summary of the sentence by louise erdrich

It turns into a descriptive noun if this fascination persists into adulthood. At its most fervent, this annoying impulse, I used to wanna be an Indian, becomes a kind of personality disorder.

I put Paul Chaat Smith’s Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong into their hands anyway. These days I nod along and try to sell a book, although people who tell that story rarely buy a book. The person is proud of having identified with an underdog and wants some affirmation from an actual Indigenous person. It usually comes from someone who wants you to know that as a child they slept in a tipi made of blankets, fought cowboys, tied a sister to a tree. Wannabe is from want to be, as in this phrase I’ve heard many times in life. It was slang at the time, but it seems to have become a noun in the midseventies. Let’s say instead that she was a very persistent wannabe. But here comes the annoying part: she was a stalker-of all things Indigenous. Our specialty is Native books, of course, her main interest. Flora was a devoted reader, a passionate book collector.

It is disturbing enough when a regular customer dies-but Flora’s stubborn refusal to vanish began to irk me. Since then, she has been here every morning. But I didn’t speak to her again and worked unhappily behind the counter while her spirit browsed.įlora died on the second of November, All Souls’ Day, when the fabric between the worlds is thin as tissue and easily torn. Somehow the familiarity of these sounds calmed me enough to go on. There was also the barely perceptible tap-clink of earrings in her double-pierced lobes, and the muted clatter of her many interesting bracelets. The material she’d worn was always of the sort that made slight noises-silk or nylon jackets, quilted this time of year. In need of good sense, I picked up my phone to text Pollux, but what to say? I put down the phone, took a deep breath, and queried the empty store. I heard her murmuring, then rustling about on the other side of the tall bookshelves in Fiction, her favorite section. The first time this happened, I had just learned the sad news and was easily rattled. Flora came in when the store was empty, always on my shift. Even so, I found the truth of this hard to accept. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize.įive days after Flora died, she was still coming to the bookstore. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. The following is excerpted from Louise Erdrich's novel, The Sentence.

Summary of the sentence by louise erdrich