Characters can’t evade the shadow of past misdeeds and are revisited by buried longings and resentments they’d thought long dead. COVID-19 is perceived as “spectral, uncanny.” “Talk about being haunted… was an ache in the brain,” Tookie mutters. most annoying and also best customer to death?” Does it contain secrets- or “a very, very powerful sentence” that could kill Tookie as well?Īs Tookie tries to exorcise Flora’s spirit from the bookstore, solve the mystery of her death, and decipher the enigma of her book, COVID strikes the community and threatens both the bookstore and her loved ones. When Flora’s foster daughter gives Tookie the book her mother died while reading, “The Sentence: An Indian Captivity, 1862-1883,” Tookie senses its ominous power. Tookie can’t tell Pollux, who won’t stand for any talk of ghosts, and feels increasingly isolated. In life, Flora was an Indian “wannabe,” a white woman who volunteered in the Native American community, at times claimed Indian ancestry, and was consumed by her “earnest, unaccountable, persistent, self-obliterating delusion.” Once dead, she becomes “a slinky, needy, invasive spirit,” making “rustling noises” and moving books around. The bookstore’s most irritating customer, book-besotted but needy Flora, dies on All Soul’s Day, 2019, and proceeds to haunt the bookstore. Led by a meta-fictional Erdrich, who has a ghost in her house, publishes a novel about her grandfather (2020′s Pulitzer Prize winning “The Night Watchman”), and has her book tour interrupted by the pandemic, the bookstore employees are a motley crew of intellectuals, artists, and eccentrics who share a passion for books and for their ardently book-loving customers. She finds a job at Birchbark Books (the small independent store Louise Erdrich founded). Emerging, blinking and disoriented, into a changed world, Tookie reconnects with Pollux, the police officer who’d arrested her they fall in love and marry. She’d thought she was helping a friend and knew nothing about the drugs, but nonetheless “received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an after-life.”Īfter seven years in prison, Tookie’s sentence is unexpectedly commuted to time served. In her aimless, hard-drinking and drug-addled, intermittently employed thirties, Tookie was arrested for “stealing a corpse” stuffed with drugs and transporting it across state lines. Its narrator, a Native American woman named Tookie, is perhaps Erdrich’s most indelible creation: hilarious, smart, wry, with, as she puts it, both “a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red” and “a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered.”
Unlike her last novel, “ The Night Watchman,” which ranged across a wide variety of perspectives, “The Sentence” is told almost exclusively from the point of view of one person.
0 kommentar(er)
