Louise Erdrich's The Sentence

I am about 3/4 of the way through the audiobook of Louise Erdrich’s latest novel The Sentence, which she narrates herself, and I’m enthralled. Last fall I was in a bit of an audiobook rut, listening to books that were okay, mostly fine, but that left me wanting to listen to podcasts instead. That’s the real audiobook test for me: am I tempted to switch from my audiobook over to podcasts? When the answer is no, I know I’ve found a good one. This winter, things have turned around: I listened to Deborah Levy’s autobiographical trilogy (read by Juliet Stevenson), and then Lynn Steger Strong’s novel Want and loved them. And now The Sentence is working its magic on me.

This book is hard to describe because it has so many different moods and subjects. It starts off with a funny, rather ridiculous, but still moving story of the protagonist Tookie’s past: she commits a crime not really understanding the magnitude of what she had done and gets sent to prison. Then the book shifts to November 2019, long after Tookie has gotten out of prison and restarted her life. She’s now working in a bookstore in Minneapolis and living with her husband. The novel turns into a ghost story at this point: one of the store’s regular customers comes back to haunt the place. Setting a book in November 2019 signals what’s coming up next: it moves through the winter and into March 2020 when they are hit by the pandemic, and then into the summer when George Floyd’s murder rocks the city.

Somehow, Erdrich manages to cover all these events with the perfect balance of seriousness where necessary, humor where possible, and a finely-tuned sense of the absurd. It’s all centered in Tookie’s first-person voice. She has lived through some terrible things and carries a deep awareness of what her Native ancestors suffered. When she is serious, we pay attention. She knows how to give suffering its due. She’s also hilarious, in a dry, understated way. She’s attuned to other people’s strangeness — her friends’ foibles, the quirky store customers — as well as her own. She criticizes people — including herself, always — but she loves them too, or at least is willing to appreciate their being who they are. She’s just so funny! I laugh out loud a lot while listening to Tookie, and then I shake my head at how ridiculous people can be. And then I get sad at how horrible people can be.

I don’t know what reading this in a different format would feel like; the print version would probably be satisfying in its own way, but having Tookie’s voice in my head as I listen is such a pleasure. It turns out that Erdrich is a fabulous audiobook narrator. There’s something about her quiet, low-key narration that captures Tookie’s sense of humor perfectly. Or maybe her reading is what makes Tookie funny. Maybe Erdrich’s voice is similar to Tookie’s, or Tookie’s is similar to Erdrich’s, and the voice I love listening to — thinking of Erdrich’s actual voice and also “voice” as a literary device — is some wonderful, inextricable combination of the two.

Erdrich herself appears as a minor character, the owner of Tookie’s store, Birchbark Books, the name of Erdrich’s actual bookstore. She is referred to only as “Louise” and occasionally pops into the story as an eccentric writer and friendly, somewhat distant boss. The bookstore scenes are great fun; Tookie describes in detail what it’s like to work behind the counter and among the shelves, to deal with obnoxious and picky customers, to do inventory and place orders. She mentions books she’s reading and recommending — exactly the sort of thing book-lovers love hearing about. These scenes are cozy and charming, even when the ghost appears.

The later sections on the pandemic and then on the protests are much more serious, and some readers may not be ready for this — it might feel too early to read a novel about 2020. I’m not one of those people, although I understand those who are. I loved reading Zadie Smith’s essay collection Intimations, about the pandemic’s early days — I read it twice, in fact —and I’m currently reading a poetry collection about pandemic life, A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr. I like reading about people trying to process this huge, life-changing, world-changing event, and Erdrich’s version is fascinating: we see what it was like to work at a bookstore as the pandemic hit, and we also get a local perspective on the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. These sections are fraught and painful, but Tookie is, I think, a perfect guide through the mess of 2020.

This book is an emotional roller coaster of the best kind. I do tend to respond to audiobooks more emotionally than I do print books — there’s something about having someone read a book out loud that is so moving, if the reader is good — so perhaps the print version wouldn’t hit me as hard. But, still, I think this book is remarkable, and if you like reading about bookstores and are ready for a pandemic novel, you won’t want to miss it.

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Publishing This Week

New small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:

• How To Be a Revolutionary by C.A. Davids (Verso Fiction): A novel about a woman who moves from Cape Town to Shanghai and the mystery that lands on her doorstep there: “a globe-spanning novel about what we owe our consciences.”

  

• The Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist, translated by Saskia Vogel (Coach House Books): This book is described as “feminist autofiction,” so I’m in: “The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary detective work spanning centuries and continents.”

• Quake: A Novel by Auður Jónsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich (Dottir Press): A novel “about Saga, a woman who comes to after an epileptic seizure on a sidewalk along busy Miklabraut Street.”

• The Danish Notebook by Michael Palmer (Nightboat Books, originally published in 1999): “Michael Palmer sets out to discover which images and designs will appear when his reflections (on poetry, collaboration, work, travel) and memories (of chance meetings, conversations among friends, books read and movies seen) are set down on paper….The result is part memoir, part correspondence, travel diary, and poetic essay.”

• Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf by Malika Moustadraf, translated by Alice Guthrie (Feminist Press): “Malika Moustadraf (1969-2006) is a feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan literature, celebrated for her stark interrogation of gender and sexuality in North Africa.”

  

• Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press): “Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?”

• Climate Lyricism by Min Hyoung Song (Duke University Press): “In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature.”

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, edited by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford University Press, 2021): I love essays about the essay! I’ve read enough of them I should be over it by now, but I’m not.

• Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, 2021; originally published in 2017): Gurnah is the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize. A “story of exile, migration, and betrayal…Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors.”

  

• The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, 2021; originally published in 2011): “Abbas has never told anyone about his past-before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna.”

• A Table Made Again For the First Time: On Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, edited by Paul Becker and Francesco Pedraglio (Juan de la Cosa/John of the Thing, 2021): I found out about this little book from David Naimon. It’s a small collection of essays about This Little Art, an absolutely fabulous book about translation. Contributors include Renee Gladman and Alejandro Zambra, among others.

Currently Reading

• The Child by Kjersti A. Skomsvold, translated by Martin Aitken (Open Letter, 2021): I’ve just begun this, a novel about a woman reflecting on giving birth and her early experiences of motherhood.

  

• Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, Gail Scott, Camille Roy, and Robert Glück (Coach House Books, 2004): An essay collection on experimental prose and narrative. At 18 years old, this feels dated, but not necessarily in a bad way: I’m learning a lot about literary movements of the late 20th century (Language poetry and New Narrative in particular) and how the literary scene felt in 2004, as well as learning about experimental writers I wasn’t familiar with.

The Cormac Report

Cormac had some gift certificates to spend, so we visited a couple bookstores last weekend. He’s reluctant to try new books or series, preferring to reread familiar things, but fortunately he hasn’t gotten to the end of all his favorites, so he picked out some sequels. He’s currently reading the Amulet series, so he bought books #7 and #8, and he got another Kingdom of Wrenly book and also the second in the InvestiGators series.

Then we got home to find some books I’d ordered for him had arrived: one way he gets interested in new books is when his teacher reads them to the class, so he’d requested their current class read, the Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles. Now he can get ahead of where his class is in the series.

Recently there’s been a lot of Twitter chat about parents who let kids read whatever they want and adults looking back fondly on books they read as kids that were too mature for them, or arguably too mature, since who knows what that actually means. I plan to let Cormac read whatever he wants whenever he wants, but so far he hasn’t been venturesome in that way. He’s content to stick to the familiar and comforting, and, honestly, for now I find that comforting too.

Have a good week everyone!