Thursday, January 11, 2018

The Ruthless Gun


“When the horse topped the hill, the angry sound of the Rio Despacio rose sudden and peremptory. The soft patter of rain had been long ago absorbed into the silence of the countryside that lay bleak and cold in the half-light of sunless dusk as though the rain had washed its color away.”

I may have just read a novel by an alcoholic. This T. C. Lewellen Western from 1964 has passages that are as good as any novel I’ve read: Honest, human heart-breaking insight. And there are sweeping sections that I haven’t the faintest clue what the hell is going on.

It’s not that it becomes fantastical it’s just that the beautiful coherence dissolves into slipshod chaos. Each time I think I’ll toss the book, the author slips back into a bit of beauty.

An odd one indeed.  A+ in passages but the schizoid nature makes this rough going.

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