"The Sentence" by Louise Erdrich
Buy this book
Readers who frequent indie booksellers often feel passionate about where they get their books. Louise Erdrich, a proprietor of an indie bookstore, understands that in a visceral way. “When you recommend a book and a customer buys it,” the narrator of her new novel tells us, “they are taking a chance, trusting you.”
It’s a bond that has moved to a different ... realm in Erdrich’s new novel, “The Sentence.”
Set in a Minneapolis bookstore that bears an undeniable resemblance to Erdrich’s own Birchbark Books, the restless ghost of a customer is haunting the stacks and frightening the staff.
When Flora was alive, she’d been an avaricious collector of books and, the novel tells us, “a stalker of all things Indigenous.” In fact, “Flora told people that she had been an Indian in a former life" and when she realized that was a ridiculous cliché, she produced a picture of a woman who, Tookie, our narrator confides, “looked Indianesque, or she might have just been in a bad mood.”
In fact, while Tookie findsFlora both endearing and annoying in the flesh, she is deeply rattled by the presence of her ghost. She finds herself following Flora through the store, re-shelving the trail of books Flora leaves behind. And when she discovers the book that Flora was reading when she died, Tookie has her own otherworldly experience with it.
This novel speaks to what books can be to the marginalized, the isolated, the happy, the aggrieved, the seeking among us. “Books,” the novel tells us, “contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”
I’ll ask Louise Erdrich what that means when she joins me on my Friday book show next week, Nov. 12. — Kerri Miller | MPR News | 