The Round House (Louise Erdrich)
J'avais noté plusieurs titres de Louise Erdrich, mais ce n'est que cette année que je me suis enfin décidée à découvrir cette auteure. Evidemment, j'ai choisi une histoire dure et violente. Malgré cet aspect, je dois dire que j'ai beaucoup aimé ce livre vraiment passionnant.
La mère du narrateur, Joe, 13 ans, est brutalement violée et battue par un blanc aux abords de la « maison ronde », une structure cérémonielle qui se trouve sur la réserve Ojibwe dans le Dakota du Nord. Avec l'aide de ses amis, Joe décide de mener sa propre enquête et de ne pas s'en remettre uniquement à la justice. En effet, le coupable sait qu'il ne sera pas poursuivi car il a commis le crime en dehors des terrains de la réserve. La police tribale ne peut donc rien contre lui. Le portrait du coupable est une des faiblesses du roman. Oui, il a une histoire. Oui, il a ses raisons. Mais il n'y a rien derrière. Louise Erdrich n'avait peut-être pas envie de s'attarder sur ce personnage.
Le sujet est difficile, mais Louise Erdrich arrive à nous faire rire parfois grâce aux « méfaits » des amis de Joe. Je pense particulièrement à la scène où le prêtre poursuit un des adolescents après la confession.
Dans l'ensemble, le roman est réussi même si la fin est un peu trop américaine ; vous savez, une fin où la morale est sauve.
Je recommande en tout cas.
Quelques extraits :
I nodded. All day my mother's words had seeped up through the surface of all I did, like a dark oil.
In her right mind, she never would have described all that happened in front of you.
I had to know. It's good I know, I said.
But it was poison in me. I was just beginning to feel that.
You've been into my dad's old Cohen Handbook. You'll be a lawyer if you don't go to jail first. He poked at the fuzzy black noodles. Take Johnson v. McIntosh. It's 1823. The United States is forty-seven years old and the entire country is based on grabbing Indian land as quickly as possible in as many ways as can be humanly devised. Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody's in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family's fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government. Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox.(...) Justice Marshall went out of his way to strip away all Indian title to all lands viewed—i.e., "discovered"—by Europeans. He basically upheld the medieval doctrine of discovery for a government that was supposedly based on the rights and freedoms of the individual.
That we have a real grocery store on our reservation is no small thing. It used to be that, besides the commodity warehouse, food came from the tiny precursor store—Puffy's Place. The old store sold mainly nonperishable items—tea, flour, salt, peanut butter—plus surplus garden vegetables or game meat. It sold beadwork, moccasins, tobacco, and gum. For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt. But with our own grocery now, run by our own tribal members and hiring our own people to bag and stock, we had something special.
Elle descend juste après ce qu'on trouve dans le supermarché... Que des denrées de second choix.
I wasn't exactly starting from scratch when it came to being a Catholic. Priests and nuns have been here since the beginning of the reservation. Even the most traditional Indians, the people who'd kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school, or had made friends with some of the more interesting priests, as Mooshum had for a time, or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.
Doe announced lost children. Papoose on the loose! Here's a little boy looking for his family. Don't be scared when you come claim him, Mama, he's not covered with war paint. It's just ketchup and mustard. He's been fixing himself to face the Fifth Cavalry over at the hot dog stand.
http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/2905/Louise_Erdrich/index.aspx
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