Little - Softcover

Treuer, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972314 ISBN 13: 9781555972318

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1995

Synopsis

"Poverty" has always been more than three wind-battered homes and an old Catalina that doubles as a bedroom. It sits on a barren landscape that was once peppered with one-hundred-year-old pines and now houses as many mysteries as it does lives.
Jeannette, Duke, and Ellis were the first to make Poverty a home. They are the guardians, the ones who remember what was once taken from them. Chapter by chapter, as each character takes up the narrative, we learn about the way life is lived on this Indian reservation. Here rumors swirl like the snow drifts that alter the landscape in the bitter winter. It was the snow that first brought them Donovan, the boy who acts as caretaker for Little, the strange younger brother who was born with fused claws for hands. All through his short and enigmatic life Little had only one word: you.

About this title

About the Author

David Treuer grew up on an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota. A graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Bemidji, Minnesota

Reviews

At once bleak and lushly lyrical, this ambitious first novel by an Ojibwe writer probes the lives of the residents of a Minnesota reservation they call, with weary sardonicism, Poverty. A priest has died, drowned, it seems, in the baptismal font, but the truth turns out to be darker and more vengeful, an emblem of the unhappy collision of white and Indian cultures. Yet the resolution of this mystery is subordinate to the unfolding of lyrical and elegiac set pieces that illuminate the lives of Duke and Ellis, twins whose coming of age is comprised of acts of great compassion and of matter-of-fact brutality; of Jeanette, sliding into embittered middle age; and of Little, the doomed child whose one word of speech?"You"?can both embrace and accuse. Treuer, who himself lives on a reservation in Minnesota, moves awkwardly from one character to another; his greater gift is a poetic clarity of observation, in which even the bloody death of a deer can be a thing of austere beauty. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Treuer's debut novel tells of three generations in a family attempting to eke out a living on a Minnesota reservation called Poverty. A bleak, barren landscape, stripped of its once fertile pine forest, serves as the setting for this forlorn tale of desperation, abandonment, familial secrets, and oppressive poverty. The story is told through the voices of people who have in one way or another ended up in Poverty, including Duke and Ellis (twins who live in their car), an abandoned child, a priest who drowns in a baptismal font, and Little, a boy whose only word is you. Treuer has fashioned a moody story with fascinating characters and an ever-evolving plot that highlights the absurd disparities between the rich and the poor. Kathleen Hughes

An empty coffin is lowered into a grave behind a half-abandoned housing project called Poverty on an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota. The burial ceremony is for an enigmatic eight-year-old boy named Little, whose entire vocabulary consists of the word you. First novelist Treuer reconstructs Little's biography by allowing Poverty's inhabitants to tell their own life stories in a mosaic of first-person narratives. In the process, we learn the history of Poverty itself, from the turn of the century to the present. Land that was once virgin pine forest has been ruthlessly logged and tilled until it is now a barren, windswept waste, littered with the skeletons of rusting farm machinery. The town's population has been similarly devastated by poverty, alcoholism, and the Vietnam War. Treuer's portrait of a downtrodden people unfolds in slow, carefully measured prose, packed with descriptive detail. An ambitious first novel about America's rural poor; recommended for all larger fiction collections.?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555972314
• ISBN 13: 9781555972318
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248