nahoonkara by Peter Grandbois

If I tried to summarize nahoonkara, I’d probably come up with something like this: a story told in the voices of several members of the Gerrull family, moving back and forth between mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin and a mining town in late nineteenth-century Colorado. It would be a summary that wouldn’t necessarily inspire me to pick up this novel and read it, which goes to show that summaries don’t tell you anything about a book.

Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.

The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.

“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”