Listen: I grew with a father who was an incorrigible Jimmy Buffett fan. So, yes, of course I knew Buffett's musical adaptation of Don't Stop the Carnival long before I knew that it was based on a book. And the adaptation is faithful; Wouk even worked with Buffett to produce the musical.

Listen: while it may have been a scathing, and daring, critique of American business culture, involvement in the Caribbean, and show more race relations in 1965- fifty years will take the edge off most anything.

Norman Paperman is a workaholic, a philanderer and emotionally vacuous. And when he can't have his life the way he's always imagined it, he packs up his toys and goes home. I suppose I should feel either pity or satisfaction that he gets his come-uppance, but I've seen it coming- and I think I would have seen it coming even if I hadn't known the Buffett version. I'm indifferent to his struggles.

I think of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, about a British soldier in colonial Africa torn between his love for his wife and his feelings for a native girl. Published nearly twenty years before Don't Stop the Carnival, Greene's novel has maintained its urgency because it is built around a central character who is tragically flawed, and whose desires are as sincere as they are irreconcilable.

Much of Don't Stop the Carnival is satirical: the shiftless natives, the Byzantine labor laws, the island's incestuous internal politics. But the institutions being satirized are so long gone, I need to do serious research to see much more than the joke.

Is it about the moral vacillations of white people who say they want social change, but please not too much and don't let it disrupt my life... ? Is it about the arrogance of a business man to think he can be successful at any endeavor... ?

I've heard these jokes before, and I've heard better ones, too. show less

Don't stop the carnival by Wouk_ Herman
Like this book because it's about a Carribean island where a lot of people visit for various reasons and they find want they were looking for.
One man, has had a heart attack and is recuperating but he knows business and helps others out by expanding their places to allocate more space for more beds, etc and it brings in a lot more money.
Like the descriptions of the area and the culture.
Money is in land deals and they are abundant-using others money to get the land, what a concept and it's working-for some.
Job and workers always need more money and there are diasters every day with help and land.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

I�m going to finish this, but more out of grim determination than anything else. There are so many isms that seem to come so naturally to the period. I don’t know why they shock me so. It isn’t as if I never read older works. I think one of the things I find most distressing is his casual assumption that it’s perfectly okay for men to have affairs, but not women. He divides his characters along strict moral and gender lines, and it never occurs to him to do differently. There are good women and bad women and sluts everywhere. When someone like Siddons writes about the period it is with the understanding that good girls would like to be doing it, —no, that isn’t it. Siddons doesn’t assume that some girls are good and show more some are bad. She has characters who play by the rules and others who don’t but she takes the time to explain why and how. A character may be shocked if another one has sex, but Siddons isn’t shocked. Someone may call someone else a slut, but Siddons doesn’t. Wauk on the other hand keeps letting his male characters sleep with girls and discard them like used Kleenex, and neither the characters, nor Wauk think that’s wrong. He agrees with the stereotypes, and he’s lazy about it, and that I do not approve of.
I finally finished it. It was a chore, I didn’t really want to. When I was done I wished I hadn’t made myself do it. Do you know how he ends the thing? I’m infuriated. Night of the big party Hyppolite the murderous one comes for Atlas, and after a week or so of heavy drinking and no food, Janet/Iris dresses up and comes to the party. Nothing happens. Hyppolite frightens Esmé and she goes into labor, but manages to have her baby in the hospital and all. Janet/Iris falls down and scratches up her face and her dog is slashed by Hyppolite. That’s all. Essentially everything goes off without a hitch. And then the next day a policeman comes to get the facts on Hyppolite and ends up shooting Hassim and killing him. No good reason, just a stupid thing. And then Janet/Iris borrows Norman’s car to go pick up her dog at the vet, and she has an accident and dies. She’s not drunk or anything. A cab driver stops in the middle of the road to talk to a girl, and she comes up and runs into him, and goes flying out the windshield. Stupid. Far all the concern about her drinking herself to death, she dies in a perfectly normal car accident. For all the fear of the murderous Hyppolite, he doesn’t harm anyone. There are two other big expectations: that Norman will go broke and that his wife will leave him if he has another affair. Norman pulls out of the island hotel business at least even, maybe ahead a little, and when Henny realizes that he slept with Janet/Iris (after she’s dead) not only does she not leave him, she ends up comforting him.
The worst thing about it all is that Wauk hasn’t set up these expectations in order to fulfill them in an unexpected way, nor has he set it all up to make a joke of how the things we worry about never come true. It’s as if he’d worked on this novel, painstakingly crafted it, and someone else came along and wrote the last chapter using the same characters. The characterizations are so poor that I can’t figure out who Norman all of a sudden decides to leave. It’s crazy. One of the most frustrating books I’ve ever read. show less

