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The Nature of Discovery
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19302 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1991 |
2,631 Words |
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Annick Smith
Annick Smith is a writer and filmmaker who lives in the
Blackfoot Valley of western Montana. She is co-editor with
William Kittredge of The Last Best Place, A Montana Anthology.
Her essays have appeared in the anthology Montana Spaces and
in such journals as Poets and Writers and Montana. The
Magazine of Western History. Smith's film credits include
Heartland, a prizewinning feature film about a pioneer family
on the western plains. |
THE CROWN OF COLUMBUS
Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich
New York: HarperCollins, 1991
384 pp., $21.95
Say a dreamy island girl found a rose-cheeked baby in a raft washed up on her Caribbean turf. Then a drowning old man with a plastic zip-lock bag in his mouth washes up on the same beach. Say the words in the bag were written five hundred years ago by Christopher Columbus, who also arrived on that shore:
Wondrous are the tumultuous forces of the sea.
Wondrous is God in the depths.
You might wonder at such an opening. You might ask if the situation is believable or contrived. Or both. The key, of course, is discovery. "The novel is about the nature of discovery," Michael Dorris said in an interview. "Interpersonal, geographic, historical."
That's the setup for this collaborative story by the Native American husband and wife team, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich. The prizewinning books they wrote as individuals (The Broken Cord, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks) have been about reservation Indians and country people of mixed blood who inhabit the fringes of American western experience.
Erdrich and Dorris (along with a talented bunch of native American authors including Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Linda Hogan) have taught us to see the tired old western freshly. These is magic in the mix of tribal cultures with European, a tradition of storytelling the dominant culture has not heard before, and a necessary element of loss. The voices in those stories carry mysteries, special understandings of the ways of connection to nature, ancestors. They come near to being sacred stories. And, like other serious writers, Dorris and Erdrich are involved with the fractures and healings of family, history, culture, and (need it be said) of the individual soul.
Two voices
The Crown of Columbus is a complexly plotted novel that partakes of traditional storytelling and postmodernism at the same time; it is a story told for the most part in two voices. Vivian Twostar is forty, a mixed-blood ("Coeur
...
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