My Book Of The Week:

"The Painted Drum"

by Louise Erdrich



Photo from: www.harpercollins.com



     This semester I took a class in Native American Literature, and even though all of the books I've read in that class were really great, I must say that this one is my favorite."The Painted Drum" is beautifully written and its narrative is very lyrical. It is a story based around the main character Faye Travers a part-Ojibwe estate appraiser.Suffocating in the ocean of guilt over her sister's death, Faye lives a half-life. She can never be truly happy. Her life changes when she hears the drum calling her while she was appraising the house of one of her neighbors. Faye steals it. The drum is powerful and sacred, it can reward and it can punish. It crosses Faye's path with the paths of many other people who have their own little histories with this mysterious artifact.The story truly is about self-discovery, relationships between mothers and daughters, family, love, and the overwhelming grief.

About Louise Erdrich:



Photo from: www.nytimes.com, taken by:Bettina Strauss

 Karen Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota on June 7th, 1954. She is the author of eleven novels, volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark books, a small independent bookstore. ("The Painted Drum", Louise Erdrich, Harper Perennial,2005)        

 

 

The passages:

So here are my favorite passages from the book, just to get the sense of her beautiful narrative. :)

"Ravens are the birds I'll miss the most when I die. if only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence.If only we did not have to die at all.Instead, become ravens. I've watched these birds so hard I feel their black feathers split out of my skin. To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike,on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next. When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens."

("The Painted Drum", page 15.)

***

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love.You have to feel.It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."

("The Painted Drum", page 274.)  

  

I recommend this book from my heart.

Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did,

Nina.