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Louise Erdrich Sets the Pace
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14864 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1988 |
3,829 Words |
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William W. Bevis
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I couldn't do the touch for Grandpa, though. He was a hard nut. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives.
People have found stone grinders, hunting arrows, and jewelry of colored bones.
So I think it's no use. Even buried our things survive.
The quotations are from Louise Erdrich's first two novels, Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. Her new novel, Tracks, begins with the same terse compassion:
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Tracks is Erdrich's third novel about intertwined French, German, and Chippewa families (Erdrich's own heritage) on the reservation and in the nearby town of Argues, North Dakota. Love Medicine was set among the reservation Indians from 1934 to 1984; The Beet Queen focused on the mainly German townspeople of Argus, from 1931 to 1971. Tracks takes us back to the same reservation from 1912 to 1924, so that we meet the parents and see the childhoods of Lulu Lamartine and Marie Lazarre and a number of other memorable characters from Love Medicine. Erdrich's writing talent is serving an increasingly ambitious narrative of several peoples in one place. A fourth work in the series is planned.
In Erdrich's writing, an extraordinary prose technique is balanced against equally extraordinary characters. Nector Kashpaw, in Love Medicine, has just meet Marie:
I'm not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trapline, I find a wounded animal that hasn't died well, or, worse, it's still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it's just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.
This is how I take Marie's hand. This is how I would hold her wounded hand in my hand.
Later in the novel, when he is much older, that same sensitivity comes to a different stillness:
I remember the day it happened. I was sitting on the steps, wiring a pot of Marie's that had broken, when everything went still. The children stopped shouting. Marie stopped scolding. The babies slept. The cows chewed. The dogs scratched full out in the heat.
Nothing moved. Not a leaf or a bell or a human. No sound. It was like the air itself had caved in.
In that stillness, I lifted my head and looked around.
What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life. It went so fast, is what I am saying, that I myself sat still in the center of it. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet
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