Ceremony
1977
- fiction
- laguna indians
- world war, 1939-1945
- veterans
- indians
- north american indians
- modern literature
- romans
- native americans
- world war (1939-1945) fast (ocolc)fst01180924
The story
"This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Navaho young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremny that defeats the most virulent of afflictions-despair. "Demanding but confident and beautifully written" (Boston Globe), this is the story of a young Native American returning to his reservation after surviving the horrors of captivity as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Drawn to his Indian past and its traditions, his search for comfort and resolution becomes a ritual--a curative ceremony that defeats his despair."--From source other than the Library of Congress
What it’s like
Wide high-desert distances, drought-cracked washes, and the long anticipation of summer rain fill this book's pages, and its prose moves between plain sentences, incantatory repetition, and oral-storyteller digressions that loop back on themselves like a song. The sensory world is precise: dust on sage, the smell of approaching storms, mesa light shifting from copper to bone-white, and the spare interiors of a reservation village. The voice is patient and elegiac, grounded in landscape and ritual, with the sense that time folds rather than moves forward. Its war memories arrive in fragmented, sharp flashes, and the violence is real but mostly remembered, not staged: captivity cruelty, alcohol-fueled brawls, and a sense of evil in the natural world. Sexual content appears but is not graphic. Restorative rather than cheerful, it is for slow readers who want myth-inflected literary fiction on a rainy afternoon, and for anyone drawn to a veteran's long, quiet journey back toward belonging.
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