Here is part of Margie’s secret: unrequited love the LaForce family land allotment in Sweetgrass and not too much sugar in the frybread when you add that little bit.Īlso, the two books’ concerns are quite different. The chapters do not stand independently as individual stories. In The Road Back to Sweetgrass, readers follow the same characters throughout, and their tales are much more closely interconnected. What is the difference here? How is this latest a novel instead? In this respect, one is reminded of the linked short stories that comprise Grover’s first book of prose, the prize-winning Dance Boots.
Narration shifts, too, between third and first person, as various characters are allowed to tell their own tales. It isn’t even past.” Events, even from long ago, are very much alive in the people they haunt, or bless, in this novel.
This might sound confusing, but it isn’t, thanks to Grover’s skilled prose. As the book ends, we are back to the present, listening to a story from almost a century ago.
Readers are gradually taken back to 1970, at which point we reverse course and hopscotch forward to 2008. Throughout Grover’s novel, time is not linear, but circular. Margie’s recipe, itself, makes a little river, in a circle her instruction ends at the beginning, by reminding you to grease the pan first. Good with butter, or honey, or jelly, or syrup. Cover and give it a little rest after you mix. Fry it like doughnuts. Add warm water to make the dough nice and soft. Mix this in a good-size bowl, and then make a little river, in a circle. What is it exactly? Here, straight from the book, is Margie’s recipe - you may wish to try your hand at it:Ī little sugar, maybe a teaspoon (this is up to you if you want it) It’s interesting (and significant) that frybread, which did not begin as a traditional native food, has become one over the decades. Grover says Margie’s creation as “was so light it all but rose from the plate, so tender as to be all but unfelt in the mouth, so tasty that the very thought that the moment couldn’t last forever brought to the eater an undertone of sorrow that added an intangible brine, like a grain of salt from dried tears yet to be wept.” As the book opens, it is 2014, and Margie Robineau, the book’s central character, is “approaching elderhood.” She is considered the reservation’s finest maker of frybread. The novel follows a small group of American Indians as they venture into the larger world and then return to their reservation, their nation within a nation. In the privacy of the ricing boat, surrounded by rustling, life-sustaining grain, the heart opens to its own truth, and admissions and revelations occur that set the book’s major events in motion. The rhythmic labor of knocking ripe rice into the boat, “the softness of the sunlight, and the breeze, light as sheer curtains blowing in an open window,” create the ideal time for reverie. Ricing brings people home.Īmong the most beautifully evoked scenes in the book are those early autumn days spent on Lost Lake. This is perfect timing, for on Grover’s fictional Mohzay Point Reservation, ricing is one of the most important rituals that bind the people together and help the Ojibwe culture endure. The annual wild rice harvest is underway in northern Minnesota, just as Linda LeGarde Grover’s new novel, The Road Back to Sweetgrass, has appeared. Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there Tags : books Dancing Boots Duluth Linda LeGarde Grover literature mnartnews 1
0 kommentar(er)
