Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade

by Gerald Vizenor

Publisher:

Wesleyan University Press

, 2022

In this historical epistolary novel from an award-winning author, Native American brothers survive the Nazi occupation of Paris.

In this powerful epistolary novel, acclaimed Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor interweaves history, cultural stories, and irony to reveal a shadow play of truth and politics. Basile Hudon Beaulieu lives in a houseboat on the River Seine in Paris between 1932 and 1945. He observes the liberals, fascists, artists, and bohemians, and presents puppet shows. His thoughts and experiences are documented in the form of fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade.
 
Basile comments on the mercy of liberté, the torment and solidarity of Le Front Populaire and the alliance of political leftists, and considers at the same time the massacres of Native Americans, and the misery of federal policies on reservations in relation to the savage strategies of royalists, fascists, communists, and anti-Semites. The hand puppets created by Basile and his brother Aloysius make brilliant commentaries of their own, and the letters include accounts of parleys between the puppet versions of Gertrude Stein and Adolf Hitler, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, Sitting Bull and Victor Hugo, Carlos Montezuma and Émile Zola, Chief Joseph and Voltaire, and others.
 
Vizenor is a unique voice of Native American presence in the world of literature, and in his inimitable creative style he delivers a moving, challenging, and darkly humorous commentary on war and modernity.

Praise for Satie on the Seine

"Science fiction. Screenplays. Nonfiction. Literary theory. Poetry—including entire books of Haikus. Gerald Vizenor, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation, is a prolific writer with an oeuvre of over 25 books." —Elena Nicolaou

Product Details

• Title: Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade
• Author: Gerald Vizenor
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9780819579355, 9780819579348, 0819579343, 0819579351
• Resource ID: LLS:9780819579355
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-07-04T05:58:10Z

About the Author

GERALD VIZENOR is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the American Book Award and the New York Fiction Collective Award.