Finn by Jon Clinch

From the publisher:

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Although it was brutal, the language was so beautiful that I had to read several sections more than once. You can open it to just about any page to find an example of this, such as this passage from page 52 (hardcover edition):

As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats' accidental paths and steamboats' cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.

It's been ages since I last read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (henceforth referred to as Huck), but this book has made me want to reread it, especially the scenes that appear in both books. The mood of Finn, though, is completely different from that of Huck, partly because Huck is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of a child while Finn is narrated in the third-person from the point of view of a cruel adult. Finn also contains detailed descriptions of violence and murder. If you're queasy about that sort of thing, this might not be the book for you.

So if you enjoy poetic writing that demands to be read slowly and then reread, and if you can stomach graphic descriptions of violence and murder, read this book.

Also try:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the first book I should list here for obvious reasons!

More than once, Finn reminded me of Cold Mountain. The last paragraph I wrote about Finn holds true for Cold Mountain as well: poetic writing, graphic descriptions of brutality.

I haven't read any Faulkner (yet), but I've read in other reviews that Finn is also evocative of some of his early novels in particular.