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muckefuck ([personal profile] muckefuck) wrote2019-09-23 12:29 pm
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Hattak abi'

The one big plus to spending so much time time at home alone this past weekend is that it's allowed me to keep up the momentum on my reading.

Saturday night I got surprisingly emotional finishing up There, there. I'd stalled a bit in the middle, feeling like he wasn't really doing enough to differentiate the various young male characters. I found myself getting two in particular hopelessly confused and not caring enough to go back and reread a few pages to untangle them. So I was surprised to find myself shedding tears during the bloody climax. "I didn't think I cared this much about these characters," I remember saying to myself.

I don't know whether this is a product of my age, but I found the portraits of the older figures more engaging on the whole. I could feel the weight of their experiences in a way I didn't with the teens, even the ones who had tragic backstories (which was nearly all of them). I was upset to see some of them killed off somewhat arbitrarily, but I didn't really start sobbing until the scenes where the survivors get taken to the hospital.

Overall, I'm not sure exactly how to feel about it. It certainly suffered in comparison to Erdrich's more mature and skillful work, making me appreciate all the more how she managed to incorporate discussions of Native American history and politics into the narrative without ever making it feel like a lecture. One of Orange's characters is pretty clear Mary Sue and one or two others come close. But he's trying to create a new sort of American Indian narrative and he's bound to stumble a bit in the process.

In any case, I'm well into Shell Shaker now. I would've started it earlier but it starts on the autumnal equinox and--by a weird coincidence--the days and dates line up the same now as they did in 1991. So I didn't see how I could really start a novel that opens on Sunday, September the 22nd any day but last Sunday.

She's also suffering next to Erdrich. The first chapter, which functions as something of a historical prelude, is magnificent. It feels epic and evocative, yet with a very relatable narrator. The second chapter, introducing the apparent protagonist, whose life parallels in certain ways that of her ancestor, starts with a bang. And then it begins to get a bit wobbly.

Howe then introduces the protagonist's sisters and the parallels to her legendary tale begin to feel more laboured. One sibling works for the tribal government, one is an actor, and one is a broker, neatly symbolising the worlds of politics, entertainment, and commerce--and I worry that's going to play out in unsubtle ways. The actor's chapter in particular is filled with dialogue that feels stilted even allowing for their tendency to self-dramatise.

And where Erdrich's novel felt like a confrontation between ordinary people and inexplicable evil in which non-Indians play a mostly unhelpful role, this feels like a more conventional plot populated with stock characters. The villains are in cahoots with movie mobsters and our virtuous heroes have the backing of the ancestors in their struggle to take back the tribe.

Who knows, maybe she'll transcend some of these tropes. Right now, though, one of the chief pleasures for me is the amount of dialogue in Choctaw. I've been reading it with my dictionary of Chickasaw handy (a language close enough to be mutually intelligible) and gradually expanding my vocabulary with each new phrase. It's also been a page-turned so far, which is one advantage to being somewhat formulaic, I guess.

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