"I needed him so much, I couldn't really go into it very far, this need, nor could my mother and I talk about it. But her wearing his robe was a sign to me of how she had to have the comfort of his presence in a basic way that I now understood. That night, I asked her if she'd packed Dad an extra shirt, and she nodded when I asked if I could wear it. She gave it to me.
I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman's in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men's clothing, and he didn't buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father's ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don't sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always a dog named Pearl."
From The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich *1954
There are sometimes interesting and surprising coincidences: While
leafing through a German magazine on latest book publications, I sort of
stumbled over an article on Louise Erdrich. Her book The Round
House had been translated into German and was presented in the
article (Das Haus des Windes, Aufbau Verlag). Obviously, it
was her name that caught my eye: Erdrich is a rather familiar surname
in the South of Germany. The more interesting to read that she is a
member of the Mikinaakwajiw-ininiwag or Turtle
Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a Native American
Tribe of the Ojibwa and Métis peoples based in North Dakota.  |
| Buchjournal 3/2014 |
Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls in the United States of America, eldest of seven children. Her father Ralph Erdrich is German-American (which explains the familiarity of the name) while her mother, Rita (née Gourneau), is part French-American and part Ojibwe. Rita's father Patrick Gourneau served for many years as tribal chairman of the above mentioned tribe and certainly had a strong influence on Louise's education. Probably as much as her father's educational measurement: while parents usually pay children for each book they've read, Louise's father paid a nickel for every story his children wrote! Eventually: while Louise is mainly writing novels, her sister Heidi publishes poetry under the name Heid E. Erdrich and her sister Lise writes children's books.
Consequently, Louise earned her MA in the Writing Seminars at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1979. The same year, she published her first short story "The World's Greatest Fisherman" which won the Nelson Algren Short Fiction prize. In 1984, after she had married Michael Dorris in 1981 and together raised three adopted and three biological children, she published her first novel, Love Medicine. While both her first short story and novel are placed in a fictional reservation her second book The Beet Queen, published in 1986, expanded its range. This lead to a fierce accusation that Louise was more concerned with her literary technique than the political struggle of Native peoples. A very common struggle: form vs. content, which reminded me of South African Literature under the Apartheid regime. If Louise compromised or just focused her point of view again on her fictional reservation universe, at least her many books are mainly placed within the circle of her familiar surroundings. Various conflicts concerning the tribal lives on religion, economics and tradition became part of the books Louise wrote until her divorce in 1995. With her book The Antelope Wife (1998) Erdrich left the fictional tribal surrounding for once but returnd to it afterwards. Nevertheless, this doesn't make her limited in her point of view. As the jury of the PEN/Bellow Award asserts:
"Some writers work a small piece of land: Louise Erdrich is not one of those writers. Her work has an awesome capaciousness – each person is a world. For Erdrich, the tale of the individual necessarily leads to the tale of the family, and families lead to nations, while the wound of a national injustice is passed down through the generations, expressing itself in intimate deformations, a heady intertwining of the national and the personal. Yet despite the often depressingly familiar, repetitive nature of so much human business, Erdrich’s eye is always fresh, her sentences never less than lyrical." (Read more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2014-pensaul-bellow-award-achievement-american-fiction)
This is also the case with Louise's story The Round House.
Though its main focus is on an very personal and intimate incident it reveals at
the same time this very complicated relationship between historical
developments and interpersonal composure. It's wonderful how she
creates a rich, colourful picture where there is no space for any
black or white, right or wrong. And again there is much more between heaven and earth we could think of that influences the human spirit. Made me certainly curious to read
more of her aside of all 15 awards she's won so far...
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