The Sentence

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence took me to a different planet and a different time: November 2019 to November 2020, in Minneapolis. Towards the end of the novel, the main character, Tookie, says, « I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year. » This is how I feel, too, about 2020!

Tookie is an Ojibwe woman who has spent six years in prison because of a stupid crime she didn’t even realize she was committing. She now lives with a good man, Pollux, an ex-cop, and she works at a small, independent bookstore in Minneapolis, with a few other interesting women.

In November 2019, one of the bookstore’s customers dies unexpectedly and starts haunting Tookie at the bookstore. Soon, too, family drama begins, and then the Covid-19 pandemic starts and the situation gets bad really quickly. And in the spring of 2020, in addition to everything else, George Floyd is killed, in Minneapolis, and the whole city (and country) erupts in anger while the pandemic is still raging.

This is not a « funny ghost story. » It’s the story of people who are trying to reconcile the many different cultures they come from, who are painfully decimated by the virus, and who join forces with the oppressed of all colours to burn a city enraged against the system, against police brutality.

It was extremely interesting to hear the perspective of this Native American family (and friends) when the George Floyd tragedy happened, and things became really complicated because Tookie’s husband was an ex-cop, so he had to work really hard to understand why people, including his own family, were so against the police.

A few times, I thought that the pandemic and George Floyd stories didn’t belong in this novel, because they had nothing to do with the ghost. However, I now see this novel as more of an « a year in the life of Tookie and Flora » kind of book, a year that brought Tookie a lot of different challenges all at once, pretty much. I loved the story of the bookstore, and how it was able to reopen quickly after the beginning of the pandemic because bookstores were deemed « essential services, » like food stores, pharmacies, etc., and their sales increase dramatically, not only because people read a lot, during the pandemic, but also because people became more interested in oppressed cultures and narratives, thanks to George Floyd’s (and others!) murder. And I loved Tookie’s love of books!

I guess this is the story of people who try to make sense of the ghosts of the past and the present, all those killed by prejudice and racism and imperialism and ethnocentrism and hate, all those who died during the pandemic because of stupid government decisions and lack of resources and lack of care, and all those who are in our lives, the ghosts of our own past. It was a very powerful and touching story in general, even if it was a bit slow, at times. The only thing I didn’t like was the voice of the narrator, who is Louise Erdrich herself. She used a very « hushed » voice, like she was telling you a secret and didn’t want other people to hear, and that annoyed me. Other than that, it was a difficult (although funny at times) book to read but I am glad I read it!