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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Stories
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Sherman Alexie’s darkly humorous story collection weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to powerfully evoke life on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.
We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.
The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”
The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.
This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.
We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.
The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”
The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.
This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.
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Commencer à lireInformations sur le livre
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Stories
Description
Sherman Alexie’s darkly humorous story collection weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to powerfully evoke life on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.
We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.
The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”
The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.
This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.
We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.
The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”
The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.
This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.
À propos de l'auteur
Avis
I read this for my American Indian History class and I liked it a lot. It was funny, sad, and moving in the way that Alexie always manages perfectly. It was a great collection of short stories that tells stories of a young boy, Victor, who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
Rating: 4Love love love Sherman Alexie and the way he tells stories about the power of words. Great mix of black comedy and heart-wrenching, but never cloying, social commentary. Highly recommend his work if you've never read it before.
Rating: 4I really hate sad books, especially when they're well-written and full of truths.Sherman Alexie is full of beautiful and sad truths that relate not only to Indians, but just about everyone. They don't always make sense, but in a good way. His writing is fragmented at times, in such a sparse and succinct manner that you have to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. This is good and bad. Good for me, because it lets me fill the blanks in with some of my own truths and stories.All the same, I do wish I knew more about each story and each character.
Rating: 5I feel that this book had more to offer than what I could get out of it. There were things I definitely did not grasp fully. A definite reread.
Rating: 4The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie was originally published in 1993 and the version I read was issued to celebrate it’s first 20 years. It includes an introduction by e-mails as Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie discuss the book and what it has come to mean. This is a collection of slightly dark, often humorous, at times extremely touching stories about life on an Indian Reservation north of Spokane, Washington.Perhaps because I have a slight knowledge of Spokane, the parts that are set in the seedy rundown sections of that town really resonated with me. But where Alexie shines is in bringing to light the thoughts and feelings of isolation that most Indians seem to feel in today’s world. These stories are built around the themes of poverty, alcoholism, and depression yet there is also a strong sense of community as well. Some of the happier stories are about carnivals, storytelling and basketball but underneath there is always the darkness of surviving as an Indian in today’s world. As a collection of short stories this is a thought-provoking, intelligent book. As a statement on Indians living on the Rez this book pulls back the curtains and shows what their life is all about. As both a writer and an Indian himself, Alexie does not leave his people without showing his compassion and his hope for them.
Rating: 4I don't know how I made it through life not having read this book. It had a profound impact on me, the lyrical prose, beauty, heartbreak, and cultural awareness that this book brings is beyond impressive. A collection of short stories about growing up on the Spokane reservation and dealing with alcohol, corrupt government agencies, tradition, love, basketball, culture, and more. Some stories make you laugh but many more make you depressed. It's a book that demands to be felt and is wonderful in getting people to understand at least a little bit of the struggle that Native Americans deal with on a daily basis. Alexie is a gifted storyteller and weaves his words to create dozens of poetic and moving stories that readers will think about long after they finish the book. I can't wait to watch the movie adaptation, Smoke Signals. I hope it does the book justice!
Rating: 5A story collection of interconnected tales focusing of many of Alexie’s memorable characters from his novels, this sometimes charming, sometimes depressing book gives insight into the desolate conditions of Native American life on the Spokane Indian reservation. Clever and insightful, the stories focus on the challenges of living when so many of his characters are limited by outside influences such as racism, government policies, and alcohol. Alexie’s sarcasm and wit shines through his characters as the hurt each other as much as they try to help each other. Readers will willingly delve into the history and familial relationships of the characters as Alexie describes journeys of recovery, disappointment, extreme poverty, love, and death. Surprisingly uplifting- though there are as many stories to cry about as there are to revel in, Alexie’s book should be on every conscientious high school student’s reading list.
Rating: 4Alexie has a voice that is unique. I trust that his stories provide insight into the life of Indians in the contemporary Pacific Northwest, but I have no way to know.
