gregorgross reviewed True Grit by Charles Portis
Great book: concise, funny, dark and dirty
5 stars
What a book, really. We get told the story of how a fourteen year old daughter sees the revenging dead of the killer of her father through, by contracting a US marshal and riding with him into Native territory. The story is told in her voice, with some southern dialect and some 19th century dialect, bringing her Old testament justice, her upraising, her intelligence and stuborness to funny, breathtaking life.
The marshal she obliges to catch or kill the killer is drunken Rooster Cogburn, a survivor of the Civil War who rode with a young Jesse James.
The plot mostly shows us Mattie Ross, Cogburn and the other marshal that rides with them, LaBoeuf. We only shortly meet Tom Chaney, the killer, or Lucky Ned the gang leader he rides with. It takes some wrangling for Mattie to get Cogburn to lift his arse, then to have Cogburn and LaBoeuf …
What a book, really. We get told the story of how a fourteen year old daughter sees the revenging dead of the killer of her father through, by contracting a US marshal and riding with him into Native territory. The story is told in her voice, with some southern dialect and some 19th century dialect, bringing her Old testament justice, her upraising, her intelligence and stuborness to funny, breathtaking life.
The marshal she obliges to catch or kill the killer is drunken Rooster Cogburn, a survivor of the Civil War who rode with a young Jesse James.
The plot mostly shows us Mattie Ross, Cogburn and the other marshal that rides with them, LaBoeuf. We only shortly meet Tom Chaney, the killer, or Lucky Ned the gang leader he rides with. It takes some wrangling for Mattie to get Cogburn to lift his arse, then to have Cogburn and LaBoeuf accepting her riding with them, until we get to the wilderness, the isolation, the snowy, empty country. But throughout the book, the story is fast paced and funny.
One of the better books I ever read, actually. Concise, single-minded, funny.