Dalva

Dalva #1

by Jim Harrison, Brice Matthieussent (Translator)

Pour reprendre le contrôle de sa vie, Dalva s'installe dans le ranch familial du Nebraska et se souvient : l'amour de Duane, les deuils, l'arrachement à ce fils nouveau-né qu'elle cherche obstinément. Meurtrie mais debout, elle découvre l'histoire de sa famille liée à celle du peuple sioux et d'une Amérique violente. Chef-d'œuvre humaniste, Dalva est un hymne à la vie.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Book Club, Novels, Native American, Literary Fiction, Westerns

471 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Jim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers. He married Linda King in 1959 with whom he has two daughters.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 68, 69), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007).

Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Nebraska

Poor Dalva.

She's so hot, so perfectly crafted by God, it's embarrassing.

Even at 45, she makes men trip over their own feet and veer into the wrong lane while they're driving.

Dalva's what you call a man's woman, and I've never known a real woman who's even remotely like her.

I typically don't have an issue with men writing female characters (and vice versa), but this was one case where I felt that the author, Jim Harrison, was just letting his erection guide him. This novel just felt contrived to me, over and over again.

Dalva, in her youth, deals with a lot of the typical bullshit that most women reading this could probably relate to: boys nearly raping her, while driving her home from school, a disgusting coach who won't leave her alone until he sees her naked in the locker room, disgruntled kids from school calling her a “whore,” because she's built like Wonder Woman (but is, indeed, a virgin at the time). I was hopeful in these first few pages that Mr. Harrison was actually going to address some REAL women's issues. It became very clear to me, shortly after that, that Dalva was going to represent nothing more than his own fantasies. Dalva's a rich woman who rides her horses hard and loves boring men with small penises (of course she does, don't we all?).

In a series of flashbacks, we discover that Dalva develops her first crush at the age of 15, with a boy who believes the rumors that she is “fast,” so she tells him, “Make love to me and then you can tell I'm a virgin.” Even though she's never even kissed a boy in her life, she starts to take off her clothes and says to him, “Come ahead you big-mouth coward.”

She's never even kissed a boy in her life, but she rolls right into a striptease? “Make love to me and then you can tell I'm a virgin". . . said no fifteen-year-old girl ever.

I became literally nauseous when the adolescent Dalva, her sister Ruth, and friend Charlene, decide to get baptized in their white clothes, sans undergarments. When they crawl out of the river, their wet clothing sticks to their bodies. This is a baptism with their family members, not a story in Penthouse Letters. Naturally, when the boy she likes suddenly comes riding up on his horse, he can not resist the wet t-shirt contest and puts her on the back of the horse (and the family members were like. . . ?) grabs her “bare bottom” after pulling up her wet clothes, and manages to pull off some hot, pounding sex with the Last American Virgin in a tipi.

It's like every bad porn that was ever written.

I have no problem with well-written sex scenes, and there is a hilarious scene in the beginning between Dalva's adult sister, whose gay husband sent her straight into an asexual life, and a priest, who has also been celibate for years, pulling over on a road trip and having some rip-roaring good sex. I wish the whole book could have possessed the humor and reckless abandon of that one scene, but it didn't.

The ultimate “misogynistic kicker” for me was when the now 45-year-old Dalva is getting out of the shower and feels “a tremor of loneliness” that she recognizes as sexual desire. She reflects, “This passed and was displaced by the vertiginous notion that another section, a largish piece of my life was coming to an end.”

Oh, goodie. Dalva is my age now, so, despite the great tits (that she just can't keep confined to any bra!), she needs to accept that she will be a crone tomorrow and dead the next day. That's women, for ya, folks, dead in the water at 45!

I understand why several of my well-read male friends love this book. It's a celebration of the natural beauty of the West, the Sioux Indian, horses, fishing, camping, and a woman who looks like Lynda Carter as the leading lady. What's not to love here, if you're a man?

All I can say is: make it stop. Make it stop.

One star for the horses. Another star for making Nebraska seem prettier than it is.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Embedded in this brilliant novel is this single poignant sentence:

Back on the front porch, I saw her in the far corner of the yard, pushing an empty tire swing as if it held an imaginary child.

