Louise Erdrich's Blog, page 2

Tree People

I finished reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a month ago. Since that time I've thought about the book every day. The Overstory is so jammed with gorgeous information that I had to read it over once I'd finished it. I hardly stopped to absorb the information on the first read through because Powers' stories, of people and trees, are compulsively readable. Dr. Pat Westerford, likely modeled on Suzanne Simard, conducts experiments with trees that reveal how they signal one another.  he concludes that they are "linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune network across acres of woodland. These brainless stationary trunks are protecting each other." Her discovery becomes the basis of her solitude, and then her solitude is shared and becomes a love story. I don't know how to encompass, or even describe, the interconnected nature of the stories in the book except to say that later on, when a character says that whatever is made of a tree should be as marvelous as the tree, this book comes close. As close as a book can get.



After finishing The Overstory, I walked outside and sat down underneath one of my favorite trees, the white cedar. I wanted to know everything about this tree.  From reading this book, I knew that this tree was aware, in a tree's way, of my presence. Powers uses stories to transmit gorgeous swathes of science but it all comes down to this: If we lose the forests of the earth we lose our place on the earth. His book permits one to despair, but it also contains this profound consolation: the world is deeper, richer, stranger, than we can encompass yet. There is so much to find out.  f we destroy our home, we'll never know its magical truths. 







The Overstory is the best book I read all summer, and the most important book I've read for a very long time.     




My best of September book is The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason, who also wrote the deeply romantic and magnificent novel, The Piano Tuner.  I would pick up a copy as soon as it appears. This book has everything a reader could wish -- a young doctor ready to use the harrowing science of the day (1914). A war in which he resolves to become an experienced surgeon at some state of the art field hospital, only to be hauled into a desperate dumping ground of horror, deep in the Carpathian mountains. An unforgettable woman runs this place, a nun/nurse who has become of necessity a far more experienced doctor than our doctor. 



Oh, just read it. Believe me, you'll read it twice and pass it to your best friend.     

Powerful Must Reads

A September Must Read:

1) Nomadland by Jessica Bruder (available 9/26/17).  Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.  You will never forget the people whose stories Bruder tells.  Proud, resourceful, screwed-over, funny and in so many ways admirable, the American nomads Bruder lived with and reports on have sometimes lost everything but their bravado.  These are people whose middle class jobs dried up, people who lost their homes when the housing market crashed, people who should have comfortably retired but instead are nearly broke.  Opting to live in vans, campers, trailers, various RVs, they follow seasonal work from Amazon warehouses in the Southwest to the sugar beet harvest in the Red River Valley of North Dakota.  Most people are in their 60s or 70s.  The Amazon jobs are so grueling that there is a period of "work hardening" before they begin, and dispensers of OTC pain relievers on the warehouse walls.  

These are the people who have done their best to "make America great again".  Bruder tells their stories with humanity and wit.  She doesn't need to editorialize because the stories tell all you need to know about who bears the burdens of an unfettered free market.  

2) Actually this is an August Must Read but you must please read You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie's memoir.  This overwhelmingly beautiful book is ostensibly about his mother, but also about everything in the world, and all things Native.  Loss, Hilarity, Cruelty, Love, and an obliterating History.  My daughter and I listened to the book on a road trip from Belcourt, North Dakota.  It was a literary experience that i will never forget.  Of course, Sherman is an extraordinary reader as well as writer.  But the sound of his voice telling us his story over the miles became something more.  By the time we got home we were imbued and imprinted with Sherman's living spirit and Lillian's complex ghost.  My sister called this "not exactly a book as much as a volcanic eruption".  She is a physician with Native Health.  She's seen a lot.  She's exactly right.

3) Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler.  This is the book I was reading when not actually driving.  Octavia Butler was a visionary writer of speculative fiction.  She was a genius.  Even if you think you don't like science fiction, please try this book.  It is wonderfully addictive and complex.  Butler constructs an alien race that exists by manipulating and absorbing the genetic material of other worlds.  They find us shortly after we destroy our place on this planet.  They save us and fall in love with us.  Their first human is Lilith.  i don't know how to convey the generosity and tension of this book -- you will have to read it yourself.  One of my daughters kept telling me it was a good book, another put the book in my hands and insisted I take it on my trip.  Thank you.  Gorgeous, strange, stunningly humane.

