Almanac of the Dead

By Leslie Marmon Silko

Book Overview

In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671666088
• ISBN13: 9780671666088
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 763 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 6.6" x 2.2"

Customer Reviews

The American Ulysses

This novel is one of the great novels of the 20th century--IMHO. It ranks with Joyce's "Ulysses" in dissecting a culture, this one of North America (sans Canada). There are lessons here, and the writing cuts to the bone. Not F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, to be sure. More like an extended take by Flannery O'Connor from a Native American perspective. To read (and re-read) "The Almanac of the Dead," "Under the Volcano," (Malcolm Lowry) "Wise Blood," (O'Connor) and "Moby Dick" (guess who) is to obtain a comprehensive view of America from the underside. And the underside, as Carl Jung was at pains to point out, is where the collective unconscious is at work.

Native Reality Check

I am a Native American woman, and I found this book empowering, depressing and very raw. I can see people that I know in the characters in the book as well as having had some of the same experiences. The book gives a realistic glimpse of a small population of Native American experiences. It shows how hard our world really is, and how Natives struggle through their lives knowing that there is no alternative. This book shows the other, real side to the "noble savage" myth.

An excellent book...

Wow, what a concept...we finally have a Native American stream-of-consciousness novel! Enough of these white-man's dreams like The Tunnel or Gravity's Rainbow, we finally are letting some other voices tell the other side of our sorry travels.Dense. Jumpy. And a few things you might wish you never read. But most of this novel is gripping and, quite sadly so, possibly the truth. If you've read the white man's tales listed above then you really should check this trip out.

prettysnake says, sssssuper book Sssssssilko!!!!

Not nearly as complex as some would like to make it. The "land" interacts with people to manifest its spirits. Those who are "cut off" from the land, become alienated and "alien." 500 years is not so long in the grand scheme of things. What is yet to come is what has been before, a people who are shaped by the spirits of the Americas.Her novel might not make some people "happy." It certainly isn't your romantic "Indian story" (that so many people seem to want). The lives it depicts in fiction aren't far from the convoluted inner workings of some of the indigenous movements here in the Americas (the Zapatista, AIM, etc.) nor from the "cultural elite" who rot in their penthouses in the monuments of Western civilization.It might not be an "easy" read, but it is certainly an engaging one, and a well-crafted one. Highly recommended.