Jim Harrison can raise a lump in your throat. By this point in the book we are already in love with Dalva. She is 45, beyond intelligent, fetching, equal parts sentimental and pragmatic. She is as self-sufficient as it is possible to be. She can, as they say, ride a horse. When she was a young girl, she fell hard for Duane Stone Horse - quite the young man but not necessarily the kind you wanted in your living room. The resultant child was taken from her, an adoption arranged. In this book, Dalva is searching for her son and searching for her history as well. It is America's history, not all parades and ruffles and flourishes. But it's so much more.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

I woke yesterday, not hungover, but I hadn't slept well. I opened Dalva. Uncharacteristically, I had left my bookmark in the middle of a section, apparently worn out the night before right there. What followed was three pages that I think show why Harrison has such a purchase on my reading soul.

Ruth arrived at the last minute before dinner, running late because she had been reading a book called Arctic Dreams and had been carried away...

That stopped me. First, because Arctic Dreams (by Barry Lopez) is one of my favorite books. That will always get my attention. But I also loved the casual way Harrison brought it up. Never even mentioned the author's name. Just a little tip of the cap. (He makes a more cryptic reference to Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard later, naming neither the author nor title.) But I also loved how it served its literary purpose. So many things could have made Ruth late: a flat tire, a phone call, an unexpected visitor. This reference wasn't for everyone. But for me, yes, I understood exactly why Ruth could be carried away and thus late.

Ruth, Dalva's sister, was late for an impromptu dinner hosted by Uncle Paul. (Their father, Paul's brother, was killed in the Korean War). Paul has conspired to invite Fred, a neighbor, as a possible match for either Dalva or Ruth. This is Dalva's take on Fred:

It turned out she (Ruth) rather liked Paul's neighbor, Fred, the divorced rancher. I felt noncommittal about him after a half-hour's chat; he wore slightly too much cologne, his informal ranch clothes were too precisely tailored and didn't seem quite comfortable, the sort of clothes a CEO would wear at a chuck-wagon outing at a Phoenix convention. He was terribly bright and knowledgeable, but lacked the "indentations," the unique character traits I look for in men. I imagined he ate donuts with a fork and folded his underpants. This trace of bitchiness in me reminded me of what my Santa Monica gynecologist friend had told me--that I was too "autolelic," i.e., I only did things for and of themselves and lacked an overall "game plan." At least with Fred there were no edges against which one could bruise--he had taken care of himself so well he'd likely grow old and die in a single minute when the time was appropriate.

Irritated by Fred, Uncle Paul offers his own thoughts:

"You can't make the desert represent a freedom you should have organized for yourself in your bedroom or living room. That's what is so otiose about nearly all nature writing. People naturally shed their petty and inordinate grievances in the natural world, then resume them when the sheer novelty dissipates. We always destroy wilderness when we make it represent something else, because that something else can always fall out of fashion. Freedom to the all-terrain-vehicle addict, the mining and oil and timber companies, has always meant the absolute license to do as they wish, while "heritage" is a word brought up by politicians to recall a virtue they can't quite remember. The only traceable heritage related to our use of the land is to exhaust it....

Of course, on a metaphoric level the desert is an unfathomably intricate prison, and you may understandably wish to play with this fact, comparing it to your own life. By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant or unwilling to carry the load."

Embarrassed by his speech, Paul asks Ruth to "play something morose and sentimental" on the piano. Dalva watches:

She began with a harpsichord imitation, lapsed into a polka, then slid into the Debussy she knew Paul favored. In turn he laughed, closed his eyes, then smiled. When I looked at him I couldn't help wondering what sort of man my father would have become.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

I stopped and looked outside. The first frost was painting the grass. It would kill the basil but not the flowers. Not yet.

I thought of love. I thought of history. I thought of my father. I thought of the magic of just three pages.

This is supposed to be the Year of Reading Proust. I found Jim Harrison two months ago. It's late in the year, but I've compulsively made this my Year of Reading Harrison. Next year too.

[David Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dalva is probably my favorite novel by the man who is most certainly my favorite living novelist, Jim Harrison. I've probably read it five times and just read it again because of a death in my family, and because Harrison in general always grounds me in life, and gives me a renewed appreciation for being alive.