4) The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk (available 8/22/17). This is one of Pamuk's most engaging novels.  The narrative is a directly focused stream.  But one of the most wonderful and terrifying things about the novel is the description of how wells were hand dug in Turkey in the old days.  I was fascinated because at the time I was also reading about hand dug wells in the 1930's on the Turtle Mountain reservation.  In both places the water was 70 or 80 feet down in the earth.  The digger filled a bucket with dirt and stones, and that bucket was hoisted up by people on the surface.  The sides of the well were reinforced as the hole got deeper, and deeper.  80 feet.  Can you imagine working at the bottom of that well, looking up at the tiny circle of sky, and not feeling entirely lonely and vulnerable?  It would ruin the book to say much more.

5) Hunger by Roxane Gay.  A Memoir of (My) Body.  And then this book.  In some ways, it is about what it is like to be greatly overweight.  It is also about why Gay used fat to insulate herself from further harm after a sickening betrayal by her childhood boyfriend.  He lured her to a hunting shack where his friends were waiting.  She was gang-raped at 12.  Sensitive, intellectual, deeply loving, soulful, possessed of great gifts of articulation, she embarked after the rape upon a life of hunger.  This book is like an undertow.  You are swimming in the life of another person, and suddenly you find that she has written about part of you that you cannot acknowledge.  You don't even know why you can't stop reading, why this book afflicts you, like it's author, with a kind of hunger.  I started the book late one afternoon and by night I reached a certain page, a section, and my heart began to madly pound.  It was near the end.  I put the book down and paced my house, sobbing, until I could finish the book.  Just telling you it is that sort of book.  In it you may find a hidden side of yourself suddenly reflected by an author who is an avatar of female truth.   

 

White Rage

Dear Readers,

For the past month I've been acting as a book physician, writing out summer reading prescriptions for people with a few hours to spare.  Mostly, I've written out prescriptions for books that will make people laugh or become immersed in suspense.  White Rage by Carol Anderson is stronger medicine.  Images of black rage abound -- from riots in L.A. to Ferguson, Minneapolis, St. Paul -- but images of white rage are often hidden in the acts of the justice system and in the halls of congress.  Anderson has undertaken a history of white rage, and it is shocking from the first pages.  Who knew that Abraham Lincoln wanted to rid the country of slaves by sending them to what is now Panama?  How many high school classes teach the true history of Reconstruction?  With unceasing clarity and calm,  Carol Anderson narrates a history so compelling that I could not stop reading.  If you're thinking of picking up a true crime drama, why not enlarge your thinking with a true historical crime drama?  

This is an extraordinary book and I hope you read it.

For books and readers everywhere,

Yours truly,

Louise 

Superior Lake

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes reads like a mystery -- how on earth will people and the lakes themselves defeat invasive species like the sea lamprey, zebra and quagga mussels, alewives?  Dan Egan makes the story of each battle epic, full of colorful characters and bold acts.  A reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Egan knows how to pare a story to its most interesting elements.  Having finished the book, I immediately started over.  (I can't remember the last time I've done that.)  More questions:  Will the deep troughs, now drains, that have been mistakenly engineered to assist large vessels, draw down the lakes?  Will the salmon. or the whitefish and other native species, triumph in the end?  And what of the waterless states fed by the shrinking Colorado River?  There have always been plans to pipe Lake Superior out of MInnesota.  When and how will our fellow Americans come for this vast, but finite, treasure?   

Taken for granted, spoiled, fished out, over-loved, will the Great Lakes survive us?  Probably, in some form, but we could very well not survive their loss.  So this book is on my MUST READ list.  Suspenseful, superbly informative, crucial.  I also love Egan's portraits of people working for and against the lakes -- a "World War II veteran named Vernon Applegate showed up and did what no creature in the past 360 million years had apparently been able to do.  He got under the lamprey's skin.  He figured out how it migrates and how it hides.  How it feeds, how it breeds, and how it dies.  And then he put a stake in it." 

If you don't know what a sea lamprey is, look it up.  You are in for a treat.  Bring this book to any lake this summer, any beach, and be grateful for Applegate.

