Resonating voices

As it happens, sometimes, as we are reading a book, another one pops up in our mind. There must be a particular resonance between them. I take it as an invitation to go back to a book we’ve read a long time ago and is waiting to be reawakened.

 

Janet Hulstrand and Louise Erdrich

 

Janet Hulstrand is an author I recently discovered at Mary Duncan’s ‘Paris Writers Atelier’ located two steps away from Notre Dame de Paris. 

 

In her recent work A Long Way from Iowa – From the Heartland to the Heart of France (Winged Words Publishing USA, 2022) the author embarks the reader on a journey starting in the deep American Midwest and ending up in France:  Paris of course, but not only. Janet takes us to many different corners in the French hinterland, including the small village she chose to enjoy nature in and write as a daily ritual. 

As I was reading Janet’s descriptions of her travels, Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (National Geographic Directions 2003), suddenly flashed through my mind.  The Native American author of Love Medicine, an instant best seller (1984), followed over the years by an impressive record of American and international literary prizes, gave several readings at our bookstore (Village Voices, chapter 14)

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is not among the books she presented at the Village Voice, but this journey to the land of her ancestors is one of stunning beauty with lakes and islands with tall, awe- inspiring rocks covered with thousand- year-old representations of sacred spirits and animals painted in “vibrant golden red”. It is one that fired my imagination and stayed with me. For Louise, it was also a special journey as she was travelling with her baby girl born to an Ojibwe father, a spiritual leader with a deep knowledge of the country’s ancient history and culture.    

To me, the great revelation of this book was the existence of the extraordinary library of some 11000 books set up on the small Mallard Island at the turn of the twentieth century by conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer.  

A bookseller herself and owner of the Minneapolis bookstore ‘Birchbark Books & Native Arts’, Louise cannot help but express what she feels as she enters this overwhelming collection of books, aware that her time to explore all those shelves is limited: …” there is a fever that overcomes a book lover.  A fever to read.”  

At first glance, these two books couldn’t be more different from one another…Yet it is now clear to me why Books and Islands popped up in the middle of my reading of Janet Hulstrand’s A Long Way from Iowa: both writers are curious about their own genealogical and cultural background as they travel to discover unusual places they immediately translate into words. Both are inhabited by literature and the inner necessity to write about their discoveries.