It's very hard to describe how he brings that about; I'm not sure I understand, something about the way he writes the sentences, the things he notices. I've read everything he's written--including essays and poetry--much of it multiple times, and he's the only author whose work I automatically read as soon as it comes out, as soon as I see the book in the bookstore. Some of his books are better than others, but I've never been disappointed by any Jim Harrison book.

Dalva is the story of a woman who had a brief love affair with a young Native American man when she was fifteen, had his child and gave it away for adoption, and set about when she was older to see if she could find the child. I write that brief plot summary, but the book is so much more than that, her life is so much more than that. Dalva is interesting because she's a midwestern woman with inherited wealth who still does wonderful things with her life, lives as if she doesn't even have money. She has a wonderful mother, an interesting uncle, and is carrying on a kind of love affair with a history professor who is reading the notebooks that her grandfather kept; he too (like Dalva and her lover) was obesessed with Native Americans, and met many of the famous ones, ran into Custer right before Little Big Horn. It's impossible to suggest the richness of this or of any Jim Harrison novel. It's like trying to talk about the beauty of life. You just have to live it, and with Harrison, you just have to read it.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three point five stars.
There are several male authors who are generally regarded as having a great ability to write from the perspective of a female character. When I read these authors I disagree with the assessment, most notably because they fail to capture the true complexity that is the essence of being a woman. Jim Harrison is an exception. With the character of Dalva, he explores all the layers of conflict and identity that are part of growing up female in a patriarchal society.

Dalva, at the age of 45, leaves California and returns to her native Nebraska. There she confronts all of her ghosts and finally recognizes that she has defined her entire life by the males she has loved and lost: her grandfather, father, first love, and then the son she was made to give up for adoption. As the book comes to an end, there's a glimmer of hope that she'll put the past to rest and start living for the present.

The subplot deals with Dalva's Sioux heritage. She's only one-eighth Indian, but her white great-grandfather was a great friend of the Sioux and left many journals. The secrets are slowly revealed as a Stanford scholar works his way through the journals.

This novel contains some excellent writing with uniquely expressed wisdom about society and life in general. I could not give it a higher rating because its construction is rather laborious and convoluted, making the reader work too hard to unearth the treasures.

[Kirk Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unflinching look at the United States Indian Policy over the last two centuries. Through John Northridge's Journals(1865-1891)we are introduced to our country's brutal history, and the genocide of the American Indians. John Northridge is Dalva's great grandfather and she is partial inheritor of his vast estate and caretaker of his journals and historical artifacts.* Dalva chooses Michael, a friend and love interest, to write her family history and share Northridge's journals with the world at large. All of this is occurring 1970's through 1980's.* CHAPTER 1 'Dalva', has her as the narrator. She is willful, directed, spiritual, athletic, independent, benevolent, cultural, graceful, and a mid-westerner with American Indian heritage.* CHAPTER 2 'Michael' is his narration. He is a self-absorbed Stanford historian with these characteristics: trite, petty, pretentious, self destructive, panty waist, non-outdoorsman, gluttonous, neurotic, Eastern Bloc heritage from an American urban jungle.* CHAPTER 3 'Going Home'. Are they "together"? Are they doing it?? NO DALVA!,he's not right for you!!....You will have to pursue this to find out.** Harrison covers plot, place and characterization like the pro that he is. More than just historical novel, epic family history, fictional biography, tallying of Dalva's lovers, this story entertains as well as educates. A bit of a lengthy tale, I can't avoid comparing Harrison with Wallace Stegner.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe it just fits my mood, but I'll call Dalva one of the top 10 American novels ever written. Stark landscapes, warm people and cold selfish motivation. Most accurate depiction of the plains I've ever read.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set mostly in Nebraska, this story opens with Dalva at forty-five, reflecting on her life. At age fifteen, she given up her baby up for adoption. The child’s father, Duane Stone Horse, had already fled upon learning a secret about his family’s history. This string of events is the touchstone that ties the rest of the narrative together. Dalva experiences numerous tragedies. We also hear from Michael, one of her lovers, a professor with an alcohol problem, as he reviews her great-grandfather’s journals.

