THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS

Love, pain, and anger radiate from every word of this strikingly beautiful and tragic memoir of an American Indian.

Born on a Navajo reservation in 1950, Nasdijj was raised by alcoholic parents and has lived with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) all his life. For the author, who has worked as a journalist and a teacher, reading is “extremely hard work. Things appear upside down. Writing is worse.” His language flows with incredible elegance and simplicity, and his passions are harnessed by a pure clarity of speech and thought. He has a love-hate relationship with his past and continuously mourns and embraces his own history, remarking that “My repetitions are my failures and my songs.” In stories that often drift into poetry, Nasdijj speaks with tenderness and rage of the genocide he has witnessed; he observes the poverty, the lack of education, the abuse, and the disease that his people continue to suffer. History haunts him, awake and asleep. He writes of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who died of FAS at six and whose ghost still visits his dreams. Writing in pencil on legal pads, he works at picnic tables in a state park, molding homelessness into words. His narrative is not guided by chronology of events. Instead, stories that could each stand on their own are woven together with patterns of image and metaphor: he drifts back and forth in time, mixing memories of his son’s short life with moments from his own adolescence, and sharing the times and travels that have shaped him. One of his more touching recollections is his account of the rebellious and illiterate young boy whom he took under his wing in an attempt to keep him out of trouble with the law. In Nasdijj’s telling, the smallest gesture of responsibility on the boy’s part (ordering his own lunch in a restaurant) resounds with the victorious force of battle won against the odds.

A triumph of a remarkable spirit.