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The Sentence: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 (originale 2021; edizione 2023)

di Louise Erdrich (Autore)

Utenti	Recensioni	Popolarità	Media voti	Citazioni
1,869	98	8,981	(4.07)	188
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.… (altro)

▾Informazioni sul libro

Utente:	Caroline_McElwee
Titolo:	The Sentence: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022
Autori:	Louise Erdrich (Autore)
Info:	Corsair (2023), Edition: 1, 400 pages
Collezioni:	La tua biblioteca
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Etichette:	novel, US, 2023

Informazioni sull'opera

The Sentence di Louise Erdrich (2021)

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FleetSparrow, FairDonna, Quizlitbooks, biblioteca privata, Rosalind, tuesandfri, artsymama03, JoeB1934, jennifer.kozelou

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▾Recensioni di utenti

Inglese (95) Olandese (1) Francese (1) Tutte le lingue (97)

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1-5 di 97 (prossimo | mostra tutto)

Well drawn characters led by protagonist, share relatable but special experiences working in a book store in Minneapolis during the summer of 2020. (

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Lylee | Apr 7, 2024 |

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.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written. (

)

jepeters333 | Feb 25, 2024 |

I had a love hate experience with this book! Its confusing, gripping, happy, sad... I could go on and on. I didn't love it, but I couldn't put it down. I love a book that really makes you think, and this one definitely did. (

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mjphillips | Feb 23, 2024 |

I'm not sure why I bought this book, it was on my wishlist but I can no longer remember what prompted me to add it. I wish I hadn't. One of the few professionally published books that I very nearly didn't finish at all, and actively disliked the last quarter.

Initially it had some promise. The heroine is one Tookie a Native American newly released from prison, harshly sentenced for a crime she was thoroughly guilty of, and then very suddenly married to the policeman who arrested her. There's a little bit of a redemption arc, as Tookie pull sher life together and starts working in a bookstore interacting well with staff and customers. And then from halfway through it just gets weirder and weirder. Tookie believes she's being haunted by a ghost of one of her customers who'd been culturally appropriating Native ancestry - Tookie and the author of course being somewhat gatekeeping on who is allowed to be a 'real' Native American. From this low it then wallows in a turgid recounting of life with covid and Grant Lloyd.

Yes these were traumatic times, and if you feel the need to write about them to relieve your suffering of those times, then that's fine. Please don't stuff such writing into the back of a novel into which it has no other connection. It was bad enough already. (

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reading_fox | Feb 16, 2024 |

Good book I just didn’t love it. (

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xfitkitten | Feb 14, 2024 |

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1-5 di 97 (prossimo | mostra tutto)

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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.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaNew York Times, Malcolm Jones (sito a pagamento) (Nov 9, 2021)

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.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaWashington Post, Ron Charles (sito a pagamento) (Nov 9, 2021)

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.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaNational Public Radio (NPR), Maureen Corrigan (Nov 8, 2021)

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.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaMinneapolis Star Tribune, Ellen Akins (Nov 5, 2021)

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.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaTampa Bay Times, Colette Bancroft (Nov 4, 2021)

It is a ghost story, a love letter to the written word, an exploration of Indigenous identity, an urgent response to a volatile and cataclysmic world. At once brutally realistic and weirdly metafictional, it burns with moral passion, brims with humor, and captivates with its striking and irresistible voice ... People’s capacity for change, their ability to transcend the limits of the sentences they receive, to exceed the sentences used to sum them up, to use the sentences they read and speak as portals onto a larger life and an avenue towards freedom, is one of Erdrich’s most moving ethical points here ... The Sentence, is a wonder, and Erdrich a writer of wonders.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaBoston Globe, Priscilla Gilman (sito a pagamento) (Nov 4, 2021)

Erdrich is the rare writer who can straddle the line between the real world and the spiritual seemingly effortlessly ... a love letter to the written word, to books, and to those who sell them. It’s also a chronicle of a tumultuous year. It’s a ghost story. It’s the story of how racism haunts America. It is all these things wrapped in a novel that is cluttered in the way a great bookstore is cluttered with treasures and little gems hidden behind every page.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaNew York Journal of Books, Susan Petrone (Nov 1, 2021)

A scintillating story about a motley group of Native American booksellers haunted by the spirit of a customer ... More than a gripping ghost story, this offers profound insights into the effects of the global pandemic and the collateral damage of systemic racism. It adds up to one of Erdrich’s most sprawling and illuminating works to date.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaPublisher's Weekly (Aug 11, 2021)

