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The Sisters Brothers Paperback – February 14, 2012
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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, JOHN C. REILLY AND JOAQUIN PHOENIX
A BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn’t share his brother’s appetite for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. But their prey isn’t an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne’er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEcco
- Publication dateFebruary 14, 2012
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100062041282
- ISBN-13978-0062041289
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush, is ‘weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness,’ according to Ron Charles.” — Washington Post
“[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own.” — Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011 on Salon.com
“This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western.” — Notable Fiction of 2011, Washington Post
“DeWitt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy inclusion on the shortlist.” — Daily Beast
“If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western THE SISTERS BROTHERS...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.” — Los Angeles Times
“Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.” — Esquire
“[T]here’s something cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure.” — Wall Street Journal
“By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.” — NPR.org
“Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.” — Time Out New York
“A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon.” — Boston Globe
“Mesmerizing… The book seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt’s subtle, nothing-wasted prose. He writes with gorgeous precision about the grotesque: an amputation, a gouged eye, a con in a dive bar, a nauseating body count [without] macho brutishness.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“DeWitt’s exploitations of the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his comic gifts without ever compromising the novel’s gradual accumulation of darkness, disgust, and foreboding.” — The Millions
“A gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir….Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths.” — David Wroblewski, bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Like Tarantino, deWitt knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader’s willingness to forgive a good narrator’s personal flaws.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is full of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third.” — Dallas Morning News
“Original, entrancing and entertaining.” — Denver Post
“Weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness… It’s all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters, who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness.” — Washington Post
“The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut.” — The Onion AV Club
“Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.” — Outside magazine
“Patrick deWitt’s narrator--a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition--is a brilliant and memorable creation.” — Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Little Children
“A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength.” — Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander
“At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it.” — Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children
“…gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination.” — New York Times Book Review
“A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.” — Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
From the Back Cover
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living–and whom he does it for.
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters–losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life–and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
About the Author
Patrick deWitt is the author of the novels French Exit (a national bestseller), The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco; Reprint edition (February 14, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062041282
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062041289
- Item Weight : 9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #106,783 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,073 in Humorous Fiction
- #2,521 in Westerns (Books)
- #7,494 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Patrick deWitt is the author of the critically acclaimed Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, as well as The Sisters Brothers, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Born in British Columbia, he has also lived in California and Washington, and now resides in Portland, Oregon. His newest novel is Undermajordomo Minor.
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I'll warn you there will be spoilers later on in this review. So, I'll pause here to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My one problem was a mild dissatisfaction with the ending or, rather, the events leading up to the ending. It is a minor problem, and something I can't quite articulate. Perhaps the answer will come to me while writing this review. I recommend the book. It is a noir western that contains some wickedly deadpan humor. I think it was a reviewer from the Los Angeles Times that said this would be the outcome if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.
Set in the American west in 1851, the novel is about the notorious assassin brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters. They are hired guns for the mysterious Commodore, and their current assignment is to kill Hermann Kermit Warm because the Commodore claims he has stolen something that belongs to him.
I found a vague similarity to Of Mice and Men - two brothers, one a simpleton, the other his protector - but, in this novel, it is the simple-minded brother who is the narrator. Little else about this book reminds me of the classic, but I wonder if the author didn't take a kernel of his idea from that book.
The novel starts out with Eli Sisters, the narrator, contemplating horses, or his lack of an adequate one. No good western should be without horses, and this book is chocked full of them. But, unlike other westerns, this book doesn't treat them with gratuitous reverence.
At one point, Eli's poor horse has his eye scooped out with a spoon because of infection. It seems gruesome - and it is - but it is made less so because Eli does it out of dedication to the animal. Or as much dedication as he's capable of.
The story is Eli's inner journey. It's about the contradictions of life, where the dumb can sometimes be smart; how even the most simple-minded person can have something worthwhile to say, or can have an original idea; and that sometimes the protected becomes the protector - that roles change. We are not always just one thing.
The Sisters Brothers is written with plainness and humor. The subtle humor can be seen in the following exchange between the brothers. When an opportunity comes along to trade in Eli's old horse for a better one, Charlie says:
"You've had a tough time with Tub, I'll not deny it. A happy coincidence, this horse just walking up to meet you. What will you call him? What about, Son of Tub?"
Most of the book is made up of the brothers' trek to meet up with Henry Morris, the front man who is to find Hermann Kermit Warm so the brothers can do their ill deed. Along the way, they meet many interesting and bewildering characters: a dentist who has failed at everything else and introduces Eli to the wonders of tooth power and brush; a distraught, crying man that they meet more than once; an abandoned hapless boy with another ill-fated horse; and a gypsy that may, or may not, have put a curse on the Eli.