Rating: 5This is one of Alexie’s first publishing successes. It is a collection of inter-connected short stories. There are several recurring characters, though each story can easily stand alone. The stories focus on the Native American residents of the Spokane Indian Reservation. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a storyteller who is frequently ignored, but is nevertheless compelled to relate his allegorical tales. Victor Joseph is another central character. We meet him in the first story as a nine-year-old trying to understand and save his parents from their alcohol dependence. Recurring themes include alcohol dependence, a desire to return to tradition, laughter shared with friends, the differences between reservation Indians and urban Indians, and, of course, basketball. Alexie began as a poet, and his writing reflects this. He has an ability to craft a phrase that will take your breath away.
Rating: 4Full of beautiful and haunting imagery that serves to punctuate the stories of Native Americans which are more often ignored than noticed. Occasional bouts of laughter are mixed with sad truths. Alexie's work is marked by flowing realism. Here is a book that should not be ignored.
Rating: 4Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spoke Indian Reservation in Wellpinit Washington, near Spokane. He has written nearly 20 books of fiction, poetry, short stories, and has had a couple films made based on his work. One of those films, Smoke Signals, was based on this book.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven.. This book is a series of shorts about living on or around the Res he grew up on. Every story is different, with ties linking back to each other. The characters know each other, though each story is told from the perspective of a different person.
The first story in the book, “Every little hurricane”, starts off with the description of a storm coming. You imagine a hurricane touching down in Washington state. The hurricane is not meteorological in nature, instead it is the fast moving storm of drunken violence that a child sees as his uncles fight drunkenly on the front lawn. The coming together of two forces of nature into an explosive and unstoppable swirling mess.
The movie Smoke signals was primarily based off the short story “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona.” The story’s axis is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is known as a story teller. He tells stories from his heart and soul. Everything has a tale to tell. some may not have happened, some are spiritual and will never be seen. Some of his narratives are visions of what he sees in others and how they would be had our world not decimated his.
The story begins when Victor learns that his father has died. His body is in Phoenix AZ and he enlists the help of Thomas to get to AZ to pick up his fathers ashes and belongings. Victor and Thomas have not been friends for many years. and there is tension between them. Victor needs his money to get there, but does not necessarily his company.
The Res is a tight community with everyone’s business hanging out in the open. Thomas was been sidelined from the other boys for most of his life due to his stories, so Victor is surprised to learn that Thomas has memories of his father. Victor asks him what he remembers about his father.
Excerpt
-Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story: “I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up. What the hell are you doing here? he asked me. I said, Waiting for a vision. Then your father said, All you’re going to get here is mugged. So he drove me over to Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”
Every story is a piece of a life, fictional, based on reality, or fully factual.. Captured in it’s sorrow and happiness, excitement and dismay.
This book, much as others I have read of Alexie’s makes my heart ache.
Rating: 4The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven.. This book is a series of shorts about living on or around the Res he grew up on. Every story is different, with ties linking back to each other. The characters know each other, though each story is told from the perspective of a different person.
The first story in the book, “Every little hurricane”, starts off with the description of a storm coming. You imagine a hurricane touching down in Washington state. The hurricane is not meteorological in nature, instead it is the fast moving storm of drunken violence that a child sees as his uncles fight drunkenly on the front lawn. The coming together of two forces of nature into an explosive and unstoppable swirling mess.
The movie Smoke signals was primarily based off the short story “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona.” The story’s axis is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is known as a story teller. He tells stories from his heart and soul. Everything has a tale to tell. some may not have happened, some are spiritual and will never be seen. Some of his narratives are visions of what he sees in others and how they would be had our world not decimated his.
The story begins when Victor learns that his father has died. His body is in Phoenix AZ and he enlists the help of Thomas to get to AZ to pick up his fathers ashes and belongings. Victor and Thomas have not been friends for many years. and there is tension between them. Victor needs his money to get there, but does not necessarily his company.
The Res is a tight community with everyone’s business hanging out in the open. Thomas was been sidelined from the other boys for most of his life due to his stories, so Victor is surprised to learn that Thomas has memories of his father. Victor asks him what he remembers about his father.
Excerpt
-Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story: “I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up. What the hell are you doing here? he asked me. I said, Waiting for a vision. Then your father said, All you’re going to get here is mugged. So he drove me over to Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”
Every story is a piece of a life, fictional, based on reality, or fully factual.. Captured in it’s sorrow and happiness, excitement and dismay.
