Almanac of the Dead

by Leslie Marmon Silko

Hardcover, 1992

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Collection

Publication

Penguin Books (1992), Edition: 3rd, 768 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML:A tour de force examination of the historical conflict between Native and Anglo Americans by critically acclaimed author Leslie Marmon Silko, under the hot desert sun of the American Southwest. In this virtuoso symphony of character and culture, Leslie Marmon Silko's breathtaking novel interweaves ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas as told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors. Touching on issues as disparate as the borderlands drug wars, ecological devastation committed for the benefit of agriculture, and the omnipresence of talking heads on American daytime television, The Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale, a sweeping epic of displacement, intrigue, and violent redemption.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Hanuman2
Epic, long, not sure what I'd think today.
LibraryThing member abbeyhar
More like three and a half. I got about 2/3 of the way through the 800 pages, and felt like I'd gotten far enough. its a series of loosely connected short stories, and so I came to a good stopping point.
LibraryThing member abbeyhar
More like three and a half. I got about 2/3 of the way through the 800 pages, and felt like I'd gotten far enough. its a series of loosely connected short stories, and so I came to a good stopping point.
LibraryThing member abbeyhar
More like three and a half. I got about 2/3 of the way through the 800 pages, and felt like I'd gotten far enough. its a series of loosely connected short stories, and so I came to a good stopping point.
LibraryThing member AJBraithwaite
This was a really difficult book to read. It is very long, but somehow it's also very slow. I couldn't read a lot of it at one sitting and ended up having to borrow it from the library three times in order to finish it!

In many ways it seems prescient - we're hearing about migrants crossing the
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Mediterranean from Africa every day now, so the book's focus on mass waves of human movement from south to north seems to be true. The reliance of people on technology and electricity has only got worse in the twenty-something years since the book was published.

With the exception of Sterling and (to some extent) Seese, the characters outlined in the story are so unsympathetic that their stories are hard to read. They seem to be dispatched from the story very casually - almost as an afterthought in some cases.

For me the central message was about our connection or disconnection with the land. As a European living in North America I can't help but feel uncomfortable with some of the generalisations about white settlers - but then I can hardly complain about that when white settlers have been happily making much more crass generalisation about people of African and Native American origin for centuries.
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LibraryThing member elenaj
I'm sad to say I gave up on this book about 100 pages in -- it was too depressing, and didn't have enough of a hook for me.
LibraryThing member questbird
A prescient and complex tale of interconnected criminal and American Indian families around Tuscon Arizona, 'city of thieves'. A theme of the book is European injustice and violence towards Indians, and a prophesied end of European influence in the Americas.

Written in 1991 there are references to
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cybercrime, increasing natural disasters, ecoterrorism, water shortages and economic depression, the absolute callousness of the rich to the poor, increasing psychosis among white people. It could have been written about today (2023); if anything it has become more relevant over time.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1991

Physical description

768 p.; 5.55 inches

ISBN

0140173196 / 9780140173192
Page: 0.1936 seconds