Louise Erdrich
Here (though, if you're in the big 612, I'd recommend heading down to Birchbark Books, which is owned by Erdrich.)
It's worth noting that I've been away from blogging for the last few weeks and what brought be back is a challenge (of sorts). My sister-in-law (Word Savvy) in conjunction with my brother (Pronto Pup) and some of their friends (A Little Leeway among others) has started a blogging challenge. In short:
The deal is we're going to be writing about reading. But it's not going to be boring. It's going to be fascinating and hilarious, as usual.
Though it's no longer the first, I'd still like to through my hat into the ring. Really, I'm just looking for an excuse to get me blogging again.
I'll start with Tracks, a book by Louise Erdrich. Though it isn't her first published book, it is the first in a Erdrich's super-novel, which includes at least five novels (Tracks,, Four Souls, Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, and The Beet Queen).
Now, I'm a sucker for super-novels, particularly when they're, you know, well done. But there are plenty of reasons to love Tracks above and beyond the fact that Erdrich is creating such an ambitious web of characters and sub-plots, (reminiscent, I might point out, of other serialized wide-scope forms, such as comics).
Erdrich hits a number of high-points in contemporary American fiction (relationship between story and fact, the effects of pomo on culture, etc.), but she does so from a distinctly different angle; that is, we're all used to white dudes from Brooklyn writing contemporary fiction (Jonathan Letham, et al.), but I'm not that used to reading these themes from the angle of a American Indian woman.
Some representative quotes:
The Girl is bold, smiling in her sleep, as if she knows what people wonder, as if she hears the old men talk, turning the story over.
It comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don't know anything.
And...
I've seen too much go by--unturned grass below my feet, and overhead, the great white cranes flung south forever. I know this. Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier.
I don't know if you can tell, but I'm pretty out of shape when it comes to blogging. I have one last point. Sorry. When it's pulled off well, these super-novels can be, in some sense, more effective than any single novel ever could be. Consider Bolano's 2666. Each one of the five parts stood alone as an excellent novel, but when put together, we received a greater thematic breadth and depth than is really possible in a reasonably-sized novel. Tracks and it's sister novels work the same way. I'll leave it to Marc, though, to tell us more about living the episodic life is worth doing...
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