Louise Erdrich

NYTS Q&A with Louise Erdrich on “The Round House”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here.

An excerpt:

President Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act into law in 2010 — it was an important moment of recognition. More recently the Senate Judiciary Committee crafted a helpful piece of legislation. The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2012 would have given tribal nations limited jurisdiction over sexual predators regardless of race. Right now tribal courts can only prosecute tribal members. The problem is that over 80% of the perpetrators of rapes on reservations are non-Native. Most are not prosecuted. The bill went forward only to stall in the House, blocked by Republican votes. Hate to say it, but that one’s on them.

Erdrich’s The Round House is a National Book Award Finalist

Kate Fort

Louise Erdrich’s latest book, The Round House, is a National Book Award finalist. Here.

Her NPR interview is here.

Louise Erdrich on NPR’s All Things Considered

Kate Fort1 Comment

A particularly timely interview of Louise Erdich on her new book, The Round House, given Prof. Carlson’s talk at our symposium this afternoon.

Here.

On the difficulties of finding justice on Native American reservations

“There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land. So in this case, Geraldine Coutts does not know where her attacker raped her. She didn’t see, she doesn’t know. So in her case, it is very, very difficult to find justice because there’s no clear entity who is in charge of seeking justice for her …

“So in writing the book, the question was: If a tribal judge — someone who has spent his life in the law — cannot find justice for the woman he loves, where is justice? And the book is also about the legacy of generations of injustice, and what comes of that. Because, of course, what comes of that is an individual needs to seek justice in their own way when they can’t find justice through the system. And that brings chaos.”

Why Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich Should Win the Nobel Prize

Matthew L.M. Fletcher6 Comments

Salon’s recent debasement of American literature as represented by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth is hilarious reading for Americans who are people of color, especially in my view American Indians. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the giants of American literature aren’t worthy of such an honor, I am in agreement with Salon that these American giants are “insular and self-involved.”

They are, but what’s worse — they are fearful, fearful of writing about and engaging in race. Europeans, Asians, Africans, American people of color, and virtually everyone else sees how truly pathetic American discourse on race has become. Derrick Bell’s passing reminds us how far Americans have to go before they can confront the undeniably racialized origins of the United States. Derrick Bell, who would have fit in well in the pantheon of Nobel winners (in either literature or peace), talked about race in a way most white Americans simply will not do. Americans was colorblindness, they want neutrality, and they certainly don’t want comeuppance.

American literature, or what Salon views as a canon or sorts (exclusively white authors), is weak on race. Probably the best novel on race by Salon’s stable of worthy-ish writers is Roth’s The Human Stain. It’s good, but it’s not really a direct engagement on race. First, it’s set on campus at a liberal arts college, maybe the whitest place around, and a frequent safe ground for American writers. Second, it’s not really about race. It’s about a white guy who finds out he’s black. And he suffers horribly for it. That’s the best Americans can do?

Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich have been writing about race for decades. They confront the question of race head on. They’re honest about it, especially Alexie. Americans are racists. So are American Indians, and blacks, and Latino/as, and Asians. We all are, and American literature runs from that reality, trying to avoid it, or cover it up. Derrick Bell didn’t run from it. He dealt with it. Alexie writes about Indians in white communities, Indians who sold out to join white America and how they can’t go back home, and Indians who hate whites so much they kill them. Erdrich writes about mixed race people of every stripe you can find in the northern plains. She adds the element of gender that’s beautiful and powerful and nasty.

America’s “canon,” the people Salon deems worthy of discussion, just don’t do any of these things. Maybe they wouldn’t know how. The Nobel committee will award the Prize to someone like Alexie or Erdrich, just as they did Toni Morrison in 1993. And the American literary establishment will spend the next two decades wondering why no American has won. Really.

Review of Louise Erdrich’s Collection of Short Stories

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the review of “The Red Convertible” — from the NYTs:

Last fall, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature, disparaged American letters, saying our fiction was “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends” in our own “mass culture” (in short, too American) to matter much to the wider world. But it’s the very Americanness of our literature — the hybrid nature of our national makeup, the variety and breadth of our landscape, our mania for self-invention and reinvention — that captured the international imagination at a time when most readers could never visit the country they dreamed about. It still does today.

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Fascinating Writers: Louise Erdrich

Kate Fort

In Bookslut’s new feature, Fascinating Writers, Lorette C. Luzajic writes about Louise Erdrich:

The Professor’s Wife: The Life and Work of Louise Erdrich

“The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being devastated by its power,” said Toni Morrison of Louise Erdrich’s first novel, high praise from a writer who would soon win both a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize.

The novel quickly became a bestseller and won a heap of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the L.A. Times Best Novel of the Year, and the Janet Kaufman Award for Best First Novel. But numerous publishers rejected the stunning, unusual narrative before Erdrich’s husband posed as a literary agent and launched her prolific and revered career as one of America’s foremost voices in literature. The novel came out in 1984, the same year as Jacklight, her first poetry collection.

It’s astonishing that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t book-clubbed Ms. Erdrich, given the magnate’s penchant for women’s survival stories, multicultural writing, and great literature. More than twenty years and nearly as many books later, all highly acclaimed, it’s impossible to imagine a world without the mixed families and topsy-turvy happenings in Erdrich’s deeply original books. Part Chippewa, and part German, the writer’s stories are set in an invented landscape called Red River Valley, a reservation town on border of North Dakota and Minnesota, two states where she was raised. And despite extreme personal trials, including raising adopted children with fetal alcohol syndrome, a son’s death, her husband’s suicide, and allegations from their children of child abuse, Erdrich continues to produce works that attract both mass market and literary readerships.

Review of Louise Erdrich’s New Novel, “The Plague of Doves”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From Rocky Mountain News:

There’s a clue to the way Louise Erdrich’s mind works in a note at the beginning of her new novel, The Plague of Doves.

It’s a standard message stating that all the places and people in the book are imagined, but the author lists an exception, a character named Holy Track. “In 1897,” she writes, “at the age of thirteen, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota.”

Other writers hitting upon this intriguing and sad bit of history might construct a novel focused around Paul himself, but as Erdrich has demonstrated in her prior novels about an Ojibwe and French Canadian clan, she thinks in terms of generations. In this book, Erdrich embeds the detail in a larger narrative about relatives and neighbors that preceded or followed him. As in her other novels, she makes room for comedy next to tragedy and includes good doses of passion, from schoolgirl crushes to a college girl’s lesbian fling to forbidden romances among the elderly.

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Louise Erdrich Story in the New Yorker

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Louise Erdrich’s story, “The Reptile Garden,” has been published in the New Yorker.