Little Fire

The Painted Drum

Posted by Boo , Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:09 PM

Louise Erdrich must know me. I have never been able to explain why I love her books, exactly. Now, reading The Painted Drum, I think I must have read all of her other books so I could read this one, now. It's a healing book, but it's a hurting book, too. I'm writing here now because I've had to stop reading for a few minutes. I've had a bit of an anxiety attack, I guess. Melodramatic? Maybe. But this book is singing over deep, old wounds. It's also holding a mirror before me under flourescent lights, and I've needed to give myself an unflinching look for some time, now.

I've stopped to put some powerful passage or other from this book on this page for several days, but haven't yet done it. I am transcribing the following passage. It will probably only resonate with me, but after trying and failing to explain the disconnect I feel from my father, and maybe everyone in the world but my Little Fire, Louise explained it to me...

Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and sister back. She hadn't allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her, Shawnee, you saved them. Not look at her with eyes that said, You burnt the house down.

Italics are Erdrich's.

I just needed to post this. Maybe I'll be able to make sense of it later. Not now. There is just so much there.

I will not be broken forever.
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I've been reading about The Painted Drum. This strikes at the heart of what I'm feeling, these days...

WOODROOF: What Erdrich has given us is a picture of Faye's profound solitude and struggle to connect with another person.

Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties even to indulge the unnecessary and maybe insulting secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he's near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain, unsolvable, alive.'

But her character learns, in the end...

Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart.'

Yeah...