Dalva’s first-person narrative is the most impactful and extremely well-written. I found Michael’s section less compelling in terms of storyline. It does not help that Michael is supremely self-centered; however, I understand his inclusion, since he analyzes Dalva’s family history from an outsider’s point of view. The journals of Dalva’s great-grandfather document the genocide inflicted on the American Indians.

The third section returns to Dalva as narrator. Native American spiritualism flows through the story. The natural environment plays a key role in healing and redemption. The ending feels like a satisfying completion of Dalva’s journey. It is well-crafted and emotionally moving.

[Ned · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no pretense or artifice here, this is raw life poured out on the page through some kind of inscrutable alchemy . The author is gone, I have no other reason to say this other than it is true.

The best so far by this beloved and under-rated author. He writes the story in the current time (1980s) in the Midwest as only a true Midwesterner can. The story is set in rural Nebraska, I grew up in rural Kansas. The author is a Michigander whom I discovered (Legends of the Fall) whilst living in Kalamazoo MI with a side trip up to Leland with my wife and young daughter (and whitefish) along the Sleeping Bear dunes. I bought this first edition hardback because it was on sale in the local bookstore in 1987 on the author’s name alone. 33 years later I’m just now reading it, my daughter a mother herself.

Dalva is a perfect book for me- a big novel about real people and events. I learned a great deal about the Sioux and the particular way the US government slowly destroyed their way of life, especially by killing all the buffalo, from which their entire way of life was based, and after failure to convert to Christianity and an agrarian way of life. This book is told in part through the journals of Dalva’s great grandfather Northbridge, a man sent to redeem the heathens but ended steeping in their way of life and from thence begat the entire family tree. And through patient horticulture, ignoring the all too familiar destructiveness of the US army (including Custer), he manages to become wealthy. Three generations we later we find Dalva, returning from California to the old ways and familiar ghosts. The layers are revealed slowly, the story gradually becoming a pager turner.

Harrison writes nakedly about human passions and his characters are full of irreconcilable pathos – it is stark and real – and highly intelligent. Harrison must have been a remarkable conversationalist, especially when deep in his cups – likely a dangerous risk taker who lived out the stories he wrote (or vice versa) Hemingway style.

This is a big novel, huge themes of unrequited love and the loss of parents and children. Dalva experiences on true love at the age of 16, secretive and forbidden, and reluctantly gives up her child. Harrison writes authentically (it seems so real, but how can I know?) about the interior life of our protagonist, and it is quite a feat as she describes her insights into men. The author is genius here, somehow pulling this off. And there’s a whole chapter about Michael, the professor whom Dalva has a dalliance with and reluctantly relinquishes the last remaining artifacts of her great grandfather so that he can attain tenure in the history department. Michael seems akin to the author, an alcoholic whose physical and mental state is described in harrowing and shocking detail.

One meets all the great Sioux warriors and their eastern army pursuers of the late 19th century. I love a book that instructs as well as entertains, and this one delivered perfectly. The author knows his subjects and renders them without any scent of romanticism or caricature – they are presented as imperfect and authentic human beings, with strong doses of humor and irony as humans will do.

Harrison knows his subject matter intimately- you just can’t fake the knowledge of plants, animals, farming and nature. He names his trees, grasses, birds, all forms of wildlife. He must have studied some, but there is no doubt that his personal knowledge is vast. It simply feels as if he’s writing from experience as he describes the awesome beauty of a night under the stars and long meditation up a draw back in the thickets and grasslands of the wild Midwest.

The old caretaker, the Scandinavian contemporary of Dalva’s grandfather, strings along the professor yet is deceptively simpleminded. I won’t spoil the plot; it is a great one.

Another special concordance, the dates of the year (early June) matched nearly perfectly with the time I read – a lot of connections here – the climate and experience outdoors matched mine (of course Harrison could never have imagined our current pandemic).

In the end, it’s a beautiful, tragic story with a welcome dash of redemption as the mother finally finds her son and discovers some well-earned closure and peace. But there are no heroes, these people are real.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is sheer idleness that deadens the soul and causes neuroses.

I sort of needed this. It was certainly bucolic, a tonic against any despair stemming from the war. Harrison can be a dick. His writing via his protagonists can assume the very form of a penis. Yet there's always the poetry. It affirms and draws our attention to the tapestry--and the history. I told Joel that Harrison's project appears akin to Vollmann's Seven Dreams though Harrison is always a poet and Vollmann an encyclopedist philosopher.

