WOODROOF: It's difficult to think of the word `relationship' in connection with Louise Erdrich without thinking about her relationship to the late Michael Dorris.
It revives my own pain, unsolvable, alive.' I feel his suffering when he's near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties even to indulge the unnecessary and maybe insulting secretive precautions. WOODROOF: What Erdrich has given us is a picture of Faye's profound solitude and struggle to connect with another person. And I had never really written a contemporary woman with a lot of my own observations that I'd actually written down in journals. I had to strive very hard to make it not me. ERDRICH: It was this woman's voice which, I suppose, is-was not far from my own. Faye's world, Erdrich says, contained the hardest truth she's ever tried to get at. Relationships for Faye are boats, little tippy vessels likely to founder. She's a woman who's ambivalent about feeling anything that rises above pleasant or sinks below unfortunate. It's the story of Faye Travers, who steals a painted drum from an estate she's appraising and decides to return it to the Ojibwa. WOODROOF: But this novel begins and ends in un-magic and un-mythical contemporary New Hampshire. LOUISE ERDRICH (Author, "The Painted Drum"): I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters. Its middle sections trek back to Ojibwa Nation land, where myth and magic compete to explain the power of "The Painted Drum." Sure, there's territory in the novel that will seem familiar to Louise Erdrich's readers. Martha Woodroof has this profile of the author. "The Painted Drum" is built around the internal life of a contemporary woman, and in it, Erdrich explores new territory: human relationships. Louise Erdrich is famous for writing stories anchored in Native American mythology, but her latest novel drifts free of her literary home base.
0 kommentar(er)
