The Forgetters
Stories
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
A tender, astonishing, and richly beautiful story cycle about remembering our shared histories and repairing the world.
"Each tale is a testament to never forgetting that the mountains, the sea, the rivers, animals and humans are all one. Osprey and abalone, wind and child, hummingbird and human—all unforgettable." —Susan Straight, author of Mecca
Perched atop Gravity Hill, two crow sisters—Question Woman and Answer Woman—recall stories from dawn to dusk. Question Woman cannot remember a single story except by asking to hear it again, and Answer Woman can tell all the stories but cannot think of them unless she is asked. Together they recount the journeys of the Forgetters, so that we may all remember. Unforgettable characters pass through these pages: a boy who opens the clouds in the sky, a young woman who befriends three enigmatic people who might also be animals, two village leaders who hold a storytelling contest. All are in search of a crucial lesson from the past, one that will help them repair the rifts in their own lives.
Told in the classic style of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories, this book vaults from the sacred time before this time to the recent present and even the near future. Heralded as a "a fine storyteller" by Joy Harjo, Greg Sarris offers us these tales in a new genre of his own making. The Forgetters is an astonishment—comforting and startling, inspiring reveries and deepening our love of the world we share.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sharp-witted collection from Sarris (How a Mountain Was Made) comprises stories told by "crow sisters" about the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok homelands of northern California. Question Woman and Answer Woman, the twin granddaughters of trickster Coyote, live as crows. Their stories, loosely anchored in creation myths but also firmly grounded in place and time, are enigmatic and open-ended, and nearly always center people who have learned, to their peril, to ignore their connections to the land and each other. In the evocative "A Man Follows an Osprey," a troubled man hopes an osprey will lead him to a legendary box of gold. The field worker heroine of the mysterious "A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird in Santa Rosa" finds her life forever changed when she's drawn night after night to a camp where three shape-shifters tell stories by the light of the moon. In the poignant "A Woman Invents a Lover," a gaggle of gossips watch as good-hearted Marlene falls in love, is abandoned, and must perform a series of fairy tale–like tasks to reconnect with her family and her past. These incandescent stories will linger in the reader's imagination.