Read and Weep/Laugh/Hope

Owning a bookstore (which actually owns me) doesn't get any better than the advanced reader shelf.  Oh wait, it does get better.  Talking to all of you readers who come in to find the book you will love -- that gets better.  But the advanced reader shelf where the copies to be published are stashed -- it is VERY good.  When Killers of the Flower Moon (available April 18th) came in, I noticed that it was by David Grann who wrote The Lost City of Z.  That made the book promising.  The demi-title "The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" gave me a start.  I knew about the murders of the oil rich Osage but the connection to the birth of the FBI -- that was a new slant.  Turns out I didn't know much, really, about what happened to Osage people in the early 1920's.  This book, written as detective fiction by a master of the genre, was impossible to put down.  All I can say is get it now and read it now.  I still think about Killers of the Flower Moon and I still see the beautiful faces in the photographs that Grann includes.  Given the political climate in which Tribal Nations are going to be pressed even harder to give up energy resources to greedy corporations, in the light of Standing Rock, of Line 3, and Rick Nolan trying to reverse the sulfide ban and endanger the boundary waters, this book is as timely as it is shocking.  And as distressing as it is compassionately told.  And yet, please let me remind you, this is a read you will not put down.

Shifting gears -- there is Standard Deviation (available May 23rd) by Katherine Heiny.  I hardly ever laugh out loud when I am reading, so I was very surprised to hear laughter in the room.  Yes, it was me, and the book is clever and full of heart and joy and origami.  A couple of perfectly mismatched human beings try to love their heart winning Asberger's son (an origami prodigy) as they try to stay married and deal with a constant barrage of absurd guests. 

Back to extraordinary tragedy -- and unbearable strength.  A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea (now available) is the journey of Doaa Al Zamel (as told to Melissa Fleming).  I can't begin to describe the fury that captured me after reading this book.  It helped me understand what happened in Syria, and put a deeply human face upon one desperate family trying to save one another.  Please read this book and pass it on to others.  Help more people understand why the immorality and cruelty of the Trump administration's Anti Muslim and Anti Immigrant actions are intolerable and shame our country. 

 

Hidden Lives

After reading The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, my daily walks are an entirely different experience.  I see the details of a tree's struggle, the tree's heroic attempt to repair a slashed limb, to repel invaders, or how so often a root flare buried by a careless landscaper will eventually suffocate the strongest.  I see how hard it is to live on a boulevard and not in a forest composed of  myriad types of tree with a magical underground connection that can choose to harden against invaders or to sustain young trees with extra food. The Hidden Life of Trees is a marvel of understanding and science. 

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien, still haunts me.  A novel of charismatic truth where reality feels like myth and myth is history.  A young woman and her ancestors live, and do not live, through the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  Gorgeous storytelling.  

 

Not Winter Reading

November rains and a stormy outlook. Time to plunge into a contradictory reading spree -- first Svetlana Alexievich's extraordinary work, Secondhand Time, an oral history that encompasses every emotion from extreme sorrow to the most tender love. This book of contemporary Russian voices and Soviet history is not for the faint of heart. So, when my heart went faint from descriptions of what is to live in that grand and tragic country, I turned to Amor Towles. His novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, is also about Russian/Soviet history but from the point of view of a most fortunate man. Our hero, Count Rostov, isn't executed in the first pages but instead is confined for life to the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. This is an old fashioned sort of romance, filled with delicious detail. Save this precious book for times you really, really want to escape reality. 

Back to reality -- I have resisted picking up Atul Gawande's Being Mortal for quite a while now because of the title, which would imply mortality. Once I began reading this important book I could not stop. It addresses, without fear, questions we all ask in our hearts but rarely voice. And it gives a person the tools to begin talking about . . . mortality. One's own, one's cherished family.  I gave this book to everybody in my family. Not as a Christmas gift -- I must admit it would be a downer to receive this book as a Christmas gift. But give it to yourself because you deserve clarity.

Somehow I missed talking about Ann Patchett's wonderfully human Commonwealth. Her first chapter is one of the best I've ever read -- leading to a kiss that is one of the best kisses I've ever read. The engaging and headlong family story that follows sweeps you up -- you won't stop reading until it puts you down.      

