Did you Read with Me? The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
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I finished The Sentence in February for my Read with Me project this year, but I’m posting my thoughts about the book in the middle of March.
Just so you know, that’s going to be the rhythm for this project going forward and I invite you to join me! We’ll read the book for the indicated month and then look for a post about the book here on the blog around the 15th of the following month.
I don’t plan or intend to write a formal review. I’ll just share what I found compelling (or not) and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Ok, so here we go.
First of all, I thought Erdrich’s The Sentence was a beautiful book. Tookie immediately captured my heart and promised a good ride from very beginning—and when we get to know Pollux —oh my. I don’t know if I loved each of them or the love they had for each other more!
This is a story about people who are still haunted by the past.
Erdrich wonderfully works with the concept—motif—of ‘sentence’ to explore this haunting. The novel itself of course is called The Sentence—which Tookie explains is the first word she looks up in the dictionary she is sent to by her former teacher after being sentenced to prison. The motif is extended to the idea of books—stories—which are of course made of sentences. Sentences, language—reading—is celebrated throughout.
But the sentencing of indigenous people is perhaps the main motif:
“…Most of us Indigenous people do have to consciously pull together our identities. We’ve endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture. So even someone raised strictly in their own tradition gets pulled toward white perspectives…
“white realities are powerful. And most of us have to pick and choose between our family and tribal traditions to find ourselves…some of us have to make a choice every day to hold on, to speak our language, to dance, to pay our dues to the spirits.”
As the story unfolds, as Tookie works and tries to live with her scars, the ghost of Flora literally haunts her in the bookstore, and then Covid hits and then George Floyd is murdered in their town…and we slowly come to understand that the past is all wrapped up in the present. “We are,” as Tookie says, “ a haunted country in a haunted world.”
“Like every state in our country, Minnesota began with blood dispossession and enslavement. Officers of the U.S. Army bought and solved enslaved people, including a married couple, Harriet Robinson and Dred Scott. Our history marks us. Sometimes I think our state’s beginning years haunt everything: the city’s attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can’t undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it…”
This is a story showing what it means to be “forced to either confront or repeat” history—and Flora’s mysterious book, also titled The Sentence, clearly shows us this history. A young indian woman taken captive after the Dakota War of 1862. This their story— Tookie and her family and friends are direct descendents of ancestors who were systematically betrayed and victimized—and the injustice continues in the present day.
Injustice we witness in Tookie’s initial prison sentence of sixty years:
“Many in that courtroom were not surprised…Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned…Minnesota alone imprisons three times as many woman as all of Canada, not to mention all of Europe”.
Injustice in the stories of the “unbelievably dense” white woman who proudly tells them of the starving indians displaced from their own land by her family, who she claims were so grateful for gifts of food…and her great aunt who dug up the bones of indigenous people, wired them together, and entered it in the state fair.
Actually, so much more than Injustice —the massacres, the displacements, the “reeducation”, the remains of 1000s of indigenous children found at former residential schools in Canada—(recently reported in the news and not mentioned in the novel, but to which this woman’s story surely alludes).
And so much more than injustice for George Floyd and all descendents of enslaved people.
As Roland emphatically cries fro his lawn chair during the protests, “The whole damn city is haunted!”
Understandably Tookie, traumatized as she is, can’t face this past or her own, and she tries to literally bury the book—and avoid her ghost. But their history—and her own personal history, again all wrapped together—can’t be buried.
The beauty of this book—like all good literature—is that Erdrich explores ideas in both the particular and the universal. Tookie is haunted by a literal ghost, which as it turns out is all wrapped up in her ancestors—and her own—past. I won’t give the ending away here—it’s too great!—but this book really is about finding a way to overcome the dark pain of the past with love, compassion, appreciation—and “the most beautiful sentence in the human language” that ultimately heals and redeems…which is at the heart of the book’s message.
This book was complex and at times difficult. As we watched Covid hit and then the protests after George Floyd is murdered in their town, we suffer a little with the characters. The books seems to drag. But I wonder if this is justifiable fatigue that can’t be avoided as we read in 2022. But the opening and then when things really heat to a fever pitch and the novel resolves to such a fine ending makes it all worth it.
I didn’t want to go too deep with my discussion here—I’m not here to write a literary analysis—but this is the kind of book that deserves more than superficial consideration. I fell hard for Tookie and Pollux and oh my, the ending scenes are masterful This book moved me and gave me greater understanding and empathy—and it gave me hope that we can move forward as a human family.
Now I’d love to hear your thoughts about the book in the comments below. What did I miss? Do you agree or disagree? Let me know!
Read with Me continues. The next book on the list is The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs. I hope you’ll read it with me and I’ll be back in April with commentary.