Re: The Great Understander
Posted by Harold Ericsson on May 08, 2002 at 14:34:21:
In Reply to: The Great Understander posted by Thom on May 07, 2002 at 20:58:08:
Thom,
The Great Understander, what to make of it? After surviving a great flash flood in the Panamints Roberts finds and rescues his dog far down the canyon, the dog firmly wedged between two rocks, the poor animal's front and rear legs suspended in the air. OK. The dog's name, Quedada, is that a form of quedar, to be? Four hundred Indians burn a young girl at the stake in Wildrose. Hmm. Then he struggles through the bones of four hundred pioneers killed by a sandstorm in Death Valley. Another hmm. The book evokes a good many hmms. But he knows about Modock and the labor troubles in the Darwin Mines and he writes about people like Pat Reddy and Nadeau (spelled Nadoes in the book.) Roberts quotes an old prospector; he has the prospector saying that water running down a canyon "evaporates into the sand." I take that as a sophisticated statement about the use of language. And it is hard to beat his story about watching the buzzards.
What needs to be done is to correlate statements and people in the book with other histories of the region. David A.?
Birman