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A review by tak_everlasting
The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
i loved the writing style, even though i found it a bit distant. the plot was interesting and really got me thinking, even though it is (necessarily) gory. the concept of history being a spiral rather than a straight line always moving toward better and nicer things is important to consider.
i knocked a star off because i found the characterization of women in this to be very stilted. it's not a first person point of view either, so i found it a bit strange that we are meant to sympathize fully with a man who, by his own repeated admission, drinks, has sex with other people, regularly abandons his wife and family, and refuses to devote himself to the job he has chosen (farming) because he finds it boring.
meanwhile, his wife works the land they have, stays home with his kids, and accepts him whenever he shows up for a few days in between his adventures. see accepts him back every time, after a brief fight over where he's been, because she is a Good Wife who doesn't exist outside of her relevance to her husband. he doesn't even consider the unfairness of this himselfuntil the end of the book, by which point this is no longer relevant and only contributes to his growth of becoming a better person.
and yes, i understand that this is par for the course in westerns, but that doesn't make it less exhausting. i'm not asking for anything extreme, like her becoming a bandit herself, just that she be allowed to have a breaking point, some limit to her saintly forgiveness.
this pattern of characters that exist to fill a role that they cannot escape from is repeated in other characters, which makes anyone besides the leads rather uncompelling. they must serve the main character, at the expense of their own existence.
which isn't entirely a bad thing, and does in some ways lend to a nuanced reading of the book. it's also tied to the magical realism of it all. but if, like me, you read because you enjoy connecting to the characters, you're pretty much out of luck.
i knocked a star off because i found the characterization of women in this to be very stilted. it's not a first person point of view either, so i found it a bit strange that we are meant to sympathize fully with a man who, by his own repeated admission, drinks, has sex with other people, regularly abandons his wife and family, and refuses to devote himself to the job he has chosen (farming) because he finds it boring.
meanwhile, his wife works the land they have, stays home with his kids, and accepts him whenever he shows up for a few days in between his adventures. see accepts him back every time, after a brief fight over where he's been, because she is a Good Wife who doesn't exist outside of her relevance to her husband. he doesn't even consider the unfairness of this himself
and yes, i understand that this is par for the course in westerns, but that doesn't make it less exhausting. i'm not asking for anything extreme, like her becoming a bandit herself, just that she be allowed to have a breaking point, some limit to her saintly forgiveness.
this pattern of characters that exist to fill a role that they cannot escape from is repeated in other characters, which makes anyone besides the leads rather uncompelling. they must serve the main character, at the expense of their own existence.
which isn't entirely a bad thing, and does in some ways lend to a nuanced reading of the book. it's also tied to the magical realism of it all. but if, like me, you read because you enjoy connecting to the characters, you're pretty much out of luck.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Police brutality, Violence, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Torture, and Death