Along the way there is much killing, for a variety of reasons. After going into town to get help for a spider bite that Eli has received, Charlie summarizes the randomness, or providence of it all, as if there is no control over the killings: "...it is a spider to blame for the early demise of your group. A woolly, fat-bottomed spider in search of warmth - here is the cause of your deaths."
The crux of the novel is that Eli is tired of the killing life. He has started to contemplate the moral question. This puts a drag, a tug, on the brothers' relationship and provides the dramatic tension.
The brothers finally make it to San Francisco, where they are to meet Morris, but he's nowhere to be found. During their search, they meet a man walking down the road petting a chicken and strike up a conversation. The man goes on to say: "My feelings about San Francisco rise and fall with my moods. Or is it that the town alters my moods, thus informing my opinions? Either way, one day it is my true friend, a few days after, my bitterest enemy."
The brief description of San Francisco during the gold rush makes me wonder if the influx of people during that frenzied time didn't leave an indelible mark on the city, and California in general. Here are Eli's thoughts:
"Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and on I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented though strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it."
Nothing is ever easy for the brothers, and so, when they go to the hotel to ask about Morris, the proprietress is loath to hand over the diary he unwittingly left behind. They resort to their usual methods of persuasion to garner the diary. It provides them with a clue to where they might find Warm and Morris, and to the Commodore's real motivations for having Warm killed.
Here is where the spoiler comes in, so stop reading now if you haven't read the book yet. I don't give everything away, but enough to give you warning.
Once they finally find the other pair, the story takes a twist. The brothers realize the Commodore lied to them. Warm didn't steal anything. In fact, it is the Commodore who wants to steal from Warm. Morris has already learned this and has turned his back on the Commodore to take up with Warm. But what are the brothers to do? They do what they generally do; let it play out and deal with things as they come.
The Commodore is after Warm's secret chemical formula for a solution that promises to reveal gold hidden in the bottom of streams. The brothers decide against killing Warm and become partners with the two men. They will help cull the gold from the river in exchange for a share of what they find.
The chemical solution works. They do find gold, but things go terribly wrong. And here is the point of my discontent. Charlie makes a critical error during the process. The mistake seems out of character. Although Charlie appears reckless at times, his action seems utterly thoughtless and without proper motivation. It is an action the author does not explain to my satisfaction.
The reader could take this error as Charlie subconscious desire to get out of the business. Even with all the gold in the world, he'll never be free of the killing life, unless he rids himself of the one thing that makes him who he is: his gun hand. But the reader is not given enough insight into the motivations behind Charlie's careless action to come to this conclusion, and I believe this is the reason the ending seemed flat to me.
While I find some of the brothers' behavior abhorrent, the author made me care about them. There was always humor to temper the morbidity and gruesomeness, and Eli's voice was delightful. The elements of magical realism sprinkled throughout add to the intrigue and poetry of the story.
Even with the one minor criticism, I found The Sisters Brothers to be an excellent bit of writing and a delight to read.
Well, Eli is, in fact, a killer. And a good one. But it is true that his life has been unduly influenced by his brother's ambitions, and as he begins to move toward creating his own life everything the brothers have built begins to unravel. It's a suspenseful, violent tale, but one with emotional resonance. Eli's dreams of settling down with a wife and maybe work as a clerk in a shirt store may sound ridiculous to his brother, but it comes from a sweet and genuine need in his heart: to live a normal life and be loved.
There's a great deal of literary heft to be found too, though it is easy to overlook as you race through the pages. There's a good reason that The Sisters Brothers was a finalist for the Mann Booker Prize last year. I think I'll have to read it again sometime to piece together my thoughts on the crying man who keeps turning up, the significance of the 'curse' Eli believes has been placed on him, and other such motifs. But the observations I did pick up on were measured and pin-sharp. Setting the novel in San Francisco during the gold rush was a nice touch; it was the perfect setting to showcase the ruins that come from avarice and corruption. The city is portrayed as a foundation of hope and, all too frequently, the arbiter of staggering despair. As in Cormac McCarthy, there are also religious flourishes here and there: "I felt San Francisco standing behind me but I never looked back and I thought, I did not enjoy my time here."
But there's a burning hope for the future, too, and that is where The Sisters Brothers really shines for me. "Though I had never before pondered the notion of humanity, or whether I was happy or unhappy to be human, I now felt a sense of pride at the human mind, its curiosity and perseverance." That this hope is seldom realized, that most dreams and hopes are created only to be cruelly murdered, is a bleak message. But when the message comes in the form of an enjoyable potboiler, it's hard to feel too bad about it.
Grade: A-
See also: Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)