Gardens in the Dunes
From The New York Times Book Review
Garden in the Dunes has its distinctive tone (elegiac, retrospective) and many
fine inventions. But instead of voices, it has agendas, lots of them--feminist,
anticlerical, millennial.
-- Suzanne Ruta
From Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1999
There are many wonderful moments in this ambitious tale of Native America in conflict
with paternalistic white cultureunquestionably the best fiction yet from Silko. Its
settings are the southwestern and northeastern US, England, and Europe near the end of the
19th century, and its resonant theme is the imperfect adaptation of a girl of the
(Arizona) Sand Lizard Indian tribe and an educated woman seeking independence to each
other's starkly contrasting "worlds."' The story begins (and, sadly, during its
first hundred pages, sags) with a detailed account of the survival of preadolescent Indigo
and her older "Sister Salt" when a massacre of their people by US cavalry leaves
them orphaned, to be raised and tutored by their resourceful grandmother. When the beloved
"Granny Fleet" dies, the sisters are captured, sent to white schools, and
separatedafter which the innocent Indigo enchants, and is effectively adopted by, Hattie
Palmer, the young wife of the much older Edward, a botanist and explorer driven by both
scientific and mercenary ambitions. During travels with the Palmers back east and abroad
(climaxing with their viewing, in an Italian village, of a cache of carved stone
"fertility figures"), Indigo's "education" acquaints her with such
alien commonplaces of white culture as sexual irregularity and hypocrisy, Christianity's
strong moralistic component, and "civilization's" proprietary attitude toward
the natural world. A chastened return to Arizona, and Indigo's (not quite believable)
reunion with her sister, now an unwed mother, occasions an awkwardly overplotted series of
ironic reversals that leave the disillusioned Hattie (easily the best character here) only
a mocking simulacrum of the "liberation"' she has pursued. Given that Silko (Almanac
of the Dead, 1991, etc.) is less a novelist than a lyrical observer and celebrant of
Native American life, this daunting fiction is, despite several longueurs and narrative
miscalculations, both a thoughtful exploration of the incompatibility of dissimilar
traditions and an absorbing reading experience.
-- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates,
LP. All rights reserved.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Almanac of the Dead
From Kirkus Reviews, August
15, 1991
A dense and occasionally dazzling saga from poet-novelist Silko (Ceremony, 1977;
Storyteller, 1981), who draws on the fullness of her Laguna-Anglo-Latino heritage in the
kaleidoscopic view of drug-dealing, revolution, and ancient prophecies north and south of
the border. Silko's story is centered in Tucson, where two elderly sisters occupy their
fortified ranch--together with a motley crew of vicious dogs and desperadoes; a coke
addict and ex-exotic dancer recovering from the abduction of her child; and a Laguna
loner, whose failure to keep a Hollywood crew from defiling a newly discovered stone
serpent on tribal land forced him into exile. In a dizzying montage, each of their stories
mingles with others involving revolt in Mexico and Central America, as the native
population rises up against hated European and mestizo masters--the rebels led by
revolutionaries and visionaries communicating with the spirit world through red
macaws--and with tales of a massive, well-organized drug-smuggling ring operated with
blessings from Tucson and border police, the local judiciary, and especially the CIA. A
vast underworld of covert operations and interlocking conspiracies surfaces in all its
grim glory, replete with violence, violation, and sex of every imaginable variety (even
the judge coupling with his beagles), while one of the sisters deciphers the remaining
fragments of the Aztec almanac entrusted to her as a last duty to her ancestors. Fantastic
and colorful in the fine details, even if belabored and unwieldy as a whole. All in all: a
chillingly dark vision of corruption, despair, and chaos in the Americas, where a native
new world order appears ready to begin.
-- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All
rights reserved.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
From Booklist, February 15,
1996
Silko's concise essays are like songs; their harmonies are autobiographical, their
melodies topical. The source of their understated emotional timbre is a carefully
controlled blend of pride in Pueblo heritage and anger over the perpetuation of injustice
against Native Americans. Although these low-key song-essays are free of fancy modulations
and theatrics, they're rich in story and observation. Silko, whose mixed Laguna and white
heritage has made her exceptionally sensitive to issues of race, weaves episodes from her
life into musings on the inclusiveness of the ancient Pueblo vision, how integral place is
to the Pueblo ethos and sense of identity, and how stories are a vibrant part of everyday
Pueblo life, establishing and preserving a web of meaning, memory, and knowledge. In her
arresting title essay, Silko contrasts Native American and European American standards of
feminine beauty, then introduces the heroic figure of Yellow Woman, whose strength,
courage, and "vibrant sexuality" were boons to her people. Silko's insights fill
our minds like sun warms rock, or a quiet rain saturates dry ground.
--
Donna Seaman
Copyright© 1996, American Library Association. All rights reserved.
From
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 1996
In these previously published essays and stories centered on the Pueblo peoples of the
Southwest, Silko (Almanac of the Dead, 1991) weaves together autobiographical material
with current and ancient Native American tales. She also blasts a broad array of
individuals, professions, and government bodies with often unsubstantiated accusations,
and plays fast and loose with matters of science and history. Emphasizing the importance
of storytelling as unifier and guidepost in the Pueblo culture, Silko is at her best when
recounting stories that demonstrate the strong spiritual relationship of the people to the
land's animate and inanimate objects, as in the tale of a drowned child whose clothes
magically turn into desert butterflies or in the story of Yellow Woman, who agrees to go
away with a buffalo spirit so that her tribe will always have food. Silko also collects
modern tribal tales: There is, for instance, a story about a giant stone snake that is
discovered at the site of a uranium mine, auguring, Silko suggests, the return of the
tribal peoples to their ancestral lands. Elsewhere, Silko rails against the historic
confiscation of tribal lands and to some extent details the continuing political struggle
for the return of these lands and land-use rights. While her sincerity is unquestioned,
and though she has a twice-told run-in with INS agents, readers may become impatient with
the barbs tossed without elaboration at anthropologists and archaeologists, and with
blanket assertions about ``greedy elected officials'' or the existence of a ``police
state'' in the Southwest run by the Border Patrol. At best, her evidence for these charges
is anecdotal and circumstantial. One wishes Silko had confined this volume to storytelling
and remembrances of her life and her ancestors' lives; the contribution she is capable of
bringing to the reader's appreciation of the Pueblo culture is diluted by unsupportable
and tired diatribe.
-- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Ceremony
From 500 Great Books by Women
Tayo is a half-white Laguna Indian emotionally stricken by white warfare and almost
destroyed by his experiences as a World War II prisoner of the Japanese. Unable to find a
place among Native American veterans who are losing themselves in rage and drunkenness,
Tayo discovers his connection to the land and to ancient rituals with the help of a
medicine man, and comes to understand the need to create ceremonies, to grow and change,
in order to survive. He finds peace by "finally seeing the pattern, the way all the
stories fit together -- the old stories, the war stories, their stories -- to become the
story that was still being told." Ceremony is somber in tone, its narrative
interspersed with fragments of myth, the writing imbued with the grace and resonance of a
ceremonial chant. It powerfully evokes both a natural world alive with story and
significance, and the brutal human world of Highway 66 and the streets of Gallup, where
Navajos, Zunis, and Hopis in torn jackets stand outside bars "like cold flies stuck
to the wall." Ceremony is deeply felt, but avoids glib mysticism; it is
informed not by bitterness and racial animosity, but by a larger sense of sorrow and an
awareness of "how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten." Tayo's spiritual
healing becomes an offering of hope and redemption for tribal cultures.
--by Prudence Hockley