Dalva recalls Byatt'sPossession in the use of found documents to refract the contemporary timelines. Harrison uses two perspectives for contrast and relief and the result is splendid. Dalva is rich woman at a crossroads in the late 1980s. Michael is a (flawed) academic deeply interested in the journals of Dalva's grandfather and great-grandfather. It is a story of horses, nomads and the Turner Thesis: somehow it is also an alchemy of magic, lust and Western Nebraska. That isn't hyperbole.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I was this woman.

[Unbridled · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first book by Jim Harrison. First, Harrison is a very good writer. He has all the moves, he knows what he is doing, and he does what he does as well as anyone else. This book was warm, occasionally wise, often amusing (particularly Michael and Lundquist), and threaded with enough 'adventure' (the Northridge diaries) to keep a reader committed to seeing how everything will end. The bad? The structure of the novel didn't really work for me - part 1, Dalva's 1st person journal to her son; part 2, Michael's 1st person diary; and part 3, more of Dalva's 1st person narrative - except she is no longer writing to her son (or did I miss something?). This was by no means fatal, but it did seem loose to me as an idea. I also found myself bored by more than a few passages in part 3 - like Dalva's fevered dreaming. Nevertheless, I admire this effort by Harrison. I questioned - and still question - whether he could capture a true female voice. I think he failed because he channeled what a man's-man kind of woman might think and feel and look like. For the record, she's hot, has always been hot, and even at the forbidden line of 45 years young, every type of man desires her openly (she has a young lover in image-obsessed Santa Monica, of course). She eats big, drinks big; she eats steak (alone); she is sexually liberated (but no whore); she is kind to fools; she is loyal to her heart; she rides horses hard in the country; she skinny-dips in bodies of water; and she is a camper who sleeps naked under the stars. It is not my intent to sound snarky - this is how we know Dalva, in her own voice. As to the 'surprise(s)' at the end of the book? Well, they're a bit...man's-man melodramatic...but they work well enough. I started this book without any preconceptions - and through most of the book I was engaged. Was I moved? No. Did I feel myself in the presence of genius? No. Did I 'believe' Dalva was real? No. Do I still admire Harrison's effort? I said that already. This is a good book.

[Pauline · Rating 2 out of 5]

J’ai bien aimé le style de l’auteur et les belles descriptions de la nature et le caractère de Dalva, une femme forte, indépendante et vulnérable à la fois. Je n’ai pas trop aimé le narrateur de la 2e partie, un mec sexiste et glauque. Et j’ai retrouvé quelque chose qui m’embête un peu avec le nature writing : à trop se concentrer sur la nature, on en oublie parfois l’intrigue… c’est le but du genre mais comme ce n’est pas du tout mon genre de prédilection ça m’a gênée. Je ne regrette pas de l’avoir lu, c’était un challenge intellectuel, mais je ne pense pas que je le recommanderais à des non-adeptes du nature writing.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is unbelievable how much I love this book. I drool when thinking of it. I love Harrison's smooth, delicious writing and the language and feeling of the West comes out in every page. I love Dalva's character and her remembrances. This is totally the book for me and I have gone on to read tons more of Jim Harrison except his food book which is...boring.

[Fionnuala]

"What do stories do when they are not being told?" (Cree question p 307)
I'm reminded of the age-old story of Pygmalion who created a beautiful statue of a woman and became so obsessed with it that it took on a life of its own. Or was that Galatea...

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I disliked the book for the same reason another reader-author loved it. I thought Jim Harrison did not craft a believable voice for Dalva. It struck me as too much bedded in how many men see women.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dalva" required a bit of endurance--at least, it did for me. The story centers around Dalva, a woman with a complicated history, an equally complicated present, and a rich family history that plays a secondary (and more interesting, in my opinion) role in the novel. Two-thirds of the story are from her narrative point of view, while the middle third is told from the POV of Michael, Dalva's sometimes-lover and an historian working on Dalva's family's past via some journals Dalva has.

