Wind's Goings On

This book is fascinating and I typically like to wait until I finish something to start in on my commentary and analysis (at least in long-form), but there's so much here that I want to document considering I'm barely 20% through the book.

There will be spoilers.

Firstly, there is this story being told in triplicate that I find extremely exciting. The first is the story of a white academic who has won access to her great (times x) grandfather's diary, which she believes will give her a leg-up academically and establish her in her career. The second is the diary itself. Her ancestor is a Lutheran priest from 300 years ago who is documenting a confession given to him by a Native American man named Good-Stab (whose physical traits include the scar on his cheek, the robes of a holy man he wears, and his dark spectacles). The third is Good-Stab's confession, which takes place over many days and he asserts that his story will encompass his long, long life of over 300 years.

So already this is interesting, but the thread is pulled taut across all three hoops, giving perspectives of the same thread. The Academic only thinks of her career and thinks of it as a story at first, while the Lutheran Priest couches every bit of his recounting in doubts. There is a willingness for him to go along with the narrative of savagery within the Native people, to infantilize Good-Stab and to constantly speak of his pity for his people and their certainly-soon demise, as he sees it. It's not often I read books that include the POV of someone who thinks this way and Stephen Graham Jones accomplishes it with a lot of authenticity. And finally, Good-Stab's narration comes from this place of deep understanding both of the place he's allowed to occupy in white society as well as of his own experiences he's recounting with a mind for translation both literal and local, though he gets too distracted to accomplish his localizing when he gets deep in the heat of his retelling. (The Lutheran Priest considers his antiquated way of speaking an attempt to sound intellectual, which I don't think is correct, but it accomplishes both that infantilization and also his disbelief in Good-Stab's story in a single move, an economic piece of writing that this story is laden with).

I'm fascinated to see where this is going. These are only the containers within which this story operates. I am excited for all of it to crash over me at once sometime soon.