Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids

Jack continues with a final look at Burns and Language –

Robert Burns as previously explained was a complex character, and we tend to see him from a modern point of view. He died aged 38 which isn’t terribly unusual for the 1700s, plus his medical treatment was completely inappropriate for what he likely suffered from (rheumatoid arthritis).

During his brief life he gained quite a reputation beyond his songs and poems. He was definitely a romantic and fathered a number of children by different women and his wife Jean Armour took on some of them. This was also not unusual then. However many of his songs show a real empathy for the situation of women in general, and despite contemplating taking a job on a plantation in Jamaica he also wrote a great song from the point of view of a newly arrived slave in Virginia. Yes – complicated!

He wrote songs and poems in support of the French and American revolutions, but ended up working for the British government as a customs officer. This led to his reputation as a drinker –

Back then if you apprehended a boat smuggling alcohol and you were in charge you could keep a share of the cargo, so it’s hardly surprising –

I think despite all his human failings he is loved and respected for a number of reasons:

He epitomized humanity including its failings.
He demonstrated empathy for all living things – women, slaves – mice and men.
His writings influenced important folk in Russia and in America during their significant growing pains.
He made people around the world curious about the Scots language and helped keep it alive.
He kept the notion of ‘Scottishness’ alive when it was in great danger of being subsumed into Englishness or even Britishness.
Almost everyone knows books and movies that borrow his words – ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ etc.
Every year at midnight on December 31^st all around the world people of all countries sing the song he collected and added to.

Guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

Wow. What an amazing, wonderful, relevant and timely, well-written book. And what a very different book for Louise Erdrich!

I have read many of her books and have always decided to read her when I was prepared to engage in either dark or Native American experience or dark, Native American experience…but almost always (minus one book!) able to trust that I’d be engaging with smart and really good writing and that I’d come out on the other end better for the experience and the time spent there. (Okay, that one book was Future Home of the Living God; maybe I just didn’t get it.)

But opening up The Sentence has taken me on a tremendous adventure and, I think, directly into Louise Erdrich herself. She even terms it, albeit in the voice and term of a different situation, “autofiction.” I get it! Autobiographical fiction…not memoir but a special blurring of autobiographical fact but spun as fiction. This is the first I’ve seen the term, but it is completely apt! And it gives me the means to re-see and talk anew about, say, Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. I think that’s what that is, too.

So this is all to say that Louise Erdrich is a character in this novel…that is written by Louise Erdrich. And the bookstore that Louise Erdrich owns, Birchbark Books, located in St. Paul, Minnnesota, is both real and a specific setting in this novel. And I LOVE that I have been there multiple times, know it exactly as it is described here, have never seen Ms. Erdrich there herself, unfortunately, though I have absolutely entered the store with hope of that every single time. And I have eaten multiple brunches at the elegant and simple restaurant just two doors away that is also mentioned here, along with the school across the little busy road. So in all of these things, there is truth and reality and fact. And that is the case, also, with much that the book so relevantly for its contemporary and current setting of time also discusses: the pandemic, the shutting down of all things, the “abundance of caution” with which many of us proceed, the strange dismissal by so many of science and the horror of their choosing conspiracy and some strange idolatry over everyone else’s desire to do right by and for alllllll involved. Okay, in all honesty, those issues are actually presented more subtly and are more PC in the book than I feel them myself. Erdrich is so smart. The novel does have a thoughtful character assert that: “I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell” (347).

This book is set in and addresses the realities, too, of George Floyd’s death and all that followed, police officers and that work as a reality and conundrum at the moment, including this novel’s main character’s husband being a former tribal officer and his grandmother’s warning him long ago to “Watch out…for when that uniform starts to wear you” (283). Wow.

Additionally, I am entangled in notes of all of the authors and books that are mentioned within this book, that wonderful thing happening when authors reference titles and authors known to the reader so engaged anew in the mind of the author and feeling that very special reading kismet as well as frantically wishing to also read and soon everything mentioned not already read or shared by the reader.

And there are so many other good things layered in this book–families and culture and tradition and love and heartbreak and most especially spirits–and which, if you read my reviews with any consistency, you know I never reveal all details thereof, for I never aim to spoil but to strongly encourage you, in this case, to also read the book…so that we can talk about it together and share our reading heads and reading hearts and build a community and a bridge to an even better way of living…together.

Read this one and soon. I do not think you will be disappointed.