True Grit by Charles Portis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
(Crossposted from Goodreads.com)
It’s refreshing to go back to the original, sometimes. I recently picked this up for a re-read after seeing the outstanding Coen Brothers film. I was delighted to revisit TRUE GRIT after such a long space– after seeing the John Wayne film in cable rotation over the years one gets a certain mental picture of how this story goes, and both the recent remake and my reading the book again after all these years (which the recent film follows more closely than the Wayne original). True Grit, the original story by Charles Portis, is a fast, adventurous and amusing read. Portis’ version of Maddie is written in an autobiographical voice, as if from a distance of years. Indeed, she makes many points about the American political and social scene in the intervening years between the events of True Grit and her “Present” (presumably at the time of Al Smith’s nomination). I found this charming, if somewhat unfilmable without constant narration, so it is an element that both filmmakers wisely left out or used in limited amounts. The endings in both films are more and yet less than what Portis wrote, but they generally get the denouement (that famous “Fill yore hand you sonofabitch” charge of Rooster Cogburn at four outlaws) and the ending right. True Grit (the book) is well worth reading, for the colorful voice Portis gives his narrator and the historical bits, which he clearly did his homework on. A great read.
Third Point of Singularity 