Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sherman AlexieEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-07
ISBN: 0802141900
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Grove Press
Product features:
- Winner of American Book Ward
- Winner of the Murray Morgan Prize
- "An Important voice in American literature" - The Boston Globe
Book Reviews of Reservation Blues
Book Review: Writing from the Heart
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most powerful novels that I have read in a long time. In this novel, Robert Johnson (the blues guitarist who reportedly made a Faustian bargain in order to play the guitar so well) shows up on the Spokane Indian Reservation looking for a magical healer who can finally separate him from his cursed guitar. Johnson gives his guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who in turn starts a reservation band called Coyote Springs with Junior Polatkin and Victor Joseph (characters who make appearances in short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heavenand the film Smoke Signals [VHS]). Later, the band gets two female backup singers from the Flathead Reservation in Montana. The band doesn't have much in the way of talent, but the guitar, which seems possessed by some spirit, leads the way, wowing audiences, and even causing spontaneous combustion. News of the band travels off the reservation and Coyote Springs start to get invited to play at various venues. Their travails culminate in an offer to go to New York to record a demo for a major recording company. Can these reservation Indians make it to the big time? What will they have to give up to succeed in big music? The novel tells the story of how this band forms around the mysterious appearance of Johnson on the reservation, their goofball journeys from one gig to another, and the denoument, when they get their big break and everything falls apart.
Alexie is one of the few writers who writing unwaveringly comes from the heart. His writing is simultaneously very warm, funny, and poetic as it is bittersweet, biting, and sharp. It aches with historical and personal betrayal and longing for "gone" drunk fathers and Indians of long ago. Being Indian means coming from a damaged culture, and, frequently, damaged families scarred by poverty, alcoholism, and loss. The story of the band is a compilation of the stories of its individual members: each has a heartbreaking story of their own to tell; each wrestles with the ghosts of the past. Some, like Thomas, make it to the other side of grief and loss while others do not. The strange thing is that despite all of the sad stories that this novel has to tell, it keeps you laughing throughout. It's that bittersweet quality that makes this novel an absolute gem that I will come back to again and again.
The novel is chock-full of music, song lyrics, and poetry. Robert Johnson's blues and mysterious story forms the backdrop of the novel as do the numerous historical betrayals of Indians by white men. (For example, the recording studio executives who recruit Coyote Springs are named after Generals Sheridan and Wright, whose scorched earth tactics during the nineteenth-century Great Plains Indian Wars resulted in the massacre of thousands of people and horses.) Each chapter opens with lyrics from Coyote Springs, which I've just discovered, you can actually listen to on the album RESERVATION BLUES The Soundtrack, a musical collaboration between Alexie and Jim Boyd. Now that I've listened to the music, I can't wait to reread the novel, with my soundtrack playing in the background of my mind.
--Also posted on my blog ([...])
Summary of Reservation Blues
Sherman Alexie has been hailed as “one of the best writers we have? (The Nation). Reservation Blues is his “irresistibly stunning debut novel? (San Francisco Chronicle). One day legendary bluesman Robert Johnson appears on the Spokane Indian reservation, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. When he passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire—storyteller, misfit, and musician—a magical odyssey begins that will take them from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan. This is a fresh, luxuriantly comic tale of power, tragedy, and redemption among contemporary Native Americans.
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