Word: erdrich
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...Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich...
...nature usually entails the adoption of older, often Native American, ways. Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), an immense novel disguised as an anthropological treatise, contains nearly all the quintessential elements, but significant contributions to the new form have also been made by, among others, Louise Erdrich and Alice Walker...
Historically, Erdrich is writing about a time when her maternal forebears were losing what little land they had left. Nanapush sees his clansmen tempted out of their holdings with quick-cash offers. He remains an eloquent holdout. "Land is the only thing that lasts life to life," he warns. "Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier...
...connections of land to culture and psychology are heavily illustrated with dramatic events and strong imagery. To leave no doubt that Fleur is an avenging witch, Erdrich poses her in front of a boiling vat of animal skulls. A tornado lifts a herd of cattle into the air, where they resemble giant birds, "dropping dung, their mouths opened in stunned bellows." A moose is tracked, killed and butchered in a snowy wood. The warm meat is then molded to the hunter's body, where it freezes to resemble marbled blue armor...
...Erdrich seems too eager to buy the grandiose literary line that the writer is a mythmaker rather than a storyteller. Crammed into a short, intense novel, her characters are too busy hauling symbolic freight to reveal their humanity. The concluding work in the tetralogy may bring all her rich elements together. But do not bet on it, unless Erdrich takes a crash course from Gabriel Garcia Marquez...