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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label Patrick De Witt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick De Witt. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The Sisters Brothers

has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The L.A. Times called Patrick De Witt's novel a "bawdy cowboy noir," which just about covers it. I read it in manuscript this January when it was called "The Warm Job." (The titular brothers are Eli and Charlie, hit men for a man they call "the Commodore" who wants a man named Hermann Kermit Warm dead.)

Here's what I said about it at the time:


There is a lot to like here.  The story is episodic and reminiscent in some ways of Little Big Man, only taking place in a more focused context.  Eli and Charlie seem to run across a whole cross-section of Western types (the diligent Chinese house boy, the luckless prospectors, the soiled doves and so forth) that Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) would recognize.  There’s also a tinge of superstition and the paranormal (the weird gypsy) that unsettles us a bit.  What the story mostly reminds us of is a graphic novel, even though this is a fully fleshed tale that doesn’t need illustrations.