This book, much as others I have read of Alexie’s makes my heart ache.
This is Alexie's breakthrough book that some call a collection of short stories and others a interconnected novel. No matter what you call it, its a wonderful and beautiful series of stories that tells of the lives of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest in the 70's and 80's. Some are just that, stories about life, like "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Anymore", where a couple of guys hang out on the porch and what the world go by at their feet. To the almost science-fiction story called "Distances", where Alexie examines what might happen after some apocalypse where the only survivors are Indians living on the "Rez".I'm not a poetry guy, but a lot of the time this book reads as prose for poetry. Excellent."Hell, my joy in winning is always much smaller than my pain in losing." - Introduction"It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on the table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope its good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." - The Only Traffic Signal..."The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive." - Family Portrait10/10S: 6/1/17 - 6/20/17 (21 Days)
Rating: 5This book wasn't bad, just a little hard to take sometimes. It is a collection of short stories about, mostly, boys and men on the Spokane Indian Reservation. There are tales about growing up, surviving alcoholism, not surviving alcoholism, basketball and fighting. The most heartbreaking story for me was The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is a born story teller, he has been telling stories for years. Then one day he stopped telling stories, at least out loud. What happened next was shocking and heartbreaking.I liked the first book I read by Alexie but it was in novel format. If I read any more by him I'll stick with the novels.My biggest problem of this collection was that there seemed to be some common threads but it was hard to track them and I often lost track of which named character went with which stories.
Rating: 3I loved everything about this book. I loved every story. I loved the language, and I loved the tales told in the language. I liked that Alexie makes his magic, his transformations, work on a sentence-by-sentence level, and yet the whole story can be transformational, too. My favorite character is Thomas Builds-the-Fire, hero of the stories "A Drug Called Tradition," "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," and "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire." He knows when to keep silent and when to speak, and when asked, "You don't really believe that shit?" he says, "Don't need to believe anything. It just is." Amen Thomas, Amen. And there's a very powerful story about Thomas's father in there, too, "A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result." But there were other special stories, too: "Imagining the Reservation," which was poetry more than story, or the story of James in "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," about a guy bringing up a baby, and then child, who fell from a great height in infancy and hit his head and doesn't talk--not at first, anyway. And then there's "A Good Story," where the story and the telling of it weave in themselves--it's a story told because the narrator's mother says, "You know, those stories you tell, they're kind of sad, enit?"--so he tells one that's happy, not sad.
So much love in these stories. Sorrow and anger, but most of all love. Great stuff.
Rating: 5So much love in these stories. Sorrow and anger, but most of all love. Great stuff.
The tone of these twenty-four stories is so consistent, with characters appearing in multiple stories, that it reads more like one long story with the protagonist switching from one character to another, Victor or his cousin, or Adrian, or Thomas Builds-the-Fire. What emerges is an impression of late 20th century life on the Spokane Reservation. And life there is both the same and different than it is elsewhere. Poor children grow up seeing their parents or their relatives as heroes. Some people drink too much; others drink diet-Pepsi. Some people are good at basketball. Others are good at stories. A few are good at school, though education rarely serves them well. But permeating everything is the question of what it means to be an Indian (the term that these characters use to refer to themselves) here, now, and tomorrow.Alexie’s writing is relaxed and accessible, even when it soars lyrically. The stories give the impression of simplicity — broad brush strokes, well-marked action, sentimental moral — but just below the surface there lies a painful personal encounter with history. When everything you do is another chapter in the tragic history of Native Americans, it’s hard to just play basketball. At times Alexie’s characters sound like they desperately want to escape their own cultural baggage, while at others they reconcile themselves to carrying the load at least to next rest station.I look forward to reading more from Sherman Alexie.Recommended.