Dalva's parts are interesting--she's a complex character with a lot going on and a lot that she hasn't yet figured out, despite being in her 40s. Chief among her complications is a recently enacted search for the son she gave up for adoption, but I honestly didn't feel like that was the point of the book so much as a gateway into her voice. I found Michael to be insufferable (and I think he was written too deliberately as such to be felt as anything else), and when I hit his POV in the second third of the book I admit I procrastinated because I knew I wouldn't enjoy it--and I was right. I liked him even less by the time we switched back to Dalva's point of view for the remainder of the story.

The MOST interesting parts of the book, to me, were the journal entries. They tell a rich and violent history of the Native Americans being taken over by the white man, and they were fascinating and awful--more so because we know from history that what was written about in the journals actually happened, or things like them. It was like a nonfiction piece nestled inside a larger fiction, and though it made for copious amounts of bouncing through time, I was captivated.

So, overall, I give the book a solid "like," though I am glad to be done. I don't know that I'll read it again, but the history in it makes it worth at least one read.

[David Veloz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admittedly I began the book with a little dread. I just finished Wolf, Harrison’s first novel and one I’d first read in graduate school in 1988. I have carried a high opinion of Harrison ever since, but now I had to wonder why? What I liked about it at 26 left me cold at 53, so I was prepared for a similar reaction to Dalva, especially since Harrison would be writing in the first person as a woman, and I’d happily wash out early.

But Dalva is a marvel — both the book and the character. Dalva is in her mid-40s and living in Santa Monica and working as a social worker when we meet her. But as the novel unfolds, we realize this barely her at all: Part Sioux, Dalva is the great-granddaughter of a famed missionary and horticulturist who was more of a convert to the Sioux than a converter. He took a young Sioux wife and managed to find himself in the middle of much of the terrible destruction of the Sioux and their way of life at the hands of the United States military. He also had a great deal of land. As such, Dalva is not only rich with history, she’s plain rich; when she returns to her family home in Northern Nebraska to search for the son she had with her 16 year old Sioux boyfriend, she brings along Michael, an alcoholic professor and her sometime lover, who has been granted the opportunity to read & publish Great-Grandfather Northridge’s personal letters.

Harrison lets Dalva narrate the first and second third of the book, while Michael takes over in the middle. Harrison also includes long passages from Northridge’s journals, so what starts out as a disarmingly prim and undistinguished story is actually the opposite. Harrison writes beautifully as Dalva as she navigates her life today and as she recalls the events of the past forty years that have formed her; while Michael is a comical, annoying academic, Harrison still invests him with a wry wit, pathos, and some surprising insight about Dalva and her family. Northridge’s letters are a mixture of 19th century benevolent naiveté and a more modern scientific doggedness. These three streams of voice and time become a fast and loud river that is as much about the Sioux and their destruction as it is about Dalva and her sorrows and solace.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading the short novels and novellas of Jim Harrison ever since a friend recommended them to me and that was seconded by an article by NY Times critic Dwight Gardener writing a piece lauding the short novels of Harrison. Dalva is the most complete novel that I have come across to date. It is the story of the beautiful and headstrong 45 year old Dalva, a part-Sioux woman who has lived a full and varied life. it is clear that the author holds this beautiful survivor in high regard-she is a survivor and a beautiful free spirit. She had a child as a teenager that she was forced to give up for adoption, went to college, later worked as a counselor for at risk teenagers, and has mostly lived on a farm in Nebraska with her kin folk. She is presently obsessed with tracking down her son from a former part-Sioux lover she had as a teenager who died of wounds from Vietnam many years before. Something about her life has felt incomplete and she hopes this will fill the void. The novel is narrated by Dalva in the first and last sections of the novel. However, the second (middle) section is narrated by the cynical and somewhat erudite historian Michael, who is researching Dalva's family history and dating her. Thus, there is a third story within the story aside from Dalva and Michael and that is the story of Dalva's missionary grandfather who settled these parts of Nebraska a hundred years before and is revealed through his journals that Michael is studying. It is not clear what Michael is searching for, but he gets his comeuppance swiftly and violently once the narration returns to Dalva's point of view. From there we have a bittersweet conclusion where things come full circle for Dalva, but not in a overly dramatic way. This is a powerful portrait of a modern American woman and a snapshot of America culture at a certain age.

