Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, Book 3)

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What McMurtry did was to reinvent the Western novel by taking its basic elements and elevating them to the level of epic. It meant they had to walk down the Brazos for nearly two hundred miles, worrying constantly about what would happen if the Comanches discovered they were afoot. In the narrative, the drive continues, the destinies of Roscoe and Joe and Elmira play out against a background of the drive making it across to Montana with wonderful descriptions the great west, technical explanations of the various aspects of cattle drives, and of course just great storytelling.

It’s funny that you mentioned that because I did often imagine those two actors speaking the dialog as I was reading.My 1980s paperback version was 943 pages and the last time I could remember reading a book that long was when I went through a Michener phase over 20 years ago. The first 100 page is as leisurely and unhurried as the first 100 pages of LOTR leading up to Bilbo’s birthday party. Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way,” he complains to his partner around the halfway mark, “with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.

Life is often cheap in the early days of the ‘wild west’ and bloodshed is commonplace, as is the casual sexism and racism of these pre PC times.He then rides on to Lonesome Dove, where the cook Bolivar, who had abandoned the cattle drive before it left Texas, is delighted to see him again. What impresses me most about this book is that the fates of the characters are neither cornily predictable nor deliberately surprising. I would like to recommend to other local readers the most enjoyable and utterly captivating novel I have ever read. As with many of the great epics, it refuses to be pegged as one thing; instead, it is all these things, like the world is all these things. In Nebraska, he gives Gus' letters to Clara and Lorena, and explains that Gus has left his half of the cattle interests to Lorena.