Rating: 4Ball players and magicians (of all kinds) populate the 24 stories (the latest edition includes 2 which were originally cut). Both professions require their top talents to make the impossible look easy, exactly what Alexie does in this thematically unified collection of short stories. His prose is deceptively approachable: more Hemingway than Faulkner (it is not surprising he won the Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction). His words are precisely and carefully colloquial, the conversations so real you almost instantly forget you’re reading them and instead lean in to hear better. As in Hemingway, his characters partake of the sacraments of real life: in this case, fry bread and Diet Pepsi, whiskey and vodka, jokes and tears. Quickly calibrated to the rhythm of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, we settle in for a captivating story of kids and adults in dire straits surviving and dreaming, but that’s just the beginning. Like a boy hopping from rock to rock down the bank of a river, sometimes teetering, jumping left, jumping right, backing up, Alexie touches on history, myth, fantasy, emotion, storytelling and pain without missing a beat, without an awkward segue, without falling off moss-covered boulders of race and racism; all the while making his way down the bank of the river to the edge of the falls where the story comes together and pours down into a dark deep pool of resonating truth. Before the reader is aware anything extraordinary has occurred, Alexie has pulled a Camaro out of their ear and launched them bodily cross-court in a multidimensional slam dunk, all in ten pages. And then you start the next story.
Rating: 5
An excellent read, enit?
Rating: 5The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven contains a collection of short stories that are interconnected, all taking place on the same reservation and with various characters reappearing in multiple stories; in fact, about the first half of the book all centers around the character of Victor, although these stories alternate between first and third person points of view. The book is sharply funny at times, but this humor is offset by the largely bleak world portrayed and peopled with pessimistic outlooks. While I found Alexie's writing beautiful, the subject matter was so depressing and almost unremittingly without hope that I'd find it difficult to wholeheartedly recommend this book. To say I "enjoyed" it would be the wrong word choice, but I am glad that I read this book. Again, Alexie's writing style is noteworthy, so that made for an overall good reading experience. But the stories touched upon so many tragedies and problems that the few hints of hope dropped on rare occasions were not enough to bolster any optimism. This is definitely not a good read if you are looking for something light and fuzzy, but the beautiful writing may win you over if you're willing to dive into some deeper themes about isolation, poverty and its negative effects, tradition versus the future, racism, and so forth.
Rating: 4Like the character of Thomas the best.
Rating: 4I've read Sherman Alexie before, but this is going back in his writing history. It shows; the stories are more raw, which can be a good thing but also leaves plenty undone.
The pain of poverty and oppression of life on a reservation is more evident and his dry humour less so. Still, it's not one to miss.
Rating: 4The pain of poverty and oppression of life on a reservation is more evident and his dry humour less so. Still, it's not one to miss.
good, but i much prefer his absolutely true diary of part time indian. the illustrations and narrator's voice spoke to me more clearly.
Rating: 3“…I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive.”This collection of bittersweet tales, about life on a Spokane Indian Reservation, is a revelation. Alexie based these linked stories on his own experiences, growing up on the Rez and here he focuses on a small group of young people, struggling against a doomed life of poverty and alcoholism, trying to maintain their dignity, their culture and their dissipating dreams. There is humor here too, along with a dash of magical realism and if you peer closely, there are fragments of hope scattered like Fool’s Gold. A triumph.“Imagination is the politics of dreams. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.” “And finally this, when the sun was falling down so beautiful we didn’t have time to give it a name, she held the child born of white mother and red father and said,’ Both sides of this baby are beautiful’.”
Rating: 5Many of the stories are beautiful and a few hauntingly so. Unfortunately, as with all short story collections, some of the stories aren't all that good. Still, the number of good ones is larger than those that aren't, and there are a few that are more than just good. Recommended.
Rating: 4Bittersweet, often funny, vignettes about the harsh realities of life on the res.
Rating: 4A ten anniversary edition of Sherman Alexie’s first short story collection that focuses on the lives of Native Americans on a Spokane, Washington reservation. The book provides the reader with a sense of the importance of oral history to the traditions of Native American storytelling. The collection also exhibits how suffering is a constant presence in Native American lore as it is a constant presence in their daily lives. Another informative aspect of the work is that of magical realism—how it is not a technique employed by the storyteller, but rather inherently and inextricably ingrained in the culture, which is representative of the causes for conflict with characters from the white, dominant society.Wonderful collection.