[Luna Saint Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a long time to read Dalva. I wanted to relish the beautiful writing. I loved the character of Northridge, Dalva's great-grandfather, whose story is told through his journals. His life became interwoven into the devastating impact of colonization of the Native Americans in Nebraska and the Dakotas. I've read quite a lot by Jim Harrison so i am already a fan. I relished every page. A few pages from the end, i was blown away by this sentence:
"I went to bed with a curious book about snow leopards in Tibet that i had already read several times because the book was filled with stillness."

The snow leopard by Peter Matthiessen 1978 was published 10 years before Dalva. The memoir has always remained in my top ten of all books fiction and nonfiction, and i have reread it several times. Clearly it was one of Harrison's favorites as well.

[Jason Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Solid read, but just shy of being a candidate to reread several years from now.

[skeptic · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am by no means against men writing female protagonists (True Grit is a favorite!).....but I really began to question the author's motivations for doing so in this novel. While I liked getting the references and the writing early on especially, it just became impossible to ignore the fact that this novel was clearly co-written by a relentless erection.

Despite being rich and apparently SO BEAUTIFUL THAT IT IS A CURSE, she's having sexual relations with EVERY man - even the GAY MAN who divorced her sister because, well, he's gay.

If it's their uncle, they still manage to create sexual tension by having him walk in on her naked, hes really looking her up and down, complimenting her body and she thinks that it's great that her surrogate father figure / a family member who raised her, is expressing physical attraction to her body. This she finds not distressing, as the many women who deal with grown men constantly objectifying even their own close family, but AMUSING AND SWEET. She also "thinks its charming" when his friends perv on her and her uncle is always getting her drunk with them. I've always despised men who have zero protective urges towards children and instead join in on their buddies in sexualizing even their own daughters.

While there are authors that most definitely do NOT feel like their characters, the way this author imagines females and girls LOVING being sexually exploited (Karen....ugh) and being happy to blow any guy that is in a room with them for 2 seconds, and absolutely no psychological ramifications for children that have to deal with adults constantly getting aroused and sexually harassing them.....I hate to say it but it really seems the author has sexual incestuous fantasies that blind him to the reality that children and women being sexualized by men who are supposed to be guiding or taking care of them. Instead, this rich woman happily accepts being a bang maid to any man who wants- she gives them money, sex, makes their meals and helps them win their rape cases. In exchange, they give her.....?

BUT EVEN WORSE: It sounds always like a performance she puts on for them? Very one sided sexually and if I am remembering correctly, at one point she alludes to not having orgasms - but also, shes basically having hands-free orgasms herself while giving these gross men blowjobs and the all the sex stuff takes you out of it because it's clearly written by a man who doesn't give one ounce of thought for the sexual pleasure of women.

Tldr: this book made me feel bad for anyone who has had sex with this author in real life. Also, I hope they weren't left alone with nieces....

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a great book. I'm hesitant to broadly label books written by Americans, or even those written about America, as containers of American culture, but there are certain, rare works of literature which seem to contain the essence of what I feel is my American heritage. Steinbeck's East of Eden is one of these books, and so is Dalva. Harrison brings a landscape and its people so vividly to life, that they come to inhabit the reader; they become real people and places that are added to our own lived experience.

I must commend Harrison, as well, on doing an amazing job in writing a believable female narrator. It's not easy to create a lifelike character, let alone one of the opposite sex. I don't know how he did it, but Dalva just comes to life as she narrates her tale. She's strong, thoughtful, troubled, and resplendent in all her idiosyncrasies. Nonetheless, I would be interested to see what women think of her, and if they find her believable.

As for the prose, it is wonderfully understated and deeply moving in a way that doesn't force itself upon you. Like a pleasant painting, it simply presents itself as what it is and lets you just enjoy it. The story is emotional at times, and intensely troubling at others. Most of us want to ignore, forget, or remain ignorant of the deceitful manner in which our ancestors swindled and murdered the Native American peoples; this book refuses to let you do so. It remains of very sad and disturbing point in our ongoing history, and Harrison does a great job of using fiction to bring these stories to life in an especially effecting manner. It's not always pleasant, but it's something that bears telling.

