He also senses a spiritual dimension as he approaches the ceremonial spot known as the round house, where the violent attack occurred, “a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. He is attuned to the natural world - prying loose tree seedlings that had attacked their house at the foundation, he marvels at how “each seed had managed to sink the hasp of a root deep and a probing tendril outward.” He is sensitive to human nuance (when his mother doesn’t return in time to fix dinner on the day of the rape, Joe notes, “her absence stopped time”).
In the spring of 1988, Joe’s mother is sadistically attacked and left in “a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.” She is unwilling or unable to say what has happened and who did it.Įrdrich’s artistry allows us to slip inside Joe’s skin easily as he is drawn into an adult role overnight, empathizing with his mother’s pain and joining his father in a search for the identity of the man “whose act had nearly severed mother’s spirit from her body.” Like Erdrich’s 2008 novel “The Plague of Doves,’’ to which this is a sequel of sorts, “The Round House’’ begins with a crime.
0 kommentar(er)
