Portis’ protagonist and narrator looks back from the early 1900s to her childhood in the 1870s, not long after the end of the Civil War, when she as a 14 year old girl went out into the Indian nation to find her father’s killer. Mattie Ross is one of the great American children characters along with Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'

He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. It’s a fast read but I was slowing down all the time. It took me several days to read this short novel because of one thing and another, but also because after a few pages I would just like to stop and savour it. So we left that drover’s bones to bleach on the hills of the buffalo He said “You went and drunk too much, you’re all in debt to me”īut the cowboys never did hear of such a thing as the bankrupt law Well the working season ended, but the drover would not pay The whole thing reminds me of the ballad “On the Trail of the Buffalo”, especially this verse Rooster is not any kind of role model for a young person.

The collision of the great Falstaff-as-Terminator character of Rooster Cogburn and the innocent-but-uncanny Mattie is a kind of love story. Mattie’s lack of any sense of humour along with any reasonable sense of self-preservation makes a violent story into pure comedy. He said he knew a woman in Sedelia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. I did not give credence to everything he said. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. I don’t usually rush to read the bookofthemovie but the voice of 14 year old Mattie Ross whose story this is is brilliant : It was almost buried by one dreadful movie version, the first one, then rescued by a wonderful version. True Grit is as salty as a bag of salt salted by extra-salty salt. (Are there any badreaders? Is there a ? What do they do?) Memoirs of Hadrian? See Ulysses, only also, it’s Romanīut here is True Grit, which I recommend to all goodreaders. Moby Dick? you kidding? recommend this and lose your friends!Ī Clockwork Orange? – it’s not even in English! Ulysses? absolutely not, too hard, and no plot Creator of Mattie Ross, who will live foreverįinding a novel which you can recommend to everybody is really not easy.

True grit book cover