A review by gorecki
Winter in the Blood by James Welch
3.0
A splinter is a foreign body that enters through your skin, nestles in under it and aches. It’s a sharp piece of wood, a glass fragment, a cutting shock of ice or the loss of a loved one. And once it settles in, it spreads pain like winter moving through your blood. That’s what I got out of this book: the way you lose a loved one, and then another one, and then another, and there’s this winter that spreads across your body and freezes you solid and cold and detached, and you’re lost in the white wilderness and can’t find your way. Even in the heat of summer in Montana. A splinter aches, but the cold numbs it down, and then it just becomes comfortable.
I wish I loved it more, but it confused me and didn’t speak to me on many levels. I don’t know if this was the intention and if it was meant to show how detached you can grow from other people, how you can lose the ability to understand and appreciate social interactions, but every time the narrator met or spoke with other characters, I could not understand what is happening or why or where it’s going. Every time he was alone with nature, though, the book just bloomed and blossomed and winter was gone.
It’s a bitter beauty, this. I don’t know if I would recommend it, or I probably would if you were a certain kind of reader (I don’t yet know what that kind would be), but I found it and bought it as a recommendation from Louise Erdrich on a blog post she wrote years ago, and I am grateful and definitely planning to read more James Welch so there’s that.
I wish I loved it more, but it confused me and didn’t speak to me on many levels. I don’t know if this was the intention and if it was meant to show how detached you can grow from other people, how you can lose the ability to understand and appreciate social interactions, but every time the narrator met or spoke with other characters, I could not understand what is happening or why or where it’s going. Every time he was alone with nature, though, the book just bloomed and blossomed and winter was gone.
It’s a bitter beauty, this. I don’t know if I would recommend it, or I probably would if you were a certain kind of reader (I don’t yet know what that kind would be), but I found it and bought it as a recommendation from Louise Erdrich on a blog post she wrote years ago, and I am grateful and definitely planning to read more James Welch so there’s that.