Erdrich turns her eye to various kinds of hauntings, all of which feel quite real to the affected characters ... The novel’s humor is mordant ... Erdrich’s love for bookselling is clear, as is her complicated affection for Minneapolis and the people who fight to overcome institutional hatred and racism. A novel that reckons with ghosts—of both specific people and also the shadows resulting from America’s violent, dark habits.

aggiunto da Lemeritus | modificaKirkus Reviews (Aug 4, 2021)

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▾Informazioni generali

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Titolo canonico

Titolo originale

The Sentence

Titoli alternativi

Data della prima edizione

2021

Personaggi

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(mostra tutte le voci 10)

Luoghi significativi

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Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Eventi significativi

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Murder of George Floyd

COVID-19 pandemic

Film correlati

Epigrafe

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From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence. - Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor

Dedica

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To everyone who has worked at Birchbark Books, to our customers, and to our ghosts.

Incipit

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While in prison, I received a dictionary.

Citazioni

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The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day.

Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.

Suddenly he had a wise preternatural look. It was as though he’d only pretended to be an asshole in life but was really a shamanic priest.

Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned. I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.

But in the despair of routine any aberration is a radiant signal.

(mostra tutte le voci 28)

Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.

On top of my Lazy Stack was Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I was reading again because I liked Rebecca—bad Rebecca—better than the goody-goody shrinking narrator. But in spite of the lush descriptions of Manderley, which had been my sinister dream place while in prison, I soon threw down Rebecca. I didn’t need Manderley anymore. I had Minneapolis.

Do you have a minute?’ I was irritated, as if I’d been fooled. ‘No, I’m trying to read Rebecca.’ ‘That’s about bones, ultimately.’ ‘The bones of a woman murdered for having sex and being strong.’

‘Some people are slippery,’ Jackie went on. ‘They are difficult to deal with after death. They don’t behave like dead people. They are death resisters.’

I began immediately to babble. ‘But I mean, the more I found out people’s sentences, the more random I realized sentencing even is. There were baby killers who only served seven years and women who killed abusive, kill-or-be-killed husbands who were in for life. There was a woman who bought a gun for a guy who used it in a murder. She got a longer sentence than the guy who pulled the trigger.’

What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book—a written sentence, a very powerful sentence—killed Flora.’ Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. ‘I wish I could write a sentence like that.’

People were hoarding, that was to be expected, so I went out shopping for things to hoard.

For some reason, nobody was hoarding taco shells, so I bought five boxes.

I wondered if I could make a mask out of a cabbage leaf. For some reason, nobody was hoarding cabbages.

When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.

‘Why marry a ceremony man unless I can rely on you to ceremony me out of trouble?’ I said. ‘I’ve asked myself that same question,’ said Pollux. ‘Why marry a bookseller unless you want to buy a book?’

‘We shouldn’t go there. We’ll be sorry in the morning.’ ‘It is morning,’ said Hetta. ‘And when has being sorry in the morning ever stopped you?’ I had to think for a while. ‘Never,’ I said.

Hetta might say books were just property. Stores too. That sure, every small enterprise was somebody’s dream but George Floyd had lost his dream. It didn’t fit together so neatly when it got this personal.

Pollux told us that a couple nights ago AIM patrol had caught some towhead Wisconsin boys trying to rob a liquor store. ‘They came down hard on those boys,’ he said to Hetta. ‘You could call it cruel and unusual.’ ‘Dad? What’d they do?’ ‘Made them call their moms.’

We may be a striver city of blue progressives in a sea of red, but we are also a city of historically sequestered neighborhoods and old hatreds that die hard or leave a residue that is invisible to the well and wealthy, but chokingly present to the ill and the exploited.

Pollux had known good people, seen lives saved by his fellow patrol officers. So who was doing the beating? The uniforms or those inside them? How was it that protests against police violence showed how violent police really were?

Suffering opened around me. Another woman screamed for her son, yet another for her daughter. I realized that the women whose sons had been beaten, merely beaten and left alive, were weeping with gratitude. How’s that.

At the time, Gruen’s country had contained the virus. Our country had fanned its spread and Americans were now banned from crossing borders around the world. Now Gruen was trapped in the United States with a bunch of pariahs, in a city slashed with fire and ash, in a country led by a filthy old con artist.

In the rest of the world, things did not calm down—things continued to falter. By sheer repetition our highest elected official was wearing false grooves into people’s brains that they interpreted as truth.

Walking back to the benches, I heard Penstemon say, ‘I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell.’

You can’t get over things you do to other people as easily as you get over things they do to you.

I put my hand on my chest and closed my eyes. I have a Dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered.

I could also feel how my heart had cracked like a windshield, the minute split traveling slowly through the glass. I should do something. I should get it repaired, I thought. The crevice was edging deeper.

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