Peter Matthiessen: Shadow Country (2008, Random House Publishing Group)
912 pages
English language
Published Jan. 7, 2008 by Random House Publishing Group.
Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by …
Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation." --front flap
Great story but plodding at times. The author did a great job evoking the time and place of life in the Everglades.
A strange sandwich. The first part is Cormac McCarthy excellent, I'd give four stars (only four because I didn't buy into the multiple voices fiction; they all sound a bit too much alike). The second part is plain awful, it's hard to believe it's even written by the same author. I had to fast-forward after the first 100 pages. The third part is solid but still too long even in this condensed version. A rating of 4-1-3 stars boils down to three stars overall. There is a separate, uncondensed version of part one that might be worth checking out, my recommendation would be to skip the rest even though I'm quite fond of the "multiple versions of the same story" concept.
