In one paragraph Damien reacts to events in the next, Agnes.
Erdrich is no help here, for she capriciously switches the protagonist's gender. Through flashbacks we watch Damien struggle with his identity (especially after a young priest comes to the reservation). Worried that his letters explaining his life to the pontiff are awkward, he apologizes, but adds nevertheless, "I don't have time to revise." In the present, the ancient Damien is writing to his seventh pope, who like his six predecessors never replies. The story is told in the present and through flashbacks. Having "lost an old life and gained a new," Agnes moves steadfastly toward her destiny. Surviving a bank robbery and a flood, Agnes assumes the identity of the true Father Damien, whose misfortune it is to drown en route to the reservation. Sometimes when she is playing, she takes her clothes off because she believes "when one enters into the presence of such music, one should be naked." (So what if these were two separate characters in earlier stories?) Agnes, a gifted pianist, is booted out of convent life for playing Chopin with too much passion. Although Damien is a devout cleric, dedicated to this Ojibwe flock, he harbors a secret that might make a lesser man doubt his vocation.īut then, as we learn almost immediately, Father Damien is no man at all he is actually a woman, born Agnes DeWitt. In Last Report Erdrich returns with the story of Father Damien Modeste, a minor character from earlier books, who spends 80 eventful years as the priest on Little No Horse reservation. All I can do is trace their passage." It may be easy for her to keep up, but it's almost impossible for anyone else to approach Erdrich's American Indian fiction without some clues to the identity of the characters who richly inhabit her stories - Kapshaw and his wives, old Nanapush, the Morrisseys. The author once told an interviewer, "My characters choose me.
Still, a cottage industry based on Erdrich's characters and plots is no frivolous enterprise. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County gets less attention. These reference books place the important events of each novel in chronological order and list the chapters in which both major and minor characters appear.
Her novels are the subject of books filled with elaborate charts tracking the genealogy of dozens of characters and with detailed maps laying out her fictional North Dakota.
0 kommentar(er)
