Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade by Gerald Vizenor

0 The attempt to recover immediacy continues in Missionaries, set as it is in Afghanistan, then extensively in Colombia . A journalist is drawn to stay in Colombia after she is kidnapped, precisely because she can’t understand what she went through. This novel enlarges the picture by including both frontline participants and the removed officials who order them into action. One is led to consider how engagement decisions are made. The hanging question is whether what’s called the System, the gathering and processing of actionable intelligence, really controls the humans who say “yes” or “no.” Of course, the focus on characters, carrying out or victimized by the violence, throws into question whether the System’s intelligence is accurate and, even if it is, whether enough is known about a target and the consequences that will follow its elimination. The American journalist who was later kidnapped had asked to be sent to a war zone where “we are winning.” Colombia in the 2010s seemed to be it. American aid had built the intelligence system, the combat teams of the Colombian army had attained SEAL efficiency, the FARC rebellion was over, and the urban drug wars were a trauma of the past. But there are many “buts.” In a country so cross-hatched by mountain ranges, order and justice tend to be locally imposed. Regional militias, hardly better than the guerrillas they once fought, often rule in farmlands and villages . While the major drug lords no longer hold sway, the poppy crops are still the best moneymakers, particularly for those near the northern border. Attempt to follow the law by growing a legal crop, and you might be victimized by drifting sprays meant to eliminate the poppy fields. Attempt to become a responsible shopkeeper after years of combat, and you might be forced into the service of the local boss. Through a shifting point of view, Klay draws the reader into the lives of victims and combatants, their commanders, students, humanitarians, government officials —American and Colombian—and outsiders. Toward the end of the novel, he shifts to a more omniscient point of view to show how these lives entangle, collide, and survivors move on. In one case, a former Colombian officer shops his talents to Yemen, using a familiar intelligence system to target new “enemies.” While many of the characters have a sense of mission, sometimes idealized enough to be compared to missionaries, they really serve more than they control. Missionaries is a needed corrective for those who imagine that political or social movements, even governments, operate through hidden controllers who can orchestrate predictable outcomes. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Gerald Vizenor Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade Middleton, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2020. 354 pages. THE PREFACE OF Satie on the Seine announces fifty letters written by Basile Hudon Beaulieu from Paris, France, to family and friends living on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota between 1932 and 1945. These “Chronicles of Liberty ” are written by the descendant of a Canadian-born fur trader who befriended members of the Anishinaabe Tribe during his travels in the northern territories. Gerald Vizenor himself counts several Beaulieus in his ancestry, a centuries-long friendship with France that continued in the twentieth century. Befriending World War I veterans Basile the writer and his artist brother, Aloysius, is Paris publisher and gallery owner Nathan Crémieux, whose character might be based on Adolphe Crémieux , a distinguished nineteenth-century lawyer and progressive politician of Jewish origins, or on the late Jean-Louis Crémieux -Brilhac, World War II resistor and historian of note. Set up as ironic witnesses and freedom fighters, these three semifictional protagonists embark on a historical voyage. Chapter 1, a charming evocation of a young woman playing a piano piece by Eric Satie on a barge near the Pont de la Concorde, makes it clear that Satie on the Seine cannot be read on its own. The weave of time and plot is too deeply WORLDLIT.ORG 119 BOOKS IN REVIEW anchored in two previous volumes, Blue Ravens (2014) and Native Tributes (2018). Each of these three works centers on a major event: the service...

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