DJIBOUTI Paperback – September 29, 2011

Elmore Leonard never disappoints. An interesting read about a little known part of the world. Unique characters give the story a realistic feel.

There are a number of reasons not to like this novel, all of them valid. It's disjointed and hard to follow. The central characters seem uninvolved in the events around them. There's really no one with whom the reader can identify. The dialogue seldom crackles.People who approach this novel with certain expectations based on their past brushes with Elmore Leonard's fiction will be disappointed. As the reviews here demonstrate, they have been.Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. If a graphic novel is storytelling with pictures instead of words, then think of Djibouti as a graphic novel told with words instead of pictures: then you get the ambiance.Dara Barr the documentarian goes to exotic East Africa to shoot Somali pirates. She reviews her footage with her one-man crew Xavier LeBou, her Nawlins neighbor who's been around the world many times, the hard way. The stuff in the can lacks zip. The real story isn't the guys with guns in the skiffs boarding boats in the Gulf of Aden, but the money men on the other end and in between the ransom drops, and that's not exciting stuff for the screen. But things take on a different cast when Dara learns the subjects of her story have rousted a couple of al Qaeda operatives from a seized natural gas tanker and are turning them in for bounty. The tanker's ransom paid -- and bombs placed on board? -- the floating container of liquid propane is headed off to port in Lake Charles, LA, where, perhaps, bin Laden plans to detonate a firebomb more massive in destructive scope than Hiroshima. Now that would be a story worth filming -- if the ship ever makes its way past Djibouti.There are colorful characters, including one of the temporarily captured al Qaedas, a black American who started as a gang banger before becoming a Muslim in prison and heading off to join a jihad that matched a vocation to his skills; a Texas billionaire sailing around the world with his fashion model girlfriend, drinking champagne and piecing together intelligence; pirate bosses who want only to get one more big score before retiring in comfort to Europe. They are all mixed together, and if the story doesn't move with the speed and direction of a locomotive (which admittedly it doesn't) it certainly does float along on a decidedly dangerous current.You might just want to put aside any expectations and come along.

I've read Many of his novels, everything from his early westerns to his final novels. He is one of my favorite writers; his characters are believable and 3D, their character revealed mostly by interesting, quirky dialogue. I love the way his plots are sometimes derailed by unforseen occurrences.One of my favorite Leonard novels is LaBrava, where his protagonist's interior world is shown alternating between current experience and his memories of the female lead's performances in a movie. Leonard perfected a similar technique in Get Shorty.It seems to me that Leonard's experiences in the film world got the better of him in DjIbouti. The cinematic editing of the novel went to far and became more distracting than expressive.

Could write this book. Elmore Leonard at his best.Characters that live and move and breathe.A great read once again.

This is a relatively new twist on the standard Elmore Leonard fare. Strong characters...really bad bad-guys, but not the usual really good good-guys. Fun story about a current world problem. It's only fair to state that Elmore Leonard is probably my all-time favorite writer. I've read every book he's ever written and loved them all. His work has had a measurable influence on my own writing.

Any Elmore Leonard novel has individual pages or short sections that are as good as anything he has ever written. But when they are separated by long stretches that just don't work, as in Djibouti, the thumb has to turn down. Leonard's narrative style means that his readers never know anything that his characters don't participate in or observe. If he puts his characters in foreign countries, there is just a tentative quality to the scene-setting that leaves the reader uninformed or confused. Even if that is consistent with the characters' own narrow focus or uncertainty in a strange land, it makes a problem for the reader.There are other narrative problems. In one segment Dara, our film-making protagonist, and her assistant Xavier watch video and comment on what they captured. There's a sense in which that's a clever narrative approach: reveal professional and personal relationships in the conversation between two lead characters while they set a necessary piece of narrative background before the reader. But there's a reason you don't see that kind of scene more often in the most involving novels. Characters doing something are inherently more interesting than characters talking about something they did.Leonard is one of American's great narrative voices and prose stylists. This book simply doesn't show him to best advantage. Nice try, no joy. Odds are the next one will be better.(Edited Nov. 2011 to fix a sentence fragment and typo. Yikes! Should have caught those in the first place.)

one of his last, this story takes us to the eponymous city-state in east Africa, the crossroads of criminality, poverty, and ambition. Dara, a documentary filmmaker, wants to tell the story of Somali pirates, but can't seem to get a story straight. Xavier, her 72-year-old cameraman, and muscle, backs her up in encounters with pirate princes, unsavory sheikhs, and all sorts of exotic Africans and middle easterners. and one particularly dangerous American terrorist. the story is not so easy to follow, bouncing between flashbacks of Dara and Xavier reviewing film already in the can, and live-action drama. but it's got plenty of Leonard's hilarious dialogue, and a swift-moving plot.