Mmm, not so good, actually. It feels as if Wouk didn't quite know whether he wanted to write a 'real' novel with characters that develop, or rather some satirical entertainment filled with caricatures.
The never ending row of misfortunes that occur while Paperman (what's in a name) tries to set up a hotel in the Caribbean doesn't strike me as funny after the umpteenth catastrophe. Catastrophes that become a habit do not really move or shock the reader anymore.
The lackadaisical and innocent but cunning natives, the boorish American businessman Atlas, Paperman's daughter Hazel and her boyfriend, the maniacal bartender Church, they are clearly conceived with satire in mind. They act only as prototypes would, not as human beings. Therefore show more they do not blend at all with the attempts to incorporate a 'real' character, the tragic Iris, whose sorry development into an alcoholic is much too obvious and foreseeable. Paperman himself is neither fish nor fowl, part caricature, part psychological character.
When finally Paperman seems to succeed, his hotel becoming the hit of the island, he throws in the towel for no understandable reason. Frustrating...
The language is fine, though, some of the conversations are exhilarating and the text is readable throughout. show less

What a great read. I was in the Caribbean 4 years ago for an extended stay, visited 6 English speaking islands, and 45 years later this is still "spot on". There are also some very good insights into New York and one eerie sentence:
"Instead of bomb shelters we construct giagantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattanat Ground Zero, a thousand feet high open to the sky, like a woman undressing before an open window and provoking him to rape her."

Not too long ago, I finished reading Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and I was thoroughly disappointed. From the hype (various movies and many reprints), I expected more. I had no expectations going into Don’t Stop the Carnival. And yet, when I started the book, I began having the same fears and disappointments and “disbelief in characters” (a new phrase I just made up) I felt with Blandings – the problem being that I felt no sympathy for these schlubs who bought into investments without any common sense.

Maybe it was worsened because I had just read Blandings, but it took me a while to get past that hint of distaste in the back of my mind. But I’m glad I got past it.

Wouk (much more famous for his war novels – in show more particular, The Caine Mutiny) tells the story of a New York promoter Norman Paperman who, swept up in the beauty of the Caribbean island of Amerigo, buys a hotel he will run. It does not go well to start with including a misunderstanding of how much money he and his partner are actually responsible for, a misunderstanding of the laws and politics of the little island, and a misunderstanding of who really does the work. The book is half disaster and half success in adversity.

This beginning is the part I had trouble getting through, watching a clueless man being crushed by circumstance. But Wouk does bring humor to the proceedings – a subtle humor that makes the people more real. And Wouk makes the characters more believable than you first expect - to the point where, when they do stupid things, we really feel sorry for them. And these characterizations and transformations of the people make the transition from disaster to success (no quick fixes, no deus ex machinas) that much more believable.

By the mid-way part of the book, I found myself turned from my earlier revulsion to interest in what was going to happen. In other words, Wouk has made a book about real people (probably because this is an experience he lived for seven years) and real situations (no matter how absurd they may seem) that becomes a pleasure to read. show less