Safe Return Doubtful

Second time of reading this..

Ranked by many of the media as Crews’s masterpiece, I appreciated this greatly, but prefer his novels. Some say to read this first, as an introduction to Crews’s books, but I’m going to disagree with that also.. better to read it last, and it gives some of perspective on Crews’s early life, experiences that led to his later writing.
That so much could occur to one small boy is amazing in itself, but that these sort of experiences were shared by his kin and community is almost incredible. That aspect of community is so well summarised in the subtitle, The Biography of a Place.

Crews is often described as the successor to the early greats of Southern Lit, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty.. but he takes the genre on a step, to a new level of violence and surrealism. Many are put off his novels. Some are unsure, wary of the blunt approach to taboo subjects. Others, like me, can’t get enough of him. Those uncertain readers should certainly read this, it’s about as close as you can get to explaining why Crews writes like he does.

The biography is told from the viewpoint of him as a child, the large part before he was ten years old. It offers a harrowing view of the trials and tribulations of sharecropping in the South during the Great Depression. The struggles are considerable and unending, many of them described in graphic detail. Literature such as this, stands as history to a time long gone; its importance should not be undervalued.

Published 1978, my GoodReads score 4 / 5