Ten Little Indians
by Sherman Alexie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sherman AlexieEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-03-17
ISBN: 080214117X
Number of pages: 243
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Ten Little Indians
Book Review: The Purposes of a Less Hectic Introduction to American Indian Literature
Summary: 5 Stars
Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians is a great gathering of the writer's comical and deeply human short stories. This collection of nine short stories helps to accelerate a person who is not familiar with Native American literatures in their understanding of writing using the rhetoric and ideas of American Indian peoples. The book also helps to develop those with strong experience with American Indian texts knowledge through humor and advance their knowledge of the genre. The text focuses on themes such as hope, grief, ideas of gender, comedy, love, and religious meditations. The assortment of stories is not meant to overwhelm the reader's involvement with American Indian concepts and themes, but instead to serve as an introduction, which can be reflected upon about the uses of language and concepts within our society.
This group of different stories is organized in a way that assists the reader to enjoy the stories, comprehend the themes of American Indian literature, and not lose the reader's attention. Alexie includes only one short story over fifty pages and seven of the nine short stories are less than thirty pages long. The tales are of fiction, but in most of the cases throughout the book can be imagined as having the potential to happen within one's everyday life. The book aspires to make a stronger connection with those who already love American Indian literature and form a bond to those who have not yet experienced it. The stories are relatable and understandable to everyone and at the same time utilize Alexie's craft for using humor and American Indian conceptions to more greatly familiarize ideas to everyone. The text brings up many questions and obliges the reader to begin to answer how might these problems of alcoholism, truth, knowledge, grief, hope, gender, comedy, and love be approached and what are the best ways of discussing and answering them.
The work Ten Little Indians should be considered necessary reading for young adults who are looking to increase their knowledge and awareness of American Indian literatures. The reasoning behind this recommendation for young adults is the at times inappropriateness of the stories and whether or not younger children would be able to look past the ridiculousness and see the rhetoric of what is trying to be accomplished. Alexie writes, "Of course, all the doctors and nurses and mothers and fathers were half stunned by that vibrator. And it was a strange and difficult thing. It was sex that made our dying babies, and here was a huge old piece of buzzing sex I was trying to cast spells with.(100)" Although this passage demonstrates how American Indians use comedy to deal with grief it can be inappropriate to younger readers. The land can come to remind and instruct not just American Indians, but all human beings about our ties to the things that we produce either physically or imaginatively.
Summary of Ten Little Indians
Sherman Alexie is one of our most acclaimed and popular writers today. With Ten Little Indians, he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. In Alexie's first story, "The Search Engine," Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. In "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawnshop window the fancy-dance regalia that were stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother. Even as they often make us laugh, Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.Sherman Alexie, a gifted poet and storyteller, plows familiar yet fertile ground in his third collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians. The book contains nine stories populated by at least one American Indian (usually of Alexie's Spokane heritage, and mostly living in Seattle), but "little" is a bit of a misnomer; the book addresses human (not necessarily Indian), rituals, ceremony, love, loss, insecurity over life choices, and personal sacrifices. A lot of intense basketball is played, too.
When Alexie is at his best, his stories function at a profoundly sad level, where broken down characters are broken down even more, but are fierce-willed enough to attempt Phoenix-like transitions. Unfortunately, the weakest stories appear first, where characters and situations seem far too contrived or forced, the dialogue wooden, and questions or exclamatory sentences appear annoyingly in bunches. In the last half of the book, a married couple, once intensely in love but now lost in life's routines, deal with infidelity ("Do You Know Where I Am?"); a bright basketball prospect attempts a comeback--twenty years after giving up the game ("Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church?"); and a transient Indian finds his grandmother's regalia in a pawn shop and seeks to quickly raise the lofty purchase price ("What You Pawn I Will Redeem"). Brilliant turns of phrase abound, such as ceremonies being "pitiful cries to a disinterested God," or when a gym rat plays against "Basketball-Democrats who came to the court alone and ran with anybody and Basketball-Republicans who traveled in groups of five and only ran with each other." Ten Little Indians is an uneven collection, but contains some significant, memorable stories. --Michael Ferch
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