She is one of the greatest storytellers in contemporary American literature: Louise Erdrich. She conquered the hearts of readers with books such as “Love Magic” and “Die Rübenkönigin”. As the daughter of an Ojibwe mother and a German-American mother, she finds her material in both worlds and angers the rubric-obsessed college wisdom. Where does she belong? Is she allowed to write about the “Natives” at all? The more recent books by the Pulitzer Prize winner also show that these questions are nonsense.
In the meantime, as far as the German publications are concerned, they are all at home in the Aufbau Verlag. And that’s where her latest book has now been published – translated by Gesine Schröder: “The Sentence”. What could be translated as “The sentence”. It’s the sentence that ends with Flora, one of the bookstore’s strangest customers „Birchbark Books“ you find salvation.
Books as lifesavers
It is precisely this bookshop, which she founded herself, that Louise Erdrich used as the setting for her book. So it’s a real book for booksellers and readers who still buy their books at their favorite bookstore around the corner. At the bookseller you trust. For example at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. Where Tookie, after a long stint in prison where she discovered her love for books, has found employment and finally finds some sort of rest and comfort in her life.
Also because the enormous book knowledge that she read up in prison helps her to always give the customers new tips, especially the most demanding and persistent ones. Just like the man whom the colorful staff of the bookshop only calls dissatisfied because his desire for the right reading can hardly be satisfied.
But the small bookstore felt the same way as the bookstores in Germany when the corona pandemic rolled around the world: it had to close temporarily, book orders could only be processed without contact. “Birchbark Books” turned into a veritable shipping station. And maybe it really was like that: the small bookstore made more sales than in previous years. The readers remained loyal and even more so stocked up on books.
It is also a book about the silent solidarity of people who read books with enthusiasm and fascination with their booksellers. In this case even a very special bookstore, because on the book table, which is actually a converted boat, are the latest titles of the native writers. For those who are not yet familiar with the richness of this literature, Louise Erdrich has attached a long list: “Tookie’s completely subjective list of favorite books”.
Flora haunts
Tookie is actually the pretty broken heroine of the story. It becomes clear when Flora starts haunting the shop that she is far from settled with her own past. Flora, who she actually only remembers as an annoying customer who is desperately looking for traces of her indigenous origins. That Flora was completely on the wrong track, as far as Flora is concerned, turns out very late – even after many crises Tookies who doesn’t really know why Flora seems to be targeting her.
Seen in this way, it would be one of the typical Erdrich stories in which magic, indigenous perception of the world, dreams and connection with the living world form the matrix on which human destinies unfold. But it was not without reason that Louise Erdrich wrote the book during the Corona period. It’s not just about books. Because Corona is also catching up with Tookie’s partner Pollux. Back when she was young and on drugs, he was the tribal police officer and the one who arrested her and put her in prison for 60 years.
60 years, because a dogged judge threw everything against the young defendant into the balance that the case yielded. So Tookie knows how quickly your origins can be turned against you. In addition to black Americans, it is above all the indigenous people who end up behind bars disproportionately often.
She is lucky because patient fellow human beings ensure that she is released earlier. And then she meets Pollux again, who bears his own fault, because he soon gave up his job as a police officer. But in the end he still feels guilty that Tookie’s life went so off track.
The murder of George Floyd
And this deeply personal story, which culminates in Pollux’s prolonged stay in the hospital while Tookie spends her days out in the car because she can’t stand waiting at home for news from Pollux, is mirrored by very real events. Because this first Corona year 2020 was also the year in which the black George Floyd was killed by cops on the street in Minneapolis just a few blocks from Birchbark Books.
Tookie and her friends witness it all – the protests crushed by a heavily armed police force. The riots, looting, burning houses. The city is in turmoil. And suddenly the topic of racism is at the top of the list again. How deep is that actually? And how do people live with it, who are so easily drawn and marked and harassed by state authority?
It’s all condensed in this book. And in the end it also becomes clear that it is not only the people who are actually marked by skin color and origin who have a problem with their place in the world. It’s not without reason that Flora has always been one of those oddly restless Americans who desperately want to find an Indigenous ancestor in their family tree, so they read everything Birchbark Books has to offer.
Flora’s story just doesn’t turn out to be the one Flora wanted at all. And Tookie must discover that her own family history is also connected to Flora’s ancestor – in that traumatic way that is passed on in the following generations and never really settles down until everything is actually said and the spirits are settled.
The past doesn’t rest
Viewed in this way, Erdrich’s access to the myths and worldviews of the Natives is a very lively literary means of telling all the dramas that people weave into their fate and the fate of their fellow human beings. The past doesn’t rest. And it becomes hopeless when nobody is there who can forgive and show a way out. That’s what Tookie learns late in life, having suffered through ups and downs in this strange year of wonders. And she has also learned that she is no longer the victim of her life. That she has paid for everything and has long since been in a position to speak the right words herself.
And as strange as that sounds: It seems so familiar, as if “Birchbark Books” could also be somewhere on a side street in Leipzig. And you could go there with all your dissatisfaction because you just don’t have the right and necessary reading material. And Tookie pulls book after book off the shelf that can comfort you for the next few weeks until you need some really good haunted coping books again.
Louise Erdrich “Year of Miracles”Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2023, 26 euros.
2023-06-30 02:55:00
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