The Sentence

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LH: Flora is a customer you depict as loyal but hugely annoying, at least to Tookie. Flora dies with a book in her hand and goes on to torment Tookie by haunting the store. Is Flora based on a customer you’ve met in real life? The love of books -- including a lot of name-dropping of titles -- is a nice touch, very convincingly woven in the story, and should certainly appeal to the avid reader. Tookie's voice is genuine and humorous, her perspective rich with history, literacy, and quietly simmering fury. Erdrich's fictional account of Tookie's pandemic experience, as singular and as universal as anyone's, resonates with strange and familiar detail (...) but doesn't blend consistently with her tale of the phantom Flora." - Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly Louise” is the bookstore owner and also an author, perhaps “the author” of the novel. It seems very meta. Is the book meant to be somewhat autobiographical? LE: I write first drafts in longhand. I don’t keep one book or journal; I mostly scrawl on various scraps of notebook paper scattered throughout the house.

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year by Louise Erdrich". www.publishersweekly.com. n.d . Retrieved May 13, 2023. Erdrich makes a cameo in this book! She’s the owner of the store where Tookie works, which bears a striking resemblance to Erdrich’s real-life bookstore, Birchbark Books. How does her appearance here strike you?I am an ugly woman. Not the kind of ugly the guys write or make movies about, where suddenly I have a blast of blinding instructional beauty. I am not about teachable moments. Nor am I beautiful on the inside. I enjoy lying, for instance, and I am good at selling people useless things for prices they can’t afford. Of course, now that I am rehabilitated, I only sell words. Collection of words between cardboard covers”. The extraordinary writer, Louise Erdrich, writes a beautifully crafted and haunting character driven novel that captivates, a blend of fact, fiction and magical realism, that resonates deeply with our contemporary world, the fear, pain and trauma of the pandemic, the brutal murder of George Floyd, the BLM protests, and the ghosts and horror of American history when it comes to Native Americans. It pays homage to books, littered as it is with numerous references to books, and to readers and independent bookstores, Erdrich herself owns one, Birchbark Books in Minnesota, indeed she makes an appearance in the novel. The flawed Tookie is Ojibwe, and the story begins with a mad caper which has Tookie taking the body of Budgie from Mara across state lines for Danae, a friend, only to find herself betrayed and reluctantly arrested by a tribal cop, Pollux. Tookie manages in prison, after a fashion; books help a lot (even if at first she isn't allowed access to them); indeed, she finds: "the most important skill I'd gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention". Her heritage from both parents is influential in her life and prominent in her work. [44] Although many of Erdrich's works explore her Native American heritage, her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) featured the European, specifically German, side of her ancestry. The novel includes stories of a World War I veteran of the German Army and is set in a small North Dakota town. [45] The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award. I decided to live for love again and take the chance of another lifetime’..... and this my friends was my favourite message from this very unique and enchanting book where sentence after sentence, word after word I became engrossed in Tookie’s story.

Louise Erdrich is an author I’ve been wanting to read for years. Over that time I’ve accumulated several of her novels, and finally, I’ve read one with The Sentence. The immediacy of The Sentence -- clearly written in the moment, rather than just about it, might not be ideal -- there's something to be said for some distance to events -- but with Tookie fully immersed in the times and circumstances it feels convincing enough. Department of English (2001). "About Louise Erdrich". University of Illinois . Retrieved May 22, 2016. I would also say though that the book reminded me in some - not all aspects - of the most recent writings of Ali Smith: the Seasonal Quartet and particularly Companion Piece) and I have always thought that a non-UK reader cannot really fully understand Smith’s writing. Tookie does her best, which is normally pretty good, but she does manage to put her foot in it every now and then; as she notes: "doing the wrong thing in general was my nature".

So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day”… says Tookie about the definition of “sentence” It becomes a challenge, figuring out how to cope with this unwanted visitor. Why was she there, in the bookstore in particular, and what would it take to get her to leave? Flora had been found with an open book, a very old journal, The Sentence: An Indian Captivity 1862-1883. The book seems to be implicated in Flora’s passing. Tookie tries to figure out if the book had a role to play in Flora’s death. There might be a perilous sentence in the book. Overall, The Sentence didn’t work for me – with an unrelatable main character and jumbled writing style. Thank you to NetGalley & Little Brown Books UK – Corsaire for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for a (very) honest review. The word “urgent” is a favorite of book blurbers and reviewers. The Sentence has me rethinking its value. Along with Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, Erdrich’s new novel marks one of the first major works of contemporary fiction to use the pandemic and its satellite catastrophes as a setting. Shteyngart, like Boccaccio before him, uses pestilence as story frame straight away, whereas Erdrich lets us watch as it infects every cell of her pre-established narrative, with mixed results. Her book proposes that it’s time to consider how the events of the past year and a half will haunt us, but this crisis is not yet a ghost. It’s not even on its last legs. A casual consumer of U.S. popular culture could assume Native Americans were extinct. Save some recent wins, like the Hulu series Reservation Dogs, Indigenous people have more often appeared in the American imaginary as relics of a conveniently distant past. In horror movies, the trope of the Indian burial ground is deployed as a threat to the fantasy of white suburban innocence. In the 1960s, countercultural movements adopted Native American dress and customs like peyote as markers of pre-industrial, pre-urbane simplicity. This remove is by design. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez put it in Days of Obligation, “Indians must be ghosts,” for “Indians represented permanence and continuity to Americans who were determined to call this country new.” It’s not uncommon for Americans to claim Indigenous ancestry, often with no more evidence than a great-great-grandparent with “high cheekbones” — an epidemic of self-identification that some Indigenous scholars have called “ Cherokee syndrome.” Time and distance are key here: They allow for the distinction between native and settler to be collapsed, while preserving as much racial purity as possible.