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samwaynescott 's review for:
True Grit
by Charles Portis
A Sojourn of Southern Literature #1:
This is a masterpiece and not talked about nearly enough for how good it is:
- It's a story that can only happen in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Move it anywhere else and you lose a piece of its soul. The sense of place is arresting.
- Simple, simple, simple plot: get Tom Chaney. It's captured in the perfect first sentence: "PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."
- Rooster Cogburn is not a man spinning a legend about himself, he's not a mythical figure. He's a human broken by the Civil War and the harsh country hasn't stopped breaking him. Yet even he can live up to one piece of his own legend "Fill your hand you son of a bitch!" John Wayne playing him at the end of his career is perfect, Bridges is dang near close.
- I hope my daughter is not like Mattie Ross and forced to bite every hand that comes near her in a harsh world. But also, in a way I hope she is: resilient to the core, loyal to those she loves.
This is a masterpiece and not talked about nearly enough for how good it is:
- It's a story that can only happen in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Move it anywhere else and you lose a piece of its soul. The sense of place is arresting.
- Simple, simple, simple plot: get Tom Chaney. It's captured in the perfect first sentence: "PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."
- Rooster Cogburn is not a man spinning a legend about himself, he's not a mythical figure. He's a human broken by the Civil War and the harsh country hasn't stopped breaking him. Yet even he can live up to one piece of his own legend "Fill your hand you son of a bitch!" John Wayne playing him at the end of his career is perfect, Bridges is dang near close.
- I hope my daughter is not like Mattie Ross and forced to bite every hand that comes near her in a harsh world. But also, in a way I hope she is: resilient to the core, loyal to those she loves.