The Round House by Louise Erdrich

I'm going to try to use this blog to get back to something I haven't kept up with in the past couple of years -- keeping a record of the books I've read and trips we've taken, and maybe a few other things I want to remember. Focus on the good is my new mantra in this time of trouble.

Just finished Louise Erdrich's beautiful novel, The Round House. Here's a passage that epitomizes this book for me:

"There was a moment of intense quiet. Then a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled me and flooded me. Finally, it ceased. I decided to go forward. As I climbed the hill, a breeze raised hairs on the back of my neck. But when I reached the round house, the sun fell like a warm hand on my shoulders. The place seemed peaceful."

Fully formed and believable characters, strong sense of place and historical context, compelling story, mysticism, beautiful writing... this book touched me in a way that few others have this past year. The central event around which the novel is built is the rape of a Native American woman by a non-native man (which it turns out is shockingly and disturbingly common) as told by her son, Joe. Erdrich weaves her intricate story around how Geraldine (the victim), Joe, his father and extended family, and community respond to this terrible event within the confines of tribal law and US law. There's tension, love, violence, and even redemption.   

Update:
Shortly after finishing The Round House, I read another fantastic book about American Indians --  David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and the Birth of the FBI. This extraordinary journalistic work tells a gripping and shocking story about the murders of Osage Indians by white men intent on stealing what hadn't yet been stolen by the US Government. These murderers perpetrated their evil acts without compunction, believing that the superiority of their race justified what they did. Talk about white privilege! If this had been a novel, I would have thought it was too ridiculous to be true. Sadly, it is not.