Then it occurred to me that this was maybe what it felt like for ethnic-minority readers being made to read the white Western canon of literature, as part of a school class or a university course. I’ve never before read a Louise Erdrich novel, and there were things-decisions she made about where to cut off a scene, what folktales to recount, the details of those stories-that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Yet something about the densely plain language seemed not to lend itself to analysis nor were the rounded but somehow glassy characters being useful. The premise was phenomenal, biblical: a man who kills a boy in a hunting accident offers to the bereaved parents the rearing of his own five-year-old son in exchange for the life he took. It seemed, in a hard-to-explain sort of way, to be resisting me. Up until the last day that I was reading this book, I was having a hard time working out whether I’d be able to review it. April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.May 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.
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