Three stars' still a positive review, right? I had been debating with myself whether I should give SUNSET & SAWDUST three or four stars, but I decided to be 100% honest about it. I'm a die-hard Joe Lansdale fan, but this novel slightly disappointed me.The execution still bears Lansdale's seal of quality. The descriptions are short, but evocative, the narration is colored by East Texas' twang and vernacular. The plot is intricate and clever. Joe Lansdale can be a pretty ideological writer at times though, as his protagonists sometimes fight for ideas and causes through the people they're pitted against and it's sometimes a dangerous game to play as your thesis can overthrow your story and I feel it partially happened in SUNSET & SAWDUST.While there is a strong mystery keeping SUNSET & SAWDUST together, but that protagonist Sunset Jones was a bit of a one note song. Outside of a dramatic, breathtaking opening scene, she's more of an avatar of feminism and progress than a fleshed out woman of the depression era. I mean, there are only two female characters in the entire novel (not counting the daughter or the alluded Jimmie Jo) and they're both strong willed, unyielding feminist figures trapped in a world of gutless, conniving men. I have no issue with making a feminist Western, but I don't feel like it's an issue that should be addressed as some kind of overnight reversal of social roles. My main issue with SUNSET & SAWDUST was that the setting and the mystery are intricate, but that the thesis at the center of it isn't. It's actually pretty blunt and it's a pet peeve of mine.My two favourite characters in SUNSET & SAWDUST were Clyde Fox and Hillbilly, Sunset's two employee, which I thought were the two most tormented characters. That made them interesting to me and Joe Lansdale, clever storyteller that he is, never let them stray far from the storyline. I still somewhat liked SUNSET & SAWDUST. It got on my nerves a little for being ridiculously too blunt about the issue and the era it was trying to tackle, but force is to admit that Joe Lansdale can write an era novel like nobody's business. While my relationship to SUNSET & SAWDUST was a little more adversarial than to other Lansdale novels, it didn't damage my admiration for the author at all.
“Naked, except for her shoes and the gun she was holding, she wandered off of what remained of her house, stumbled down the muddy clay road in front of her place, frogs, minnows and perch hopping and flapping beneath her shoes.”Joe Lansdale has a reputation for "mojo storytelling," which he manages to pull off in a wide assortment of genre. Near as I can tell "mojo storytelling" means that the author works magic on us; if so, then his bag of tricks includes lots of laugh-out-loud vernicular, memorable characters and non-stop quirky action. But what makes his stuff so endearing, at least to me, is his secret ingredient -- he entwines a bit of a broad-minded liberal slant to his stories – something I never quite expect from a Texan (which I think is his point). Just look at his Hap & Leonard series, for example, where he pairs up a white heterosexual man (Hap Collins) as best friend and trouble magnet with a black homosexual man (Leonard Pine). Lansdale seems to have as good a time pointing out Leonard Pine’s reality (and thus disarming the reader’s defenses), as he does spinning the tale of whatever adventure the two friends are on. In Sunset and Sawdust, Lansdale sets the events during the Depression in East Texas; a time when a few white men were getting rich on oil and Jim Crow law was being unofficially legislated by the Ku Klux Klan. Certainly, women were supposed to know their place. Enter Sunset Jones, the heroine of this tale, the one who unexpectedly (especially to herself) sets out to straighten up a few crooked things in her sawmill town.Read my review: http://mostlyfiction.com/west/lansdal...
What do You think about Sunset And Sawdust (2005)?
Read thru the ebook version of this novel, courtesy of the Indiana Digital Media consortium. Ye gods, Landsdale is not kind to his characters ... the book kicks off with Sunset Jones being beaten by her husband during a tornado and doesn't get much gentler from there. However, Ms. Jones rises above the situation and through sheer stubborness manages to solve a mystery and make life better for a few more people along the way. She does make mistakes - and others suffer for it, as does she. The novel is a compelling look at a place and time (1930's Texas) and a labor of love. While Landsale is known for his horror writing - I've enjoyed his historical fiction as much, if more so, than his genre work. In fact, this novel has a nice tip of the hat to his short story (later expanded to a novel) "The Big Blow" - a fictional account of the boxer Jack Johnson and the Galveston Hurricane. Lansdale's writing is powerful - deceptively easy on the surface, but he'll draw you right in and make you feel as if you're right there in the story. I've been careful to stretch out my readings of his body of work - it's potent stuff that I don't want to run out of any time soon.
—Tracey
A tornado comes through east Texas. At that very moment in time Sunset Jones is fed up with her cheating husband beating and raping her. She takes his .38 and puts it to his temple and blows him away. She turns to her in-laws as she has no family. Surprise is that her mother-in-law takes her side and makes sure she is appointed constable in place of the now gone husband. Most of the men in town and even some of the women don't like the fact that there is a woman constable. (The book is set during the Depression years). Sunset seems to be getting along too well with the black population of town also. Once appointed Sunset sets out to actually do the job, assisted by a love-sick local man and a smooth talking hobo that just blew into town, the book does get gritty and violent at times.The ending of this one got my cold little heart a bit more than normal as I grew to really like Sunset and her motley crew that she seemed to pick up as she went along.Plus, this book is another case of a male writer writing about strong women that blows away some of the Mary-Sue's everyone has gotten used too.
—Shelby *wants some flying monkeys*
Una donna uccide il marito dopo l'ennesimo atto di violenza. E proprio l'omicidio le dà la forza per inoltrarsi nel passato criminoso del suo villaggio. Lei si chiama Miss Sunset, "Tramonto", per la sua bellezza e i capelli rosso fuoco. A questa indimenticabile figura femminile Lansdale affida la sua esplorazione dei confini tra Bene e Male, in un romanzo accolto in America come il suo capolavoro.Una comunità di poveracci sorta intorno a una segheria, una natura violenta testimone muta di una terribile storia di amore e di sopraffazione. Siamo in Texas, negli anni della Grande Depressione. Sunset Jones uccide il marito, manesco tutore dell'ordine, e ne prende il posto. E si trova ben presto invischiata nel caso di un antico delitto che affonda le sue radici in una macabra storia di sesso e razzismo, di avidità e corruzione, di ragazze-madri e figli mai nati. Una vicenda nascosta nelle viscere del piccolo villaggio, che offre alla giovane donna la possibilità di scoprire in se stessa una forza morale di cui fino a quel momento era inconsapevole. La voce di Lansdale dipinge un mondo che sembra uscire da una leggenda orale, di quelle che passano di generazione in generazione, e dove, lontani, arrivano gli echi del Ku Klux Klan, delle leggi razziali, della nuova ricchezza in arrivo dai pozzi petroliferi.
—Matteo Pellegrini
