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Chargement... La Sentence (2021)par Louise Erdrich
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The Sentence covers a lot of ground, from ghosts to the joys and trials of bookselling to the lives of Native Americans and inmates doing hard time. And that’s just the first half of the story, before the pandemic, before George Floyd. The novel gets a little baggy after a while, as Erdrich struggles to juggle multiple plotlines. But the virtues here so outweigh the flaws that to complain seems almost like ingratitude ... The Sentence is rife with passages that stop you cold, particularly when Erdrich...articulates those stray, blindsiding moments that made 2020 not only tragic but also so downright weird and unsettling ... There is something wonderfully comforting in the precise recollection of such furtive memories, like someone quietly opening a door onto a little slice of clarity ... The Sentence testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives ... There are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of The Sentence, that’s plenty. The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet ... Such is the mystery of Erdrich’s work, and The Sentence is among her most magical novels, switching tones with the felicity of a mockingbird ... The great arc of [the] first 30 pages — zany body-snatching! harrowing prison ordeal! opposites-attract rom-com! — could have provided all the material needed for a whole novel, but Erdrich has something else in mind for The Sentence: This is a ghost story — though not like any I’ve read before. The novel’s ectoplasm hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy ... Moving at its own peculiar rhythm with a scope that feels somehow both cloistered and expansive, The Sentence captures a traumatic year in the history of a nation struggling to appreciate its own diversity. The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual); but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles; ambitious in its immediacy... All is tumultuous in The Sentence — the spirits, the country, Erdrich's own style. One of the few constants this novel affirms is the power of books. Tookie recalls that everyone at Birchbark is delighted when bookstores are deemed an "essential" business during the pandemic, making books as important as "food, fuel, heat, garbage collection, snow shoveling, and booze." No arguments here. And I'd add The Sentence to the growing list of fiction that seems pretty "essential" for a deeper take on the times we're living through. Clearly having been written in the midst of the events that overtake its characters—the coronavirus and then the Twin Cities' eruption over the murder of George Floyd—the book has a sometimes disconcerting you-are-there quality, which can seem out of step with the story proper, though the events do amplify the novel's themes of social and personal connection and dissociation, and of the historic crimes and contemporary aggressions, micro and overt, perpetrated in the name of white supremacy. What does hold everything together here, fittingly enough in a novel so much of which takes place in a bookstore, is the connection made through reading; and one of the great charms of The Sentence for an avid reader is the running commentary on books—recommendations, judgments, citations, even, at the end, a Totally Biased List of Tookie's favorites. Few novelists can fuse the comic and the tragic as beautifully as Louise Erdrich does, and she does it again in The Sentence ... No one escapes heartache in The Sentence, but mysteries old and new are solved, and some of the broken places made stronger. The Sentence, a book about the healing power of books, makes its own case splendidly. Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Et à l’heure de commencer cette note de lecture, c’est le même état d’incertitude, je ne sais pas non plus comment la commencer. La Sentence est en effet un livre qui part un peu dans tous les sens. Il commence en promettant une histoire de rédemption d’une jeune fille un peu paumée par les livres (un joli poncif de la littérature facile donc on craint un peu le pire…), mais non finalement on se retrouve complètement autre part (en terme de genre littéraire), la rédemption a eu lieu, et on est dans le quotidien d’une famille d’autochtones (c’est du Louise Erdrich tout de même…). Une famille un peu bancale, avec ses démons hérités de l’enfance, ses difficultés à trouver la juste distance par rapport à sa culture, la discrimination latente… Et puis là-dessus arrive un brin de réalisme magique, et puis on se rend compte que l’histoire commence en novembre 2019, et que donc certaines réalités vont rattraper nos personnages, d’autant que, je ne l’ai pas dit, l’histoire se passe à Minneapolis. Ajoutons à cela que Louise Erdrich tient elle aussi une librairie à Minneapolis, et que dans le livre il y a un personnage qui s’appelle Louise, qui écrit des livres dont un qui s’appelle [Celui qui veille] (tiens, je n’en ai pas déjà parlé plus haut?), cela fait beaucoup…
Cela fait aussi un livre inclassable, qui emprunte aux codes de tous les genres, et étrangement, cela se tient de bout en bout. J’ai lu ce livre lentement, parce qu’il faut une certaine attention pour suivre Louise Erdrich dans le cheminement qu’elle suit, pour donner aux personnages le temps de se déployer, de dévoiler leur complexité.
C’est un roman assez déroutant, mais cette façon que l’autrice a de jouer avec son lecteur est assez agréable si on se prend au jeu et permet à Louise Erdrich de dire des choses difficiles sans « plomber » le texte ou l’histoire. Même si je pense que ce roman ne plaira pas à tout le monde, pour ma part, je l’ai beaucoup apprécié, tant du point de vue de sa forme que du point de vue de son fond. Car ce livre n’est pas qu’on jeu littéraire, c’est aussi une peinture sombre d’une Amérique toujours et encore malade de ses mêmes démons, le constat d’une société qui n’arrive pas à se délester de ses innombrables fardeaux. C’est sombre, c’est dur, mais c’est aussi plein d’ironie, c’est grinçant et c’est une très belle lecture.