Day Three ��� I���m Still With Her

Dear Hillary,



Thank you for running an honorable campaign. Thank you for speaking to
what is best in us as humans, and as Americans. Thank you for
repeatedly including everybody. Thank you for your grace under the
burden of ugliness, the pressure of hate.



I never thought that I would miss this campaign, but I do. I miss
watching you fight the good fight. I miss the joy. I miss the hope.



You inspired me by sticking to intelligent, practical, experience-born
responses to the real problems that face us. You offered a tough but
welcoming face of America to the world. As a mother of four daughters, a
writer, a bookstore owner and a Native American, I gained strength from
the example of your resilience and composure.



My daughter
Pallas and I met you when you stopped in Minneapolis. We were thrilled.
We gushed, “You are our warrior!” You smiled and gripped our hands. You
exuded warmth. I wanted to hang out with you and have a beer, and I
don’t even drink beer.



On the morning after the election,
everything felt flat, and strange. It wasn’t just grief, it was fear. It
was haunting to walk the streets, go to the grocery, do simple things.
There was always that question: is that person filled with hate?
Contempt? Or maybe that person? It was worse in the schools, where some
students felt emboldened to make racist comments, to harass girls, to
let out their ugly side.



My oldest daughter Persia teaches
kindergarten in a Native language immersion school on a reservation. One
of her students said she knew our next president was a “wall builder”
and she was scared. She didn’t know which side of the wall she would be
on.



For women of all ages on day one, a sense of confidence
and joy drained out of us. We shut down, tried to cope. And of course we
did our jobs. At midnight, in tears, I found myself on your website
buying more Hillary buttons and signs. Irrational. I already have plenty
of Hillary swag!



On day two, things began to change. A sense
of all that we have to fight for came back to us. A conviction that now
all of our work is more important than ever. Work our staff does at the
bookstore to build awareness of climate change. Work to build
understanding between people of every race. Words from your concession
speech helped -- fighting for what is right is always worthwhile. Your
loyal belief in the best of America, not the worst.



Thank you
for your commitment to clean energy. Thank you for fighting for a future
of our children, for the legions of diverse plants and animals that
keep us all healthy, and deserve to live as they were created, by a
force we do not comprehend.



Day two seemed to last forever
though, I kept faltering. How to answer questions from people in other
countries? Our national temper tantrum was now installed in our highest
office. Shame crawled up inside of me. I told myself that having a
bookstore where, through literature, we can inhabit hearts and minds
different from our own, is important. I reminded myself that listening
my 15 year old daughter’s wisdom, supporting her and other young women,
especially Native women, was important. My daughter Aza has a baby, my
grandson. Helping him learn that a man’s strength is expressed by his
respect for women, that’s important. I wrestled with accepting that
although you won the popular vote, so many other voters, 25% of
Americans, were choosing racism, intolerance, contempt for women, and
maybe most dangerous of all, volatile inexperience.



By the end
of day two, Pallas asked me to write this letter and post it on this
page. She said that it would reach a lot of people and that you might
read it. My brother told me that some people are angry, blaming, and
that it is a stage of grief. So I’m writing a letter on day three to
say what is true. You are the most experienced candidate for president
we’ve ever had. There was no better candidate. You ran into a wall of
hate, but you got up again, time after time. Never lost your wits, your
cool. Nobody else could have done that.



Though in frail health
this summer, my father, Ralph, always wore a flower in his hat. As he
walked laboriously around the neighborhood, he stopped people to
campaign for you. My mother Rita, 83, always keeping Ralph steady,
filled out her ballot with the pride of a Native women who had worked
all her life to teach her daughters fortitude, her son’s kindness. She
finally had a woman as strong as herself to vote for.



On day
three I’m so thankful for what you showed us. Truth. Resilience. Honor.
Expertise. You are our champion. Maybe you didn’t know that even if you
lost, you would still be our champion. All along, you were showing us
how to get through life without you as our President.



As you
gave your concession speech, with Bill behind you, I thought: she is so
much stronger than the men who have won the presidency. She is doing the
right thing, but she is not defeated. She models power even in her
loss.



