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Title	:	A Flag for Sunrise
Author	:	Robert Stone
Book Format	:	Mass Market Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 440 pages
Published	:	November 12th 1982 by Ballantine Books (first published 1981)
Categories	:	Fiction. Literary Fiction. Literature. Contemporary

A Flag for Sunrise

Robert Stone

Mass Market Paperback | Pages: 440 pages

Rating: 3.87 | 880 Users | 77 Reviews

Relation During Books A Flag for Sunrise

”A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion – could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You’ll sting me and I’ll drown. But the scorpion swears he won’t. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I’d drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor Buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says – it’s my nature.”

It is the late 70s. America is reeling from a Vietnam hangover. And burnouts from that war go looking for some foothold. They descend, or wash up, on Tecan, an invented Central American cauldron. Father Egan, a drunk and dying priest. Justin Feeney, a nun and nurse, who will laicize if she gets out. Frank Holliwell, an alcoholic anthropologist, asked to give a lecture. And Pablo Tobar, a Coast Guard deserter driven by Benzedrine.

There is revolution in the air, but that is simply a tableau for the literary flailing of American purpose. It is all of a piece, Stone writes: child murderers, right-wing dictators, American interests. Wait, whaaaat? There’s a very rubbishy sort of American loose on the world these days.

Robert Stone is self-aware if not self-debasing. He understands he is being cinematic:
Movies are movies, Oscar. This is your life.
And:
It’s a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart.

Stone writes thrillers, sort of. The amoral, drug-fueled violence is surely meant to be metaphorical. Like Cormac McCarthy, but with less talent and, oddly, less hope.

So, Holliwell is haunted by his unspecified spook-work in Vietnam. Pablo serves as that legacy. Father Egan is a drunken oracle. Justin is either the American kindness which can not be allowed to survive, or maybe just a convenient too-hot-to-be-a-nun character so at least someone can get naked, damnit.

What A Flag for Sunrise is not, however, is a clash of cultures. Nothing like Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord. ‘Tecan’ is a fictitious country, so, apparently, there’s no real need to create a Tecanese people or culture. The natives are props against which the Americans can be ugly adventurers. We lost our soul in Vietnam, he says, and never got it back.

Stone reworked this theme to much better artistic success in Outerbridge Reach. But AFFS is thematically and metaphorically accessible, deeper than its plot, even if disagreeably so. Stone sums things up for us: it was not easy to watch all the world’s deluded wandering across the battlefield of a long-ago lost war. One had to close the heart to pity – if one could. The truth was a fine thing, but it had to be its own reward.

A man has nothing to fear…who understands history, Stone concludes. That would be hopeful, Robert, had we not been cast as scorpions, damned by our nature.

Identify Books Conducive To A Flag for Sunrise

Original Title:	A Flag for Sunrise
ISBN:	0345306503 (ISBN13: 9780345306500)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Fiction (1982), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (1982), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (1982), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1981), National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (Hardcover) & (Paperback) (1983) (1982)

Rating Regarding Books A Flag for Sunrise

Ratings: 3.87 From 880 Users | 77 Reviews

Evaluate Regarding Books A Flag for Sunrise

I say "I liked it" but it was a difficult book to get into for me, so I put it on hole for awhile. Whether it was the actual narrative or where I found myself in life at the time, I cannot say. However, once I dug back into it I really enjoyed it...until the fever dream of the last 75 pages...



Well, I found the POV characters in this book utterly unlikeable, and I would have rated this book as 2 stars were it not for this line: "There is a creature in another dimension whose jewelry is dead worlds. When this creature requires more of them, it plants the seed of life on a tiny planet. After a while there are people and then nothinga patina. I reread this line several times and found it so thought provoking that I added another star to the book.

Bloated scenes and characters lecturing each other. Very disappointing.

[From an NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED segment entitled "You Must Read This" September 2011)In 1985, when I was in the midst of a 12-year struggle to write my first novel, I had the good fortune to be invited to the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony in Austerlitz, N.Y., for a monthlong residency. There, in the colony's curved-roof barn, I happened to pick up a paperback copy of Robert Stone's 1981 novel, A FLAG FOR SUNRISE.I had not yet heard of Robert Stone, but the precision of his language hooked me

When I started college, I thought I was going to major in "International Studies" or "International Relations" or some such; I could speak French and Spanish and planned to "pick up" other languages (ah, the arrogance!), and basically become, maybe not necessarily a "spook," but someone who worked in many different countries and would be at home in any of them. Not once did I consider the possibility that maybe I would feel at home in none of them. And now, having read stuff like Greene's The

Great read, highly recommended. Political intrigue and insurrection and quite philosophical