Scan barcode
A review by nigellicus
By Sorrow's River by Larry McMurtry
5.0
We pause in our heedless wanderings to think and ponder and wrestle with relationships. Well not a pause in the journeying, but during the journeyings, between actually getting anywhere and anything else happening, we get our interlude of romantic complications. Or anti-romantic complications. Poor Tasmin, falling out of love with her fierce, taciturn, wandering husband, and into love with a gentle, passive, guide without a lustful bone in his body. It's a typicially McMurtrian triangle, where desire and personality and timing and opportunity and geography all fail spectacularly to harmonise, leaving everyone confused, miserable and tortured. And then Indians come along and torture them. Well, no. Maybe. Not for lack of trying.
With more babies on the way and balloons in the air and smallpox on the river and a long dry walk, we must brace ourselves for the death to come, and come it does, and if we've had horror and brutality and senseless violence, McMurtry, like a literary conductor who has expertly woven individual themes out of familiar motifs, builds to a new and novel crescendo of actual heartbreak that leaves the reader sitting, fuming, knowing that you shoulda seen that coming, or something like it. God dammit. Now I've got to read the last book and I know he's got to top the ending of this one and I'M VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE BABIES.
With more babies on the way and balloons in the air and smallpox on the river and a long dry walk, we must brace ourselves for the death to come, and come it does, and if we've had horror and brutality and senseless violence, McMurtry, like a literary conductor who has expertly woven individual themes out of familiar motifs, builds to a new and novel crescendo of actual heartbreak that leaves the reader sitting, fuming, knowing that you shoulda seen that coming, or something like it. God dammit. Now I've got to read the last book and I know he's got to top the ending of this one and I'M VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE BABIES.