The Sisters Brothers
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
Starred review from January 10, 2011
Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.
This is one strange novel about two gunfighters in the Old West who are long on ability and short on conscience. Maybe it's because their last name is Sisters, but the two "heroes" of the novel are loyal only to each other. Patrick deWitt's intriguing story of these two greedy men, whom he somehow makes likable, is a fascinating exercise in writing skill. His scenarios are breathtakingly original--no clichÄs here. John Pruden has just enough of that laid-back cowboy drawl to allow the listener to slip into another time. His pitch-perfect rendition is a wonderful complement to this story about two soldiers of fortune traveling through old Californy during the Gold Rush days. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
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