The blend of murder mystery and Native American legend can be intriguing, but Elsie, who never speaks for herself, remains...
A stranger visits a small town to uncover the truth about the short, tragic life of a Native American woman in 1960s South Dakota.
Born into poverty to a Dakota mother and a black father she never met, Elsie Roberts never fit in with the Native American or white communities. Cleaning houses and looking after her sick mother, Elsie’s life takes a terrible turn one winter day when she is brutally raped and left for dead by four joyriding white teenagers. She beats the odds and regains consciousness to discover not only that her mother has died—but that the boys who hurt her were killed in a car wreck the very night of her attack. After she recovers, a local church intervenes and gets the vulnerable-seeming young woman a new job in a nearby town where she keeps to herself but seems to find some happiness doing beadwork and receiving visitors. Striking yet childlike, Elsie also has a strange effect on some of the local men, including the young Catholic priest she works for, and the rancher husband of a well-meaning white woman who befriends her. After Elsie is murdered while walking home one night, the gossiping about her only intensifies when the top two suspects in her slaying are found dead. Could it be that Elsie was really the seductive embodiment of the “Deer Woman,” an avenging force in native legend? Or just a lost soul who never had a chance? And what about the mummified baby found in her cabin? Told via flashbacks to an unnamed narrator somehow connected to Elsie, this frequently sad story is most interesting when showing the intersection of modern and Native life, such as Elsie’s attempts to tan her own deer hides using ancient methods.
The blend of murder mystery and Native American legend can be intriguing, but Elsie, who never speaks for herself, remains an enigma, making it hard to see her as anything other than a victim.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-9865-X
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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