Winter’s Tale. A writer’s work should not be fixed. Moving, that of Louise Erdrich is made up of a patchwork of texts that she assembles and repairs, sometimes forming an original literary object, like Like footsteps in the snowa volume bringing together, according to the author’s wishes, two texts published twenty years apart: Tracespublished in 1990 under the title The hanging forest (Robert Laffont), and Four soulsfor the first time translated into French. At the center of their plot, the same heroine, Fleur Pillager, the last survivor of her lineage, and the same narrator, Nanapush (alternating with two other narrators), who follows Fleur’s bumpy trajectory, from the Anishinaabe reserve where he discovers her, more dead than alive and saves her life, in Minneapolis where she will try to satisfy her thirst for revenge.
From the first lines, Louise Erdrich’s talents as a storyteller wrap us in a coat that allows us to face the rigors of history. “We began to die before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall one after the other. It was astonishing that so many of us were still left to die. For those who had survived the spot disease from the south, a long fight in the west of the Sioux country where we had signed the treaty, then the east wind which had thrown us into exile in a storm of official papers , what was coming down from the north in 1912 seemed inconceivable. » You North, “the invisible illness” arrived, decimating Fleur’s family and a people whose lands had already been confiscated and distributed to settlers from the east. After being treated by Nanapush, Fleur goes to Argus to work in a butcher’s shop, “hired for her strength”. Following poker games which she wins, Fleur is raped by the losers. The next day, Argus is hit by a storm which causes no casualties, except for the men who attacked Fleur. Her legend soon precedes her, but does not dissuade Eli Kashpaw from loving her. A daughter is born, to whom Nanapush recounts her mother’s odyssey in hopes of reconciling them after Fleur places her in a state institution.
The heritage and transmission of a decimated culture, assimilation considered as a means of survival, are at the heart of this diptych, the first part of which confronts the points of view of Nanapush, Anishinabe fighting for the preservation of his culture, and Pauline, mixed race denying her Native American ancestry. The tension between these two visions – the stories sometimes contradicting each other without the reader knowing who is telling the truth – questions the way in which history is understood by those it mistreats. The violence of the events is opposed by the invisible presences of the deceased and of spirits accompanying the story, light breezes caressing the ramifications of the plot or tornadoes sowing devastation in their path. For readers who have not yet had the chance to know the work of Louise Erdrich, we recommend discovering it alongside more recent texts, such as The one who watches or The sentence (Albin Michel, 2022 and 2023), with less complex narrative structures. For fans, Like footsteps in the snow will help you wait before the French edition of The Mighty Redhis new novel which has just been published in the United States.
Louise Erdrich
Like footsteps in the snow
Albin Michel
Translated from English (United States) by Michel Lederer
Edition: 15,000 copies.
Price: €23.9; 448 pp.
ISBN: 9782226469656
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