The Sentence

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Dorris and Erdrich separated in 1995, and Dorris died by suicide in 1997. In his will, he omitted Erdrich and his adopted children Sava and Madeline. [19]

I would say though that one difference could be characterised as that while Smith plays with language, Erdich’s focus in more on literature. Flora is a contradiction. She was a good customer, but also stole the book. She means well, dropping off potpourri, but then she’s also a clumsy appropriator of culture. She shops at the store, but later haunts it. Do you believe in ghosts? What was Flora’s role in the story? 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. She notes early on: "Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters", and, though very book-centered, The Sentence ultimately does focus on experience, and it is the human -- and spiritual (in the sense of ghostly ...) -- connections and interactions she has that are the truly meaningful ones here.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? She also writes for younger audiences; she has a children's picture book Grandmother's Pigeon, and her children's book The Birchbark House, was a National Book Award finalist. [40] She continued the series with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction; [41] and The Porcupine Year. Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

Reread with my book club and have changed my rating to a 4* based on Ms. Erdrich's wonderful writing. It was a case of the wrong book at the wrong time for me -- now that the nightmare that is/was Covid isn't as intense, I was able to appreciate the book more Some people spent their pandemic confinement learning a new language, refining their cooking skills, increasing their step count or gardening. Louise Erdrich spent the time writing a novel. Specifically, she wrote a ghost story, “The Sentence,” and the further you read in this engaging account of what happens after a loyal bookstore patron dies and her ghost refuses to leave the store she loved, the more apt Erdrich’s choice of genre seems. Set mostly in the year 2020, which itself came to seem haunted as Covid spread and the deaths piled up, this novel restores to us all the messy detail of an almost amnesiac time when, worn down and exhausted, “we skied weightlessly through the days as if they were a landscape of repeating features.” LE: That just landed in my consciousness. I wrote it down and then thought, Oh, I have to think about this. Why am I writing this? And Tookie’s character emerged. Though I've never put Norman Mailer and Erdrich together before, sections like this one remind me of Mailer's 1968 masterpiece, The Armies of the Night, his so-called "nonfiction novel" chronicling an earlier time of fracture and unrest in America.The most recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction—for The Night Watchman (2020)—turns her eye to various kinds of hauntings, all of which feel quite real to the affected characters. That acquisition is literalized in the context of the bookstore. It attracts affluent white Minnesotans like Flora who want to forge a connection while still feeling like they are in control, because they are there to buy things. In death, Flora raises the ante. If, per Rodriguez, “Indians must be ghosts,” then Flora has now achieved a kind of self-actualization. Settlers are famously insatiable, and Flora, in spirit form, can possess in ways previously unavailable to her. Alone at the bookstore, Tookie hears someone whisper in her ear: “Let me in.” As the book moves deeper into fictionalizing 2020, though, Flora’s ghost starts to feel like a sideshow. COVID first enters the picture in the context of a book tour for fictional Louise, her daughters getting anxious as people crowd around her at a local reading. Yet it is the protests for racial justice that really give The Sentence its urgency, for better and for worse.