The Sisters Brothers
2011
- fiction
- brothers
- frontier and pioneer life
- gold miners
- murder for hire
- inventors
- gold mines and mining
- fiction, westerns
- fiction, historical, general
- brothers, fiction
The story
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.
What it’s like
Deadpan, wry first-person narration, sour and observant, turns the Old West's grime into comedy and then, without warning, into quiet ache. Eli's sentences are plain and unhurried, full of crooked humour about balky horses, bad teeth, and his brother's appetite for whiskey, while the landscape arrives in patient detail: cold river mud, rutted mining camps, the damp smell of pine and gunsmoke, lamplit saloons with dim, sour air. The mood is melancholy and rueful, best suited to a slow weekend or a chair by a rain-streaked window. Pacing is loose and episodic, drifting between hard riding and odd encounters with prospectors, cheats, and drifters. Violence is frequent, sudden, and bloody, delivered matter-of-factly rather than lingered over, and there is explicit sexual content and crude talk throughout. It is not gentle. It suits readers who want Western grit with dark comedy, a brotherly bond tested by brutality, and a narrator who is funnier than he knows.
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