Winter's Bone is strong, old-school noir. Someone should have beaten this into my head. NOIR NOIR NOIR! I would have reached for it sooner. Ree, a badWinter's Bone is strong, old-school noir. Someone should have beaten this into my head. NOIR NOIR NOIR! I would have reached for it sooner. Ree, a badassed young protagonist, knocks on strange doors, talks to hostile folk, and gets taciturn replies, silence, arguments, and fights that eventually form a logical shape. Winter's Bone reads as if Chandler and Hammett wrote convincingly about the Ozarks instead of cities, and were obsessed with pastoral survivalist settings and nature rather than suits and cars.
Briefly, in the search for her father, Ree crosses many of the frayed lines of power and shadow networks in a group of small communities.
The book has its perceived flaws. The poetic tone combined with country twang is odd at first, but it grew on me, since 1) the tone is internally consistent with itself, and 2) having had my own country family friends, the grammar of the people is consistent with what I have experienced. There is plenty of poetic insight, rough exchanges, and atrocious grammar. The poetic-twangy tone made me feel that the smells and sights of the woods were familiar, while simultaneously underlining the foreignness of navigating the closed mountain subculture.
Ree's encounters are pleasingly dissonant like she is talking to outdoorsy neighbours who are also jailhouse cyborgs from Mars, who would just as soon shake her hand as murder her with hate lasers. Her kin are close-knit but roiling with an anger borne of severe deprivation. They can barely keep their anger in check, and it moves under and into most of the dialogue. Given how pinched and rough their lives are, many of the characters demonstrate remarkable restraint in the moments when they are not violent.
The scene that nagged at me, as a potential flaw, was when Ree reflected in a cave about how her ancestors took refuge in caves during a religious, family feud. The half-forgotten religious concepts and language verged on apocalyptic parody. Totally paraphrasing: "In the old timey-wime, the Fist Gods spake..." However, this scene intimated the creation myth and partial history of how a large, quasi-incestuous group of people could share the same kinship bonds and flinty ethics long after family-religion fades. Survivalism and insular family religions can certainly lead to bad times. This scene is conceptually brilliant despite some awkward phrasing.
Winter's Bone has more than a passing similarity to The Hunger Games: crazy-sad mom, vulnerable younger siblings, tests of mettle, communities of angrily starving people and movies starring Jennifer Lawrence. They are superficially similar, and this could be another way in for readers. The Hunger Games is definitely Ozark sci-fi. But Winter's Bone is solid noir.
This book is brutal, short, and I loved it....more
Roseanna is one of the first popular nordic crime novels translated into English. I realize that's quite the qualified statement, which also deserves Roseanna is one of the first popular nordic crime novels translated into English. I realize that's quite the qualified statement, which also deserves some commas somewhere. But hey, it is an actual sub-genre which has reached pop culture fruition in the Stieg Larsson novels. The authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, were a duo who have far too many umlauts between their surnames. Other sub-genre authors include Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, and Jussi Adler-Oslen.
To get an idea of Roseanna, imagine it is a The Girl who... novel with only one or two sex crimes, people eating a moderate amount of sandwiches, and still drinking far too much coffee. Since this book was a sub-genre forerunner, everything is turned down a notch. The writing is dry, but gets straight to the point.
As for the story, Detective Martin Beck is haunted by the case of unnamed woman whose naked, tortured body is dredged up from a shipping lock. Beck is ambivalent towards his family. He fixates on solving the crime, because he likes his work, and he uses his work to keep his family at a distance. There is a moment where he thinks something like "Ugh, if I don't catch a break in this case, I'll have to participate in raising my children," which I find both hideous and funny.
Snowy, restrained, melancholic-- I would read another in the series....more
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