Winter in the Blood

Winter in the Blood is the first novel of James Welch (writer), a Native American author who became well known for his later works Fools Crow, Indian Lawyer and The Death of Jim Loney. It was published in 1974 by Harper & Row, and has since come out in Penguin Paperback.

The novel begins with the words: "In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak and watched the sorrel mare, her colt beside her, walk through burnt grass to the shady side of the log-and-mud cabin." In that one sentence is conveyed the lyric grit that gives the book its texture and interest.

Winter is a short work written with a spare grace, its characters opaque to the narrator, a young man who understands himself as little as he does his family. Nonetheless, that opacity and lack of understanding do not sap it of any of its power, but make for a compelling psychological verisimilitude combined with a realistic portrayal of the world around.

Welch's device, a narrator lost to himself, serves to create an atmosphere of alienation in keeping with reservation life, where a tribe and its culture subsist in the shadow of white settlement, misguided legislation and inescapable modernity.

Precisely these difficult issues of self-understanding and the shifting nature of personal identity against the backdrop of progressing "modernity" (particularly with respect of the latter's effect on the former) mark "Winter in the Blood" as a piece of modernist literature or late-modernist literature (or, in the minds of some, a post-modernist narrrative.)

The story takes place on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and along the Hi-Line of Montana, where Welch spent his childhood.

Summary:

The narrator of this beautiful, sometimes bizarre tale is a sensitive, self-destructive young man living on the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana. He is haunted by memories—of an older brother, dead at the age of fourteen; of his father (whomade white men laugh at the local bar), found frozen to death in a snowdrift; and of his once-proud heritage.

He sleepwalks through his chores, consoles himself with women. The visions he sees and the echoes he hears are swallowed up in Montana's vast emptiness. Yet he struggles against that emptiness, searching for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors.