James Welch is the author of four other novels, including Fools Crow, which won the American Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations and studied writing under the legendary teacher Richard Hugo. He died in 2003.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk: A Novel
by James Welch
Paperback
- ISBN-13: 9780385496759
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 10/02/2001
- Pages: 448
- Sales rank: 135,740
- Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)
What People are Saying About This
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From the award-winning author of the Native American classic Fools Crow, James Welch gives us a richly crafted novel of cultural crossing that is a triumph of storytelling and the historical imagination.
Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, joins Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and journeys from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the back streets of nineteenth-century Marseille. Left behind in a Marseille hospital after a serious injury while the show travels on, he is forced to remake his life alone in a strange land. He struggles to adapt as well as he can, while holding on to the memories and traditions of life on the Plains and eventually falling in love. But none of the worlds the Indian has known can prepare him for the betrayal that follows. This is a story of the American Indian that we have seldom seen: a stranger in a strange land, often an invisible man, loving, violent, trusting, wary, protective, and defenseless against a society that excludes him but judges him by its rules. At once epic and intimate, The Heartsong of Charging Elk echoes across time, geography, and cultures.
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Chicago Tribune
"Moving... Absorbing... Magnificently imagined."
The Boston Globe
"Brilliant... A masterpiece... Charging Elk [is] one of the most resonant characters of our current literature."
Star Tribune
"Ambitious, moving and altogether nourishing... Welch's novel moves with sensual grace... A novel with an expansiveness of heart and mind, an intimate analogue of Indian estrangement worthy of any readerly voyage."
Chicago Sun-Times
"Powerful... An engaging, pointed, heartfelt examination of culture clash and the debilitating effects of otherness."
San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
"Vivid [and] evocative... A story of survival... It's a familiar story, but Welch takes the conceit one step further, creating a Wild West show of his own."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Stranger in a Strange Land
The historically inspired premise of James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk -- an Oglala Sioux, stranded in late 19th-century Marseilles -- is so rich and intriguing that one fears the novel's action might not be able to support it. That Welch succeeds is testament to his sympathetic characters and the ingenious patience of his storytelling.
This patience echoes the consciousness of the novel's protagonist, Charging Elk. In his youth, he'd hoped to follow Crazy Horse; a "wild Indian from the badlands" who "never surrendered" to reservation life, Charging Elk finds himself prized in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He chases buffalo in the arenas of Europe and marvels at the unexpected cities ("Once they looked at statues or pictures in a long house of wood floors and stone stairs; once they went to a showhouse and listened to a lady with large breasts sing high and big"). An accident under the big top, combined with a series of bureaucratic confusions, strands Charging Elk in France, where various people -- a newspaperman, a vice consul of the U.S. embassy, a fishmonger -- take an interest and attempt to help the disoriented "savage."
As Charging Elk slowly adjusts, learning French and struggling to find his place, these other perspectives suggest how good deeds are colored by self-interest and add new dimensions to the novel's world. Welch deftly illuminates many lives while always maintaining the narrative's momentum. What is daring is the patience with which characters' humanity is investigated and how this is managed within a wildly inventive plot. Charging Elk's adventures lead through love to murder and beyond. The writing's texture and dexterity are amplified with each complication.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk shows us unfamiliar lands from unexpected angles. It fascinates us with details of 19th-century France yet never forgets the homeland that Charging Elk has left behind -- a place that is vanishing and to which it may be impossible to return. This is the rare novel that is consistently surprising: The prostitute does not turn out to have a heart of gold, people do not always overcome their prejudices, and characters disappear from the plot when their lives seem to call from beyond the margins. "The Great Mystery works that way," Charging Elk reminds us. "All things have reason, but He chooses to let his children figure them out."
Peter Rock is the author of the novels Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he now lives in Philadelphia. His email address is rock@aya.yale.edu.
Christian Science Monitor
Native Peoples