The Rising of the Moon: A Novel - Hardcover

Capouya, Emile

2.71

7 ratings by Goodreads

9781585746644: The Rising of the Moon: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585746649 ISBN 13: 9781585746644

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 2002

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Longing for a ship to captain in postwar France, young Mike takes a dubious smuggling job out of Tangier that eventually tests his temper and results in some near misses for his crew.

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From the Back Cover:

The Rising of the Moon is an immaculately crafted novel. Set in Tangier following World War II, it chronicles the odyssey of Mike, a young American merchant seaman in his twenties, broke, and adrift in postwar France. It is a tale of honesty, integrity, bravery, and friendship, as well as one of mutiny and murder.
Mike is looking for a ship to captain. The job he takes is a dubious one, smuggling contraband (and sometimes people) from Tangier to the south of France for a shady organization. His quick temper is born of a staunch defense of dignity and of his own ironclad sense of justice. His reckless bravery once saves his crew and once endangers them, and lands him in an Italian jail, where he barely escapes with his life. His journey takes us across the Mediterranean, and further into the dark hearts of cowards and the bright clarity of martyrdom.

From Publishers Weekly:

Capouya (In the Sparrow Hills) once again draws on his WWII experience as a merchant marine in this short novel about the wanderings of a highly principled and combative American merchant seaman in his 20s named Mike. The story opens with Mike stranded in France shortly after WWII, having had a falling out with the agent who gets him assignments. Bad luck continues to dog him when he journeys to Genoa in search of a berth on a ship. He is mistaken for a murder suspect, interrogated and beaten up by the police. Mike finally gets a break when he lands a new job as the captain of a ship running contraband cigarettes from France to Italy. But trouble arises when he hears horror stories from the vessel's previous captain, MacNamara, and Mike soon discovers that cigarettes aren't the only things being smuggled on his ship: he's unwittingly been transporting Nazi officers. Capouya poses provocative questions about the wages of behaving decently in a corrupt world, and his lean, sinewy prose giving the meandering narrative intensity. Mike is well drawn as an honorable but mercurial man, likely to take reckless risks as long as his efforts are for the side of justice. He's a compelling, nostalgic noir hero, but sometimes his righteousness is self-righteous; Capouya overemphasizes Mike's moral integrity by exhaustively detailing his various quarrels with ex-captains and company officers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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