The Sisters Brothers is a strange, darkly comic Western (or is it a parody of a Western?) that was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize in 2011. One review joked that it would be the sort of Western the Cohen brothers would write. The style is terse and narration contains the stilted 19th C. English that is not exactly dialect speech but heavily colored nonetheless. It usually rings true and suits the character. The journey described in the book is a bizarre one - basically told episodically. Not all episodes seem relevant to the main plot (the brothers, who are hit men, track and find a man who has discovered a formula for separating gold from the dirt in which it is embedded, with the intention of stealing the formula and killing him). The dark events, some grotesque and not clearly linked to anything in the plot (like the scooping out of the damaged eye of the narrator's sad-sack horse, and the meeting with the "weeping man") effectively set the tone. It's hard to know what to make of the book, but it is often funny, often disgusting, and always interesting.
For a review of the book by the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt-book-review.html?_r=0
For a review of the book by the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt-book-review.html?_r=0