Rating: 5So what is reservation realism? Through the course of these twenty-four interconnected short stories you learn of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and of the many Native Americans who call it home. Victor Joseph and his family and friends, like Thomas Builds-the-Fire are the narrative centers. The stories of the modern Indians are not very hopeful, and are drenched in alcoholism and all kinds of abuse. Despite these characters being the victims of circumstance, Sherman Alexie makes these stories easier to handle with humor and unforgettable characters.I’m usually a person who tries to block out reality and search for “happily ever afters,” but despite that I still loved this book. Alexie’s humorous voice and beautiful prose made this collection so dear to my heart. The characters in this book are searching for their different versions of happy and some might never get it, but that’s not stopping them from trying.One of my favorites from this book is the title story where Victor returns to the reservation from living in Seattle with his white girlfriend.The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is poetic and real. It’s the perfect Sherman Alexie book to start with, because once you read this one, you’ll want to read more.
Rating: 5Many others have reviewed this more eloquently than I can. Suffice to say - I love Alexie's writing. His turn of phrase, his humour, his portrayal of all the heartache and institutionalised prejudices, the longing and the sorrow, take me to a place i've not ever been to before. This is good heartfelt writing, and I'd put Sherman right up there with Thom Jones and Etgar Keret as one of the finest short story writers around in recent years. I will definitely be reading more of his books.
Rating: 4A collection of linked short stories -- some of them more brief character studies or bits of commentary than stories, really -- set on a Spokane Indian reservation, among characters suffering from poverty, alcoholism, and the dull ache of being crushed under the weight of someone else's history while slowly losing your own. I had somewhat mixed feelings about the writing; there are places where it feels almost a little too aggressively literary for my tastes, if that makes any sense. But at its best, it has a kind of bitter poetry, with a wry sense of humor underneath it, and a bleak sense of despair under that.Also, Alexie is a genius at titles.
Rating: 4I feel a bit mixed about this book, which is a collection of 22 connected short stories, some in first and some in third person. The book was on a list of recommended literary fiction. Picking it up, I realized that though I've read many a book by African Americans, several assigned in school, I couldn't recall ever reading a work of fiction by a Native American about Native Americans. I found myself jotting down the unfamiliar or recurring words and themes, wanting to learn more later: frybread, salmon, commodity cheese, alcoholism, diabetes, sweathouse, longhouse, HUD, fancydancing, owldancing, basketball, powwow, tipi, braids, ribbon shirt, five hundred years.That glimpse into another world, the world of the Spokane Indian Reservation, is a lot of what kept me reading, but I wondered at times when Alexie was giving us a look behind the stereotypes or playing with them. Especially given the touches of magical realism, I found myself wishing at times this was straight memoir and not (as admitted in the introduction) autobiographically inspired fiction.This is a very bleak book--so much of it dealt with drunkenness and alcoholism and the self-destructive behavior it engenders, sprinkled with historical grievance and the experience of present-day bigotry and a terrible poverty. The most upbeat tale in the book revolved around a terminally ill cancer patient: "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor." Two of the other standouts for me were "Fun House," about a women who finally has had it with the behavior of her husband and son, and "Indian Education." Here's a quote from that story that stuck with me: The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot. This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN. Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.I think that's a passage that captures a lot about the book. Clean, spare style, sometimes lyrical, spiked with a dark humor. I find myself dithering about the rating here. I don't know if it's a book that I can say I enjoyed, or one where the individual stories impressed--I think it's one where the whole is more than its parts, but the repeated (and repetitive) notes of hopelessness ground me down. However, the book did make me think and a time or two broke my heart a little, and I think it'll stay with me.
Rating: 3I read this book when it was first published but had lost my copy in a move and was happy when I recently found it again. I grew up in a small town not far from the Spokane Reservation and have several friends from there and had spent time there. Mr. Alexie's writing is so indicative of that place. Although the book is fiction, it is told with such realism. His writing style is unique and sparse but speaks volumes about the characters and gives a clear idea of what reservation life may be like. It gently speaks about issues relevant to modern Indians and native pride. It made me homesick but at the same time reminded me clearly why I left. A great book.
Rating: 4