Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Louise Erdrich, Corsair, $32.99.
“From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.” ― Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor
The book’s title suggests that it should be associated with a writing manual, yet Louise Erdrich’s novel is illusory, delivering a number of storytelling styles and aspiring in its instancy.
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Erdrich provides a richly layered novel that delve into how we cope with pain, fear, injustice, illness and
explores identity, exploitation and how the burdens of history still shape our lives today.
This book with its unpretentious title creates a impishly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman’s relentless errors. The Sentence, which begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 (and ends a year later), asks what we owe to the living, the dead, the reader and the book.
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention” must solve the mystery of this haunting, while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.
For Erdrich, these strange times call for mysteries and proliferating ghost stories that sometimes shifts into social realism. Here is a narrative that’s rich, demonstrative and overpowering.
Absorbing though edgy, like the era in which we are living, The Sentence gets us thinking, on the alert for the next implausible turn of events threatening us.
