Two Books & One Movie / Reviews by Me 2/24/2021

Go ahead, ask me what I’ve been doing lately…

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The movie we watched is Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao.

In 2018 I wrote this review of Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. (Read here) The book is nonfiction and was so powerful that two years later, it still affects how I think about being old in our nation.

Friday night Len and I streamed the new Nomadland movie. The movie is well done, most of the actors are actual folks who live the camper/van nomad life. The story respects Fern, the character played by Frances McDormand.

Nevertheless. Where the movie goes with Bruder’s book bothers me a lot. Zhao shapes the storyline to be about the personal evolution of Fern as she comes to value her own toughness and independence. But, this is weird, the second half of the movie is comprised mostly of scenes that don’t exist in the book.

Respecting the toughness of older women is powerful, yes, but is not what the book was about. The book was a researched examination of how fraught it is to be aging and financially broke in this society now.

I think the movie disarms the power of the book. In our tough and dangerous economic world, I find that dishonest.

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I wrote a review of Overstory by Richard Powers a couple weeks ago. (Read here) I liked and didn’t like the novel.

In response to my somewhat cranky review of Overstory, my friend Michol lent me her copy of a beautiful book that I read in two afternoons; The Hidden Life of Trees / illustrated edition. The author, Peter Wohlleben is a botanist caretaker of a forest under restoration in Germany. His book is clearly written over-sized book about trees, plant life, and the ginormous understructure of fungi that scientists are just beginning to research. It has gorgeous photographs every few pages and would be an excellent present for anyone who loves nature and photography. (The photo that heads today’s post is one of the book’s photos.)

Apparently one can also obtain Wohlleben’s book in a more elongated version with no photographs.

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After months of waiting, my copy of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer arrived. It’s so popular it’s not renewable!

Let me just mention right here - I’m curious why the universe is giving me all these books about trees! I didn’t think I was this interested, but here I am.

The subtitle of Braiding Sweetgrass tells you the theme of Kimmerer’s book of essays. “Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.”

Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation; she belongs to Potawatomi people. She also has a PhD in botany and has studied plants all her life. Her book is a connected compendium of essays describing her life interacting with plants as a scientist and as an indigenous person. Her essays are fascinating.

The essay that astonished me most is “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.” She describes the revelation it was to try to learn the native Ojibwe language her grandfather spoke before forced boarding schools stripped native kids of their mother language. Kimmerer has spent years trying to learn her own language.

There is this: We know ourselves via the language that we speak. English is mostly nouns, with about 30% verbs. Ojibwe is 70% verbs. Much of English is about delineating gender. Anishinaabe doesn’t divide the world into sex.

Anishinaabe DOES describe the world according to the nature and properties of how things are changing, moving, growing, or interconnecting to something else. The example she uses is that a bay of water is not a bay. The Ojibwe word for bay is translated to a VERB meaning “to be a bay.” As if it might be something else tomorrow, which since a bay is filled with water, it might be. The bay is not the static noun where three sides of land are filled with water. A bay is the moving interconnection of trees, water entering from streams and springs, water moving outward to the lake or river, the interconnected life that happens in and around a bay. The bay is animate.

What she learns is that her native language not about what things are now, but about how things are connected. One does not own things. One is in a relationship for a day or a lifetime and the language speaks to that.

Her scientific PhD is important to her and she values it. She explains that much of western science is about breaking entities down to see and understand the parts. Indigenous language is about seeing the connections. Both are needed to build a path for all of earth.

FYI because this has confused me for years: As clearly as I understand Native nations names, Anishinaabe is single umbrella name for the large and culturally interconnected nations that covered the massive woodlands that once covered most of Canada and the US from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Within that overarching interconnection were smaller (though still very sizeable) nations such as Ojibwe, Odawa, Saulteaux, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples. 

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I am reading more widely than I have read in years. I’ve always read a lot, but within genres that made paths for me through my life; novels of girls and women and men.

I’m still mostly a novel reader, but this past year I’ve discovered National Book Awards winners and runners-up. Still tales about people, but incredibly well-written novels of characters whose lives and cultures are more consistently different than mine. 

Also, to give credit where credit is due, I read the website The Nonconsumer Advocate.  People who look for ways to live more frugally and lightly on the earth tend to be readers and thinkers. Nomadland, Overstory, and Braiding Sweetgrass all came to my attention via the NCA. I put notes of interesting sounding books in my phone’s note app and when I order books from the library, I order from that haphazard list.

And Bob’s your reading uncle.