Tortuga is a bittersweet novel about a 16-year old boy who is injured in an accident and must go to the Crippled Children’s Hospital to recover. Set in the 1950s when Iron Lungs helped keep the most severe polio sufferers alive, this bleak portrait of life in a hospital somehow shines with a luminescence that I found very surprising.
Tortuga uses his spiritual gifts to connect with the “vegetables” in the polio ward and is overcome with the grief of life and suffering he sees there. Driven to despair he contemplates suicide, yet survives and then goes on to become a singer about pain and suffering as well as the beauty of life that he manages to see through his experiences at the hospital.
I’m painting a rather ominous picture of one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. The basic plot-line is as I’ve described above, but the desire to live and fight and be more than you currently are, coupled with beautiful prose, witty characters and an overall joy of living that permeates throughout the book, Tortuga does not leave the reader despairing. Instead, the reader finishes with a sense of hope and confidence in the future.
Tortuga uses his spiritual gifts to connect with the “vegetables” in the polio ward and is overcome with the grief of life and suffering he sees there. Driven to despair he contemplates suicide, yet survives and then goes on to become a singer about pain and suffering as well as the beauty of life that he manages to see through his experiences at the hospital.
I’m painting a rather ominous picture of one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. The basic plot-line is as I’ve described above, but the desire to live and fight and be more than you currently are, coupled with beautiful prose, witty characters and an overall joy of living that permeates throughout the book, Tortuga does not leave the reader despairing. Instead, the reader finishes with a sense of hope and confidence in the future.
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