True Grit Author: Charles Portis | Language: English | ISBN:
B004I8V0Q8 | Format: EPUB
True Grit Description
Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost writers.
True Grit is the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and the Academy Award® winning 2010 version starring Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers.
True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory
. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.
This mass-market edition includes an afterword by award-winning Donna Tartt, author of
The Little Friend and
The Secret History.
- File Size: 270 KB
- Print Length: 228 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1408814005
- Publisher: Overlook (August 28, 2007)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004I8V0Q8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,922 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
I love this novel, having stumbled across it in a used bookstore some 20 years ago, having read it expecting not much more than stilted prose and shootouts, and having returned to it again and again since that first reading.
It's written in the first person, kind of like a memoir, by an old woman describing a youthful adventure. And what an adventure! Shootouts are the least of it.
Mattie Ross, the adolescent girl, is stingy, opinionated, unsentimental, and as tough as John Wayne, if not as big and strong. She conforms to Northrop Frye's concept of the "ironic" hero -- too naive to understand the things she's dealing with, like Voltaire's "Candide." When her ability to keep up during the pursuit of some outlaws is questioned, she answers defiantly, "Pappa took me on a coon hunt once." Camping overnight with the two lawmen, she registers a succinct complaint, "One of the officers made a wet snoring sound. It was disgusting."
But the prose is delirious throughout, like the events they describe. There's a laugh on almost every page, far too many to give examples. I should mention too that the prose is historically and regionally accurate. About a bucket of milk, Matty says, "It looks like bluejohn to me." I looked up "bluejohn" in the Dictionary of American Regional English, and there it was, an old term used in and around Arkansas for skim milk. Likewise, kerosene becomes coal oil. Tall scrubby weeds are a "brake." And all of these regionalisms are woven into a prose style that is memorably idiosyncratic and unintentionally funny as all get out! Rooster Cogburn intends to shoot an unsuspecting man in the back because, "It will give them to know our intentions is serious." Now that's a sentence to savor. First of all, there is the absurdity of the plan.
Charles Portis' "True Grit" is the story of Mattie Ross a 14 year old girl in the old west circa 1875. After her father is murdered Mattie goes in search of justice for him and falls in with U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn who, along with Texas Ranger, LaBeouf follow the murderer into the Indian Territory. The story is familiar to most because of the 1969 movie starring John Wayne. With the release of the Coen Brothers "True Grit" I wanted to see what the book was like.
Mattie Ross is beyond precocious. She's practical, stubborn, judgmental and has grit enough herself to hire the orneriest U.S. Marshall she can find and embark on an adventure into a life she wasn't born to and had her father not been killed probably wouldn't have known anything of the world she ventures into. Cogburn is a Marshall that has tenuous connections to both the world of the law and the outlaw and when he meets Mattie he's working in the world that pays the best, at the moment. Cogburn's voice fairly booms off the page (and it's hard not to hear Wayne's voice in them), but Mattie's voice also has it's character more diminutive but no less strong. Portis develops the characters mostly through their voice and you won't be mistaken about who's talking or what they're saying. The story is so simply told it could almost be part of an oral tradition and told from the point of view of Mattie remembering back upon her life maybe that's the way it was intended.
In Donna Tartt's afterward she compares Mattie to Huck Finn and Ahab, but I think she may be reading too much into it that isn't there. "True Grit" is Mattie practical and plainspoken. Mattie says exactly what's on her mind and in the story Portis tells us exactly what's there (not even what isn't there), and usually only enough to move the story along.
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