True Grit by Charles Portis
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book is wonderful in a lot of ways. the last fifty or so pages alone are intense and scary and my mouth did that thing where it just falls open and makes me look totally doofy but i couldn’t care because i was frantically reading to find out what would happen. that is some seriously good writing.
and if i had read this when i was younger and it had been part of my life for a long time, or even if i had read it before winter’s bone, it would probably have attained the five stars cats.
but. narratorial voice.
so the story is told from the perspective of an elderly mattie, retelling the events of What Happened to her in year 14, recollected in tranquility and all that, but this ain’t no transcendentalist. she is this puritanical spinster barking crusty old testament ideals of justice into the narrative which would be great if it were offset in alternating chapters maybe, but is jarring when it slips into the thoughts of a young girl, even a young girl in which we can see the baby-roots of this prissy judgmental worldview.
and maybe a lot of people find that awesome, but me, this reader, it was like when you are just drifting off to sleep pleasantly and then you hear this mosquito, and you are like – goddammit- that thing again, and you could still drift off, but your sleep would be tainted by knowing you were probably going to wake up with a swollen itchy face. (this probably doesn’t make any sense – i have a zillion things happening in my head right now so i am only giving this review 70% attention)
i can’t help it, my heart belongs to ree. and i know how unfair it is to compare on book to another, but there is no way to avoid it. if i were to invite both of them for tea, ree probably wouldn’t come – she would go off and shoot a squirrel and watch me with suspicious narrowed eyes, while mattie would come over and criticize the amount of sugar i put in my tea (which is A LOT, thank you) and eat up all my lemon-poppy cakes. i am extrapolating here.
i know this is sooo many people’s favorite book ever, and it pains me to not love it as much as them, it does. i really did enjoy it, but old biddy/young spunky girl syndrome grates on me a little bit.
i am going to hide in a cave now.
