The Hiawatha, David Treuer's second novel, is a story about the delusions and redundancies of the American Dream as told through the countless "hidden tragedies" of those it excluded--generations of Native Americans who died building the huge skyscrapers and architectural monuments that litter the skyscape of American cities.
Treuer's search for the memories and intimacies buried under those concrete-and-mortar foundations takes him to the city of Minneapolis and to the tragic history of one family: the recently widowed Betty and her sons Simon and Lester, who have relocated to the city to make a fresh start. After Lester's inexplicable, strangely self-annhilating murder by Simon, we follow the strained "lines of tension, of anger and recrimination" between Simon and Betty, as the former sets off in an itinerant pursuit of the secret maps and symbolic routes of the city. In his criminal wanderings Simon composes a "grammar of the streets and lines", but, like the anonymous hordes who went before him, his contributions are destined to go "uncatalogued"--unacknowledged--as the pressures of the past catch up with him leading him to commit a second murder. Like the abandoned train that gives Treuer the title for his book, The Hiawathacomes to rest on a note of extinguished connections and possibility, derrailed by the freight of America's past. --David Marriott
Genre: Literary Fiction
Treuer's search for the memories and intimacies buried under those concrete-and-mortar foundations takes him to the city of Minneapolis and to the tragic history of one family: the recently widowed Betty and her sons Simon and Lester, who have relocated to the city to make a fresh start. After Lester's inexplicable, strangely self-annhilating murder by Simon, we follow the strained "lines of tension, of anger and recrimination" between Simon and Betty, as the former sets off in an itinerant pursuit of the secret maps and symbolic routes of the city. In his criminal wanderings Simon composes a "grammar of the streets and lines", but, like the anonymous hordes who went before him, his contributions are destined to go "uncatalogued"--unacknowledged--as the pressures of the past catch up with him leading him to commit a second murder. Like the abandoned train that gives Treuer the title for his book, The Hiawathacomes to rest on a note of extinguished connections and possibility, derrailed by the freight of America's past. --David Marriott
Genre: Literary Fiction
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for David Treuer's The Hiawatha