This is a superb piece of American literature and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books. I read it while in my 20s, single, having lots of passion and adventure, falling in love and having broken hearts, piecing together jobs, rent, moving over and over, and college....this book was like my doppelgänger as well as my comfort and re-focus guide. It helped my wounded heart heal, celebrated my independent spirit and my adventures, and gently whispered to me about the right path to aim toward. Like a good big sister. Hard to believe a man wrote it, but very telling about the way some men see women's issues from a different and sometimes clearer perspective.

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is gonna simmer for a while but I was a big fan. Slowly built, excellent humanisation of the communities and characters and an earned sentimental ending.

[Esquejes Lunares · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si os gustan las sagas familiares y queréis saber algo del exterminio de los Sioux, éste es vuestro libro.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dalva is named by her parents after a Portuguese song, “Estrella Dalva,” or “Morning Star.” It may suit Dalva throughout her life for she always seems to be up early enough to witness such thing. Always active, on the move. While still a teenager, Dalva falls for a half-Sioux man and makes love with him. When she becomes pregnant, she is sent off to have the baby and put it up for adoption. Dalva will never marry again, and she will never have another child. She begins a rather circuitous journey to find out who her son is. She doesn’t necessarily wish to meet him or become part of his life; she merely hopes to find out how he’s doing. Interwoven throughout this search is the buried story of her great-great grandfather, by way of his journals, that a young scholar, Michael, examines for his research. But always the narrative is about Dalva and her search for her son. The tragic story of the Sioux serves to inform Dalva of the wildness, perhaps, of her half-Sioux lover, the foretelling of what her son might be like, when she finally does meet up with him. And ironically, (thanks to artful writing) the meeting with her son comes near the end of the book. And it is brief. The book has been all about the journey. What happens to those two is now anyone’s guess. It could even become another story, for another time. The novel may, in the long run, become known more for its fair and stark retelling of the American West: how the original homeowners were duped out of their land forever.

[Andy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Harrison does a great job of jumping back and forth in time in this novel about Dalva and does an even better job of tying the different narratives(even those narrated by her sometimes boyfriend) bringing together her childhood, her family ancestry and present day adventures which lead her back to her Nebraska home

We learn at the beginning that Dalva is a sympathetic strong woman when she intervenes in a terrible child abuse case putting the child's welfare and safety ahead of her own career. She then saves her boyfriend's career at Stanford by agreeing to give him(and Stanford) access to her great grandfather's journals of his experiences and contacts with the Plain Indians in the late 1800s--this sets the stage of her dysfunctional and hapless boyfriend going to central rural Nebraska to read the journals and we get to alternate between reading the journals themselves and seeing the boyfriend's often humorous attempts to integrate into his surrounding Nebraska life

A great read

[Humphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a work. One reviewer said that Harrison makes his reader do too much work, but I think this is perhaps his greatest accomplishment here. The story is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, as well as knowing when to leave 'gaps' in a story so as to allow it to maintain its primeval aura. These two qualities not only fit perfectly with Dalva's character and the landscape so essential to her history but also keep the story from spiraling into something self-important or overly insistent, which could have easily occurred with this subject matter and would have corrupted its authenticity. Harrison’s prose provides the perfect music for a slow dance between the past as it slips into twilight and Dalva, learning to let it go, music that is both achingly beautiful and firmly real. I very much look forward to reading more from this author.

[Orrin Laferte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dalva is the first of a two part examination of a well to do but vaguely dysfunctional multi-generational family living in rural Nebraska during the early twentieth century. By weaving the same story multiple times from the viewpoint of different family member narrators he paints an interesting picture of the effects of a benevolent tyrant on successive generations. Harrison's love and understanding of Native Americans, especially the plains Indians, is an essential strand in the multiple strands of this narrative.

[Cora · Rating 5 out of 5]

yay i loved this book so much. it reminded me of barbara kingsolver only better. i love dalva, she is a classic woman to me with the ranching and horse sense and boldness and strength, but i know classic woman isn't a real anything. except she lied at the beginning of the book when she said she doesn't live in memories like most people. i understand though. and i wish i grew up riding horses and i was closer to my grandfather. such an interesting, creative story and man! harrison can really write for a woman. made me really really tangibly painfully miss the southwest.