By Sorrow's River, the third in Larry McMurtry's folly-laden four-volume 'Berrybender Narratives', finds itself treading water. Our eccentric English aristocrats and their varying entourage of mountain men, servants and fools continue to tool around the American West with no sense or reason, and the story is only maintained in the reader's heart by its author's ever-present ear for dialogue.

The characters also remain palatable, though the most endearing of the previous book, young Kate, is almost entirely absent here. Pomp, who emerged as a point of interest in the previous book, takes on a larger role here, though the ultimate purpose of the narrative remains obscure. A solid final act, in which a random act of chaos intrudes, pulls at the heartstrings with surprising effectiveness, and that is enough to redeem the previous 300 pages of irrelevance. But this is the least of the three Berrybender books so far, and it will require a rousing finish in the fourth and final volume (or at least some indication that there was a point to the story) for the whole thing not to have felt like merely a way to pass the time. ( )

By Sorrow's River är en roman från 2003 av Larry McMurtry. Det är den tredje, både i kronologisk och publiceringsordning, av The Berrybender Narratives. Den utspelar sig år 1833 och berättar om Berrybenders resa söderut genom Great Plains till Bent's Fort vid Arkansas River.

We pause in our heedless wanderings to think and ponder and wrestle with relationships. Well not a pause in the journeying, but during the journeyings, between actually getting anywhere and anything else happening, we get our interlude of romantic complications. Or anti-romantic complications. Poor Tasmin, falling out of love with her fierce, taciturn, wandering husband, and into love with a gentle, passive, guide without a lustful bone in his body. It's a typicially McMurtrian triangle, where desire and personality and timing and opportunity and geography all fail spectacularly to harmonise, leaving everyone confused, miserable and tortured. And then Indians come along and torture them. Well, no. Maybe. Not for lack of trying.

With more babies on the way and balloons in the air and smallpox on the river and a long dry walk, we must brace ourselves for the death to come, and come it does, and if we've had horror and brutality and senseless violence, McMurtry, like a literary conductor who has expertly woven individual themes out of familiar motifs, builds to a new and novel crescendo of actual heartbreak that leaves the reader sitting, fuming, knowing that you shoulda seen that coming, or something like it. God dammit. Now I've got to read the last book and I know he's got to top the ending of this one and I'M VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE BABIES. ( )

By Sorrow’s River is the third book in Larry McMurtry's four-book series known as "The Berrybender Narratives."

By the beginning of this book, the Berrybender family and its traveling party have several fewer members than they had at the beginning of Lord Berrybender's quest to kill as many of the wild animals populating America's West as he possibly can. But the old man is not ready to call it a day and, in fact, he could not do so even if he wanted to because he has placed himself and his entire party in such a dangerous position that the only choice they have is to move on to Santa Fe.

It will not be an easy journey, and if everyone is to get to Santa Fe before winter sets in, they need to start moving in that direction immediately. But hard as they know the trek will be, they also know that those who manage to survive the journey will have a relatively safe place to spend the cold months just ahead - a refuge promising them a brief respite from the onslaught of fierce Indians who have been killing off the adventurers one-by-one for the last several months.

Despite all the suffering and brutality endured by the Berrybender group, By Sorrow's River is really a love story - one involving a love-triangle in which the passionate Tasmin Berrybender finds herself torn between Sin Killer (her husband) and Pomp Charbonneau (son of, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark's famous interpreter). By nature, Sin Killer can take only so much of civilization and "crowds" before he feels compelled to head out on his own again. And now, because he has been away from Tasmin for so much of their marriage, she is happily giving in to her attraction to Pomp, who seems to be just the man she has been looking for all of her life. Pomp, though, is at best a reluctant participant in the love-triangle, and if anything is to come of their relationship it will be up to Tasmin to make it happen.

By Sorrow's River, too, is another rousing adventure story with quirky fictional (two French hot-air balloonists, for example) characters interacting with real-life individuals from one of the most exciting periods in American history. It is Larry McMurtry at the peak of his skills. "The Berrybender Narratives," all four volumes of it, deserves to be placed on the shelf right next to the author's masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. It is just that good. ( )

Volume three of the Berrybinder narratives, a group of novellas that could have been easily combined into half as many volumes, but where is the money in that? ( )