Michael's Reviews > Three Day Road

I love Erdrich's blurb for the book: "a devastatingly truthful work of fiction, and a masterful account of hell and healing. This is a grave, grand, and passionate book." This is the story of a three-day canoe journey home for Cree Indian Xavier Bird, who arrives by train in northern Ontario severely damaged from his experience as an infantry soldier in World War 1. He has lost a leg and is addicted to morphine. He is accompanied by his only family member, his aunt Niska, a medicine woman who raised him in remote bush after liberating him at age 5 from a residential school. A pervasive mystery for Niska is the fate of Xavier's friend and effective brother Elijah, whom she helped raise from an older age and went off to war with Xavier. The narrative skillfully alternates between Xavier's upbringing and his experience in war with Elijah, where they became snipers in the trench warfare in France and Belgium. The account of the common foot soldier's perspective on the fighting is to me on a par with "All Quiet on the Western Front". At the same time, the novel provides a timeless fresh vision of alienation associated the human failure of 20th century civilization through the lens of Native American culture. The transformation of his friend Elijah into an amoral killing machine epitomizes the corruption, insanity, and evils of the whole enterprise, which represents a big challenge for Niska to help Xavier recover from.