Tookie, a forty-year-old of Native American origin, long accustomed to stealing to eat, is hired after her release from prison – a story of corpse theft aggravated by drug transport – in a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis which specializes in indigenous works .
During her ten years in the penitentiary, she resumed her studies. She also had the time and the will, she tells us, to read a lot of books. “But we find in books everything you need to know, except the essentials. » Upon his release from prison, Pollux, the tribal police officer who had handcuffed him (and who had since changed his professional life), will declare his love for him.
Recently, the narrator of Sentenceon the 18the novel by the American Louise Erdrich, Femina Foreign Prize 2023, says she is pursued by the ghost of a client who died suddenly in November 2019 while she was reading the hand-written diary of an indigenous captive from the 19th century.e century. A manuscript entitled Sentence. An Indian captivity, 1862-1883which the daughter of the deceased will offer to the bookseller.
She feels a presence in the bookstore and books, often the same ones, are found on the floor every morning. Tookie’s husband, more connected to her indigenous roots, criticizes her for believing in ghosts rather than spirits. But the question comes back, without haunting us: can certain readings be fatal?
This client, named Flora, “a veritable leech of all things indigenous”, according to Tookie, who describes her with annoyance as an “indestructible wannabe ”, told anyone who would listen that she would have been “Indian” in a previous life. It was before this Flora discovered that she was an indigenous great-grandmother, showing everyone as evidence the old photo of an “austere woman wrapped in a shawl”…
While Tookie, increasingly worried, wonders how to get rid of Flora’s ghost, the pandemic enters the equation and reality meets fiction. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, followed by protests and riots, awakens old wounds, reminding Tookie of “the racist origins of Minnesota.” To this rather bitter cocktail are added some parallel plots which evoke the living together or the family reality of the narrator.
The 69-year-old Anishinaabe writer herself opened Birchbark Books (literally, “birch bark”) in Minneapolis in 2001, a bookstore that closely resembles that of the novel, “a core, a mission, a work of art , a vocation, a sacred madness.” The author of Latest report on miracles at Little No Horse (2003) says he found a real community there.
A haunted bookstore in the middle of which there is an old confessional, stories of corpse unearthers, echoes of the Red River Rebellion, a bit of redemption: an extended novel sometimes a little messy, overflowing with dialogue, imbued with a light tone despite themes that are not always light, Sentence is also a praise of books and independent bookstores.
But above all, Louise Erdrich unearths in this militant novel the painful indigenous memory, often repressed but very much alive.