Pearl's ( yes this is a man ) wife Lucille dies, and after she was dead, he observed a worm, no wider than a ring finger and no thicker than a few sheets of paper pushing forward several inches out of her mouth. I've been trying to figure out what kind of worm it was.
".. the only thing to do, he finally decided, was to wait it out, and so he sat back down and spent the next several hours watching the creature slowly work its way out of her. Not long after sunrise, the last of the worm slid from Lucille's mouth and dropped onto her chest with a soft, almost imperceptible plop. Pearl looked out the window and beyond the yard to his Fields Barren of crops and overgrown with weeds. Lucille's dying had begun in the spring and taken up the entire summer. Soon the man from the bank would be coming for his money, and Pearl didn't have it. He stood and repeated the lesson words aloud: 'where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.' He studied on this for a while, then turned to the bed and gathered up the worm like a spool of wet rope and carried it outside. Unrolling it along the ground in front of the house, he pinned each pulsing end of it down with rocks he took from the border of one of Lucille's flower beds. Two pea hens, all that remained of his livestock, darted out from around the house and began pecking furiously at it. He grabbed them up, one in each hand, and bashed their heads bloody against the porch post....."
A tapeworm? In another book, a white woman in England swallowed a tapeworm on purpose, so that she could eat a lot of food and stay skinny. Te digo. ( )

On peut lire, à plusieurs reprises, combien ce roman de Donald Ray Pollock est puissant mais, en même temps, quelque peu brouillon, ou confus, parce que difficile à suivre. C'est surprenant, à mon sens, de voir au contraire combien il est maîtrisé ; c'est un labyrinthe de personnages qui s'entrecroisent, certes, mais pourtant il est impossible de se perdre dans les axes des récits tant l'ensemble est sous le contrôle d'un romancier au sommet de sa narration.
Finalement, même si ce sont les hommes et les femmes (et les plus jeunes) qui sont le cœur du récit, j'ai souvent eu l'impression que le personnage principal était une époque, justement, une atmosphère, la pensée et la philosophie générales qui étaient celles qui les menaient il y a tout juste un siècle.
Et donc, quid du récit lui-même ?
C'est un déflagration. Une révélation. Un pamphlet de l'ignominie et de nos vices les plus enfouies, là, pourtant juste sous la surface, qui sont énoncés les uns après les autres au détour d'un paragraphe. Une narration d'une classe folle, des personnages tous traités avec la même empathie, et pourtant un maelström de détails sordides et pourtant tellement humains.
Une déflagration, oui, mais claque à chaque page qui te réveille brutalement, au risque de faire passer les lectures qui vont suivre pour des jolies histoires du soir enrobées dans du papier bonbon. Oui, c'est aussi bon, aussi puissant, aussi essentiel et nécessaire que ça. ( )

I looked it up and saw I read Pollock's other novel about six years ago and gave it four stars. I guess we both changed in that time. Oh well. ( )

I'll say 4.5, based on the ending which didn't wrap up as neatly as one might expect, but how could it when you have a thousand irons (exaggeration, of course!) in the fire? IMO, that didn't detract from the storytelling one bit.

Whew. Book. Hangover. ( )

A great yarn more like Knockemstiff than Devil and full of laughs and squirms and winners ( )