At the age of 91, Ralph Erdrich promised that he would
live to vote for you. He has. He is still living in Wahpeton, North
Dakota. He is still for you. I am still for you. Mothers, sisters,
brothers, daughters, children, friends – we are still for you, Hillary
Rodham Clinton.



We don’t know what you will do next, but we’ll be there.



It’s day three. Time to dust ourselves off, stand up, begin.



Time to make America proud again.



Yours truly,



Louise

Power of Spring

Even though this was yet again a record setting warm winter, spring still has its power and the first few days of warmth are disorientingly heady.  Before I start living outside again I have to write about one book that got me through the indefinite days of ice last month.  A Different Kind of Daughter, by Maria Toorpakai and with Katherine Holstein, is subtitled the Girl Who Hid From the Taliban In Plain Sight.  It is one of the most wrenching memoirs I've read.  The story is about a family who refuses to abandon its women to the terrifying measures of tribal law, and how one daughter defies the society into which she is born (and which she also treasures).  She breaks gender taboos in order to become a world class athlete.  Every page is gripping and Toorpakai is one of the most engagingly stubborn people I've ever read about -- her entire family is composed of a singular toughness.  This is a book for parents to read with their daughters and sons -- a kind of all family read that will reward everyone with a piercing look into the lives of extraordinarily courageous people who are also altogether human in their daily decisions, feasts, trials, squabbles, and intense loyalty.

Pearlman, Lispector, Enright

Dear Book Lovers,

Three writers have dominated my month -- Edith Pearlman (again), Anne Enright and Clarice Lispector.  Although I have some assigned reading to do, I've been escaping frequently into Binocular Vision, The Green Road, and Lispector's Complete Stories.  From Edith Pearlman this paragraph, "Into the slot she dropped.  She fell smoothly and painlessly, her hair streaming above her head.  She landed well below the water's surface on a mossy floor.  Toenails still there?  Yes, and the handkerchief in the pocket of her jeans.  A small crowd advanced, some in evening clothes, some in costume." 

Where are we?  So delicious and strange. 

Anne Enright: "Rosaleen was a nightmare.  She was very difficult.  She was increasingly difficult.  She made her children cry."

Clarice Lispector:  "The light in the room then seemed yellower and richer, the people older.  The children were already hysterical."

I will just say that these are marvelous reads, treasures, sharply funny, deadly sad, and that I hope you have the chance to read any one of them.

As for this other book -- Voices in the Ocean, A journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins by Susan Casey -- what a surprise.  My daughter plucked it out of the advanced reader copy pile but I didn't open it because the cover looked like a Lisa Frank backpack or first grade notebook cover.  I like the illustrator Lisa Frank okay for elementary school swag, but this book deserves a truly unsettling cover -- something that gives a sense of its profoundly urgent content.  It also deserves a good title -- for instance many people read The Soul of the Octopus on the strength of its cover and title.  I read it too.  Not bad.  But this book!  Gracious.  Voices in the Ocean?  So vague.  This book is by turns jaw-dropping, tragic, funny, lit with love.  I kept it with me for two days, turning to it between volleyball points, school pickups, and I even took it on a dog walk.  Susan Casey is a talented science reporter, and I grew to admire her skills and bravery so thoroughly that I went dizzy when she stepped onto a harrowing boat in the Solomon Islands and took a gut-clenching ride -- just a friendly visit to dolphin murderers who killed 1,000 dolphins in a day.  She wisely travels between beauty and brutality, between research and folklore.  She goes to The Cove (Taiji, Japan, where dolphin snacks are sold to eat during dolphin shows).  She travels to Dolphinville, where people swim and commune with pods of dolphins in ecstatic communion.  She profiles dolphin rescuers and dolphin profiteers.  Often, the profiteers and murderers become so disturbed by the empathetic intelligence of their prey that they turn into the rescuers themselves.  By the end I knew what so many people feel -- the connection between our species is filled with meaning -- uncanny, powerful -- yet to be understood.

If you're looking for a book for an fuzzy wuzzy animal lover, this is not a cute book no matter what the cover may suggest.  Buy it anyway.  Read it yourself.  Voices in the Ocean is the furious and loving truth.  Plus, it is a fantastic adventure. 

Yours for Books,

 Louise