Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Penguin Classics (2008), Paperback, 160 pages
Description
Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance �?? "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." �??Tommy Orange, The Washington Post During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood, is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning transl… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Together with other authors such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Robert Vizenor, James Welch was one of the first American Indian authors to spur a Renaissance of Native American literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Published in 1974, Winter in the blood juxtaposes the
The depth of the narrator's identity crisis is best characterized by the following citation from the novel:
The distance I felt came not from the country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. (p. 2)
Published in 1974, Winter in the blood juxtaposes the
Show More
depressing contemporary life of the Native American main narrator, living in a reservation in Montana, with memories harking back to the narrator's youth, when the people in the community stood close to nature. In his life, the narrator moves from bars to motels, from drinking to meaningless sexual encounters, a life of drunkenness, void of essence. The flashbacks evoke powerful images of nature, but cannot reconcile the main character with his identity as an American Indian, because they are mere references to the death of his father and younger brother. Through their deaths he feels cut of from his true identity.The depth of the narrator's identity crisis is best characterized by the following citation from the novel:
The distance I felt came not from the country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. (p. 2)
Show Less
LibraryThing member PatsyMurray
I read this book when it was first published in the 1970s and held onto it, recognizing that it was a good novel. Rereading it some forty years later, I am stunned with its beauty and precision. Welch was a poet and it shows in his careful use of language. Every vignette of the narrator's life is
Show More
shown as it unfolds with such attention to detail that you can see it all laid out before you. With his drinking and his sexual encounters, he is trying simultaneously to numb himself still further and to connect with an always elusive sense of meaning and value. This futility, of course, is rooted in the history of the Indian people, which Welch makes personal through the stories of the narrator's grandparents who were both young adults when the White men came and rounded up the Indians into reservations. Anyone who wants to write should study this novel for how Welch builds the tension and reveals why the narrator lives the life he does. Then they should go back and read it again for the beauty of the language. Show Less
LibraryThing member Terpsichoreus
Falls prey to the flowery/boring prose problems of most contemporary American authors; and unlike in Harry Potter, there is no driving plotline to keep the reader's interest. However, I will say that Welch's prose is often rises from his ilk and actually spins together an interesting metaphor or
Show More
underlies a moment of subtle emotion. Show Less
LibraryThing member SheldonDeVane
A beautifully written novel. The narrator is a young Native American man living on his mother's cattle ranch. He is intelligent but self-destructive and emotionally distant from his family. He describes with precision and clarity everyone and everything around him and also frequent flashbacks to
Show More
his youth when his father and older brother were still alive. A chance encounter with an elderly blind man reveals an important truth about his youth and his grandmother. Show Less
LibraryThing member kaylaraeintheway
I've been intentionally trying to read more Native authors, and James Welch was at the top of my list after listening to a panel on his works at a local book festival last year. He writes with brutal honesty about the hardships of life, specifically for Native Americans. I can't say if I enjoyed
Show More
this book, since it's not the most uplifting of stories, but it is extremely well-written. Show Less
LibraryThing member jekka
I finally read this book because so many of the authors of my favorite books from the Native American Renaissance had cited it as an influential text. It was rough, but beautiful. Not a happy read, but definitely one worth reading.
LibraryThing member mstrust
Winter in the Blood by James Welch. The days of a Blackfoot man who lives and works at his mother's Montana ranch.
The story begins with the man's mother, Theresa, informing him that his live-in girlfriend has not only left him but she's taken the only items of value he had, his electric razor and
The man, who is still referred to by many as his mother's boy, has to remind people that he's thirty-two years old. He and everyone he knows drinks heavily, switching bed partners and fighting, though these things are clearly just ways for killing time. It's when he allows himself to think about the deaths in his family that we find old wounds that haven't healed and have surely led to the indifference he seems to feel for everyday life.
The story begins with the man's mother, Theresa, informing him that his live-in girlfriend has not only left him but she's taken the only items of value he had, his electric razor and
Show More
his shotgun. The news matters little, he seems to be an even-tempered young man though he wishes she hadn't taken his things. At some point this level-headedness becomes more clearly an indifference that extends to nearly everything around him. He sees his elderly, silent grandmother who never leaves the living room, yet there's no connection, and he gives no opinion, good or bad, when his mother suddenly comes home with a new husband who is now the boss in the ranch work.The man, who is still referred to by many as his mother's boy, has to remind people that he's thirty-two years old. He and everyone he knows drinks heavily, switching bed partners and fighting, though these things are clearly just ways for killing time. It's when he allows himself to think about the deaths in his family that we find old wounds that haven't healed and have surely led to the indifference he seems to feel for everyday life.
Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Prix Maurice-Edgar Coindreau (1993)
The Great American Novels (1974)
Language
Original publication date
1974
Physical description
160 p.; 7.74 inches
ISBN
0143105221 / 9780143105220