As her tales develop, however, these people become involved in events and perceptions that strike the reader as quite extraordinary-as exaggerated or heightened in ways that may seem deluded or mystical, grotesque or magical, comic or tragic, or some strange mixture of these. Erdrich’s stories generally begin with a realistic base of ordinary people, settings, and actions. Erdrich’s fiction further resembles Faulkner’s in that the experience of her characters includes a broad spectrum of experience “from the mundane to the miraculous,” as one critic put it. Like Faulkner, Erdrich created a gallery of diverse characters spanning several generations, using multiple points of view and shifting time frames. The ways in which Erdrich brought this region to literary life have been favorably compared by critics to the methods and style of William Faulkner, who created the mythical Yoknapatawpha County out of his rich sense of rural Mississippi. In a 1985 essay titled “ Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place,” Louise Erdrich (7 June 1954-) states that the essence of her writing emerges from her attachment to her North Dakota locale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |