| Title | : | The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0802141676 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780802141675 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 242 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 1993 |
| Awards | : | Washington State Book Award (1994), PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel (1993) |
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Reviews
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This is one of my favorite books to teach. I give it to my tenth graders. We do most of it as a read aloud. We do most of it as discussion. My students enjoy this book because they don't think they'll be able to connect with native americans on the west coast when they're alt school kids on the east coast, but then they're amazed. Some themes - poverty, alcoholism, depression, love, passion, sex, confusion, loneliness, isolation - are universal.
This is one of the few books that I have read with a class, had a student go to jail during the reading, and come back asking to read the book and tell me about how he picked up another book about native americans while in jail because he missed LR&TFFiH so much. That's probably the best endorsement I can give a book. -
“The ordinary can be like medicine.”
I was introduced to the work of Sherman Alexie in college. I read THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN at that time, mainly because of the influence of a good professor, and that awesome title! Revisiting it 20 plus years later this text resonates in a different way for me. There is much melancholy and sadness in this book, but despite that there beats beneath the surface of all of these stories a persistent embrace of life. The good and the bad are there, but these characters keep plugging away, day after day. Some of these people get the good more than others, some seem to inherit mostly the bad. But they all breathe in and out, and put one foot in front of the other.
The text is a collection of 22 loosely connected short stories, all dealing with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. There are some reoccurring characters, one of the most prominent being a man named Victor. We get glimpses into Victor’s life at different stages throughout the text.
Some highlights from the text include the titular story, which has depth, and is tightly written and flows very well. Another personal favorite in this collection is “A Good Story”, which I just enjoyed. Finally, the story “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” is a lovely piece about laughter, relationships, and death.
Some quotes from the text:
• “Memories not destroyed, but forever changed and damaged.”
• “Don’t need to believe anything. It just is.”
• “Your past ain’t going to fall behind, and your future won’t get too far ahead.”
• “They fought each other with the kind of graceful anger that only love can create.”
• “Music had powerful medicine.”
• “What’s real? I ain’t interested in what’s real. I’m interested in how things should be.”
• “One of his dreams came true for just a second, just enough to make it real.”
• “It was cruel, but it was real.”
• “Books and beer are the best and worst defense.”
• “More and more, he heard his spine playing stickgame through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.”
• “Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.”
• “Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.”
• “I knew there were plenty of places I wanted to be, but none where I was supposed to be.”
• “But those arguments were just as damaging as a fist.”
• “How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you?”
• “Diabetes is just like a lover, hurting you from the inside.”
As a rule I am not a fan of the genre of short story. Many times the limitations of the genre prove to be too much for me. However, Sherman Alexie makes me forget that I feel that way. The journeys he creates for the reader are worth taking. -
"We have to believe in the power of imagination because it's all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs." - Lawrence Thornton
Make me jealous. If you can make me jealous, I am yours. I was kinda jealous of the community because they HAD one, despite tearing itself down in the no-past and no-future. I kinda loved these stories. I was almost belonging to it. Sometimes I felt lonely from the possessiveness of their heroes. That kinda sucked because I've been trying hard to avoid loneliness. Sometimes I understood the loneliness that caused that and I'd have uncomfortable thoughts about why I don't feel community and communicative.
The possessiveness is what kept them connected, and also what kept them down. The lower points were fascination in what happened. My highs were the fascination in the stories of what could be. The imagination, Mariel!
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven is the second recommendation I've tried from karen's
readers advisory for all group. karen's project for school is to help readers think about what they are looking for in a book, helping other readers find their deepest book desires. Like the kinds of books you REALLY hope to find but seldom know about how to go towards discovery (since I'm nuts I just call them my fetishisms to myself). The criteria can get really specific. I asked for recommendations for short stories that would make me feel as Winesburg, Ohio did (in my woefully lacking in real reaching out words). The feeling of Winesburg being the connected best way as souls turned inside (it's hard to put it how I mean it!). I wanted short stories because it is hard to take that kind of closeness for long. Sometimes you can't bear to be in that life prison for, well, life.
Christy (she hasn't read Winesburg) suggested reading 'Tonto'. Thank-you, Christy! (Check out
her great review of this book that is much, much better than mine.)
"I know how all my dreams end anyway."
I was not a fan of the introduction by the author. If you ever read the ass-patting praise quotes on the back of book jackets? Alexie gave me major vibes of buying into that. "The great new voice". 'Tonto' was published in 1993. There was an indie film version, Smoke Signals . MIRAMAX DID IT. It played at SUNDANCE. Y'know, ROBERT REDFORD'S Sundance. Gasp! (I haven't seen it. That'll show those guys who used to insist I'd seen everything since the '70s. I clearly haven't!). Blah blah, it was in its tenth publication. He wanted to give a fuck you to this lady agent who didn't think the stories were ready yet, that they needed more work. Um.... The book is very good. But I don't like the feeling I get from the "great new voice" stuff. I think the book should live as best it can and not worry about being scene changing. What the hell is that, anyway? If you got published and it all worked out, why worry about some lady agent from freaking years ago (but not nearly long enough to be considered a classic).
Anyway, I thought that Alexie should have taken Thomas Builds-the-Fire's advice and live for the now. I really liked Thomas. I got the trying to know how other people felt through stories feeling from him. The inventing your own reasons to live by knowing others around you through imagining what could matter to them. Community type stuff there.
Alexie also wrote in the introduction that his detractors didn't approve of the alcoholism of his stories. I'm totally with him on that just being autobiographical. Do they really think that writing stories about people who drink is the problem in the situation? Really?
My mom was always calling my dad a drunk Indian (he died of drink, as did five of his six brothers. The other surely will do the same). (His father was Cherokee. I'm about as Cherokee as Johnny Depp is, I guess.) That and thinking he had a Jesus beard were my earliest impressions of him. (Not that my mama spared me the abuse stories. She didn't.) My mom might have meant it as a slur. But she STILL sighs over how good looking he was (these days I think he looked like a prototype hipster). My mom would totally be one of those annoying "white people" written about in 'Tonto'.
I did wonder if the introduction bitterness had to do about himself being one of the heroes who made it. That would be a funny feeling. To be a hero... -
We need more authors like Sherman Alexie. Being Native American in the U.S. is like living in our own foreign country within a country. No one besides an Indian REALLY knows what it is like to live on a reservation. Alexie vividly paints this picture in a no-nonsense, brutally honest way. I love that. I wish general joe-public had more of a grasp of what growing up Native American is like instead of applying the age-old stigmas of uneducated diabetic drunks who run the casinos and play BINGO.
I love my heritage and am desperately trying to keep it alive with my children. We are a dying breed.....only a shell of what we used to be before the Europeans came...and yet so rich in culture and tenacity. I appreciate how Alexie captures this in his writing.
Today is a good day to die. I found myself remembering some of the lingo from the rez and way it is spoken. I love how Alexie brings this in...enit, and ya~hey. I could feel the beat of the drums through each story. Echoing in the wind where ever I am..covering me in a blanket, bringing me peace.
While on the reservation, there always seemed to be drums in the air. I would step outside the hospital during my night shift for a break and hear drums beating in the distance. Like a lullaby. An instant stress reliever. A soft breeze combing through the hairs of my arms. Comfort.
This is what Indians are good at. Living for today. Living the NOW. Because...today is a good day to die. OR...today is a good day to read a book. Today is a good day to read Sherman Alexie.
Bring it on dude....more, more, more.... -
Alexie's collection of linked short stories is a tale of life on an Indian reservation; it is an exploration of the ways in which Indians deal with the pains and the joys of their lives (storytelling, dance, basketball, food, alcohol); it is a reflection on the relationship between past, present, and future; and it is a meditation on storytelling as a means of bearing witness and as a means of creation and change.
The first story of the collection, "Every Little Hurricane," introduces both the functions of storytelling and the interconnectedness of pain and joy. Told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy, "Every Little Hurricane" describes a scene at a party in which the young protagonist watches his uncles fight in the yard: "He could see his uncles slugging each other with such force that they had to be in love. Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly" (2). Immediately, we are shown this connection between hate and love, between the "specific and beautiful" and the "dangerous and random" (5). The young boy, Victor, does not really take part in the action of the story, however. He is merely a witness: "They were all witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale" (3).
The second story, "A Drug Called Tradition," takes up the question of time. Three young Indian men try a new drug together, one that gives them visions of a glorious past (horse stealing, music, dance), only to be warned in the end against the seductive appeal of this past as Thomas tells them "not to slow dance with [their] skeletons" (21). This is explained further: "Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you" (21) Sometimes these skeletons can trap you or they may try to tempt you, but "what you have to do is keep moving, keep walking, in step with your skeletons. . . . [and] no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don't wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That's what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That's how it is. We are trapped in the now" (22). The past, tradition, can be glorious, Thomas warns the young men, but looking only backward is dangerous; similarly, looking only forward to a potential future is dangerous. Both are dangerous because they prevent a clear vision and an actual experience of the actual, present, real world.
In "Imagining the Reservation," Alexie presents a formula that is key to the entire book. He writes, "Survival = Anger X Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation" (150). He notes the limitations of imagination, asking, "Does every Indian depend on Hollywood for a twentieth-century vision?" (151) and "How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs?" (152). But he also ends the story with a call for more imagination, for imagination that has concrete results:
"There are so many possibilities in the reservation, 7-11, so many methods of survival. Imagine every Skin on the reservation is the new lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, on the cover of a rock-and-roll magazine. Imagine forgiveness is sold 2 for 1. Imagine every Indian is a video game with braids. Do you believe laughter can save us? All I know is that I count coyotes to help me sleep. Didn't you know? Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. Adrian, imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace." (152-3)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven is a book that is not without hope, but it is a hope that is thoroughly aware of what has lost that cannot be regained and of what losses may be sustained in the future. It is a hope that dares not look into the future at the expense of the present or the past. Alexie writes in the final story, "Witnesses, Secret and Not," that "sometimes it seems like all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared" (222), asking "at what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives?" (222). At what point is the storytelling and the memory a new creation and what is the cost of this memory and this creation? Imagination--the key component of both this kind of memory and of storytelling--he seems to say, is both a burden and a tool. -
about a 3.8 stars
I read Sherman Alexie's
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and loved every last word of it. It's funny and utterly charming without ever losing sight of the deplorable standard of living on many Native American reservations and the difficulty young Natives have struggling to free themselves from poverty, alcoholism and casual racism.
This collection of interlinking stories is exactly the same.
And I mean exactly the same.
Some of the characters are the same as in "True Diary" and the exact same things happen to them.
Story after story.
Even when Alexie changes style and genre, the basic tone of the pieces are all the same. It's like reading bonus material for "True Diary" and that makes the collection, despite the excellent writing and insights, feel very monotone after a while.
Individually read, many of these stories are top notch pieces! Taken as a group, however, they show Alexie's difficulty veering from his own recurring autobiographical themes to find new material.
Interestingly, Alexie is aware of this. We know, because he even gives us a story in which his own mother calls him on the carpet about it. "Your stories are all so sad. Good things happen to Indians, too." Alexie says he knows, but...
The one story I found most innovative was "The Trial of Thomas Builds-The-Fire" which takes Kafka's "The Trial" and sets it on the Spokane Nation reservation. Works fabulously well to show how mysterious the ways of the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) sometimes seem to the Spokane. (Why is Thomas on trial? Thomas himself is clueless but the white BIA people think it's glaringly obvious.)
If you've never read Alexie and like short stories, this might be one for you. If you'd like a really great novel about modern Native Americans, check out "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and skip this collection. -
This is one of his earlier short story collections, and I think Sherman Alexie definitely got better at writing later on in his career. Several of the stories here left me skimming because I was confused, bored or both. Some ended too abruptly. In some, it felt like Alexie was going a bit too experimental on the structure and I got lost.
But most of the stories were so excellent. That's why short story collections are so hard to review, for me, because they can be pretty uneven or inconsistent like this one. The second half in the collection had much better stories than the first half. I like the stories that had Thomas Builds-the-Fire, especially the "Phoenix, Arizona" story. The first story ("Every Little Hurricane") was a great opening story, the one with that crazy-long title (the longest one) that mentions Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock was also good.
The standouts to me are "Imagining the Reservation," the "My favourite tumor" story, the titular story, and "Witnesses, Secret and Not".
I find Sherman Alexie a remarkable and special writer because of how he blends sharp humour with the realism of life as a Native American, on a reservation. His humour is so self-aware and not too serious to be a satire, such that I can actually enjoy thinking about the real political and cultural issues behind each story. Even if the characters don't seem to have hope, I want to hope for them. That's really rare and so skilfully done here. -
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Many years ago I worked in a hub for indigenous peoples and storytellers from all over the world, and I think they taught me a lot—most of it not through ordinary words. Whether they were Native Americans or African shamans or People of the South American Forests or Aboriginal Australians, the thing they had in common was an inclusive view of all life: everything is alive; there is no division between all that is life or between incarnate and spirit. In white people's terms: there is no difference between metaphor and common reality, dreamland or awake time, imagination and history; they are one, in one flow, and interchangeable.
Although The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is an uneven collection of short stories (some immaturely written, others mature), what I appreciate is that Sherman Alexie wrote "straight," sharing life on the reservation and his people and their point of view without explaining or in any way trying to package it for white culture. Some stories are pure expressions of despair; some are funny; some are like free-verse poetry, and all of them express what it is to live in white culture but to be made in and of a culture that has been assaulted for centuries, a culture that sees things differently so that one's experiences are different. This alone makes this book worth reading and learning from—even if you can't follow things like a man becoming a pony in the 1800s and then floating around in time.The reservation doesn't sing anymore but the songs still hang in the air. Every molecule waits for a drumbeat; every element dreams lyrics. Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness.
(p. 150, "Imagining the Reservation")
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The movie Smoke Signals introduces me to this book and it’s author. That movie, loosely based on stories from this book, was first rate. It touched on the themes of despair and sadness endemic to Reservation life, but in no way prepared me for the dark, brooding, bitterness that lies coiled like a snake ready to strike at the heart of Alexie's prose. He has distilled five hundred years of his culture's losing battle against the interlopers who have replaced them in their own land down into a powerful, bitter prose that rivals that of the greatest and grimmest of Russian novels.
If this was all there was to this book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven would have a limited appeal at best. But there is so much more here. Alexie's talent at creating characters rivals that of Dickens — the residents of the Reservation whom he introduces in these short stories will stay in your imagination forever. His sense of humor and comic timing are just as deft as his skill at emoting bitterness and despair, something that helps to soften the blow of his grim vision allowing us to appreciate its bitter beauty.
These stories feel as raw and honest as anything that I have ever read. To the point of pain. Alexie has taken that pain and reshaped it into something beautiful and wonderful, and provided a window into his world.
After reading this book, Sherman Alexie joined the list of my favorite authors. He is a master talent who deserves a place in the American pantheon of writers. He was a wonderful discovery, and if you have not yet experienced his work, well then, get to it! -
Maybe Alexie's best book--rough and eloquent, sweet and brutal, smoky and colorful and moving, always honest--made we want to write so bad it hurt. I found it in City Lights in SF when I was on a $300 Tercel-no-air-conditioning but a pup tent honeymoon. It's a book I always go back to. Have been following his work since...god, a long time. First went to a fiction panel he was on at Writers@Work, then in bright white Park City. My husband was the only native in the audience, maybe in the building, maybe in Park City. "Everything I write, I write to spite the white people who had set me up to fail," he says...an opening of sorts. White people in audience said things like, "If I want to learn about Native Americans, I go to white people because they're objective and unbiased. HOly mother of god. I live on the same planet with these people? And we're stuck within the same atmosphere, you say? But Alexie held his own with the little chimps, and we (David and I) had a new hero. At one point, white-guy-with-cough-cherokee-grandma said "I once sat in a ceremonial circle with ten traditional Lakota medicine men" and Alexie says, "If you once sat in a circle with ten traditional Lakota medicine men, they were neither Lakota nor traditional." Or SOMETHING like that...don't quote me on it. Hubby and I were in love with Alexie immediately and forever. Of course, I already had a good start, having read Lone Ranger...oh! and poetry before that, I think, still in Moscow Idaho, I think...
But I'm still reading his most recent. Over the long long long holidays my husband read ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY... on his side of the bed while I read THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD on mine. Our conversations (just not with each other): Oh. Oh! Oh, god. Fuck me. Oh my fucking god. Amazing. So beautiful. One more. One more paragraph. Wow. One more page. Just one, one, one, one... Had to turn the radio on so our children wouldn't hear. Too stunned for sex, we'd just try to sleep like that--book closed finally, knowing we've got too much work to do a.m., looking at the ceiling anyhow, hands buzzing, head buzzing, thinking of all the lovely possibilities and tongues of phrase. Thinking of all we could let go of to find that thing Alexie found or Zora found...that evocative elixir that makes you want to simultaneously die and live and pull like taffy (not like THAT...I'm a girl, nothing to pull but the longitudes themselves), then just slice off that way quietly, left to think ourselves to bliss. But now it's my turn for ABSOLUTELY TRUE. So, good night. -
Sherman Alexie can flat-out write, but this book, while strong, is uneven. There are some stunning, beautiful passages along with some standard early-career passages. I liked the book enough to read more Alexie, but I don't see myself pulling it back off the shelf too often.
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"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" is one of Sherman Alexie's first collections of short stories. The collection deals with the lives and troubles of Indian in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. The stories also deal with characters that Alexie would later revisit in his novel "
Reservation Blues" (specifically, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor, and Junior).
In a 1996 interview with Tomson Highway, Alexie explains a bit about the title of this collection: "Kemosabe in Apache means "idiot," as Tonto in Spanish means "idiot." They were calling each other "idiot" all those years; and they both were, so it worked out. It's always going to be antagonistic relationship between indigenous people and the colonial people. I think the theme of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is universal."
This universal theme permeates many of Alexie's stories here and in his other writings. The stories take a fresh, sometimes painful, look at life for modern Indians on the Spokane Reservation. Alcoholism, violence, and death all permeate this collection. At the same time, Alexie brings an extreme level of humor and compassion to these characters, making their hardships bearable to the reader.
The stories here mostly interconnect, referring to the same events or at least the same characters, creating a narrative that almost flows between stories. Exceptions to this flow include "Distances." "Witnesses, Secret and Not" and "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation" also seem disconnected but remain similar in style to the rest of the collection. A follow up to "
The Business of Fancydancing," a collection of short stories and poems, the stories in this collection alternate between a poetic style and a more conventional prose style.
The characters in these stories have not reached "happily ever after," it is not clear if they will ever get there. Sometimes, the characters are at fault for these failures. At other times they are victims of circumstances far beyond their control. Regardless of the reason, Alexie portrays his characters with compassion and the hope that they will one day succeed. Even Victor, a drunk continuously falling off the wagon, and Lester FallsApart (whose name might say everything) are presented with a certain dignity and afforded a degree of respect throughout the stories.
When writing about such modern problems as car wrecks and alcoholism, there is always the risk of being too serious, too tragic. In "A Good Story" Alexie acknowledges this fact when his self-proclaimed storyteller, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, goes out of his way to tell a happy story.
Other stories remain less concerned with themes discussed and instead are focused on presenting rich narratives. One favorite is "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore" in which Victor and his friend watch reservation life from their porch while drinking Diet Pepsis. However, bar none, the best stories in this collection are the title story and "Somebody Kept Saying Powwow." Both stories are as evocative and compelling as any novel. Furthermore, in each story Alexie creates characters that are unique, well-developed and completely absorbing--no easy feat for stories of around ten pages.
"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" does two important things. First, it illustrates Sherman Alexie's wide range of talents as a writer. Second, it tells a lot of good stories.
You can find this review and more on my blog
Miss Print -
I was rooting for this one - really, I was. It's about Native Americans on the reservation, for crying out loud. You have to root for the underdog! I was trying so hard to care.
Well, I stopped caring. It was hard to make heads or tails of most of the stories, and even when I did, they didn't go anywhere. Maybe that was the point, but I didn't like it. -
This collection of short stories from 1993 is a poignant collage of Native American life on the reservation. Anyone who has seen the movie Smoke Signals (the screenplay of which written by Alexie) will recognize characters and events taken from various stories in the collection, though he freely adapted which characters did and said which things for the movie. And characters who play only minor roles in the movie take on more substantial parts in the short-story collection.
I loved this book—the heart in it, the quiet desperation, the perseverance and hope, and the writing itself. The style in different stories ranged from naturalistic to near-post-modern. And when Alexie combines pathos with beautiful prose, it’s really wonderful. An example: “Victor imagined that his father’s tears could have frozen solid in the severe reservation winters and shattered when they hit the floor. Sent millions of icy knives through the air, each specific and beautiful. Each dangerous and random.” And another example, this one taken from a drug-fueled dream:
“When I finally come close to the beautiful black pony, I stand up straight and touch his nose, his mane.
“I have come for you, I tell the horse, and he moves against me, knows it is true. I mount him and ride silently through the camp, right in front of a blind man who smells us pass by and thinks we are just a pleasant memory. When he finds out the next day who we really were, he will remain haunted and crowded the rest of his life.
“I am riding that pony across the open plain, in the moonlight that makes everything a shadow.
“What’s your name? I ask the horse, and he rears back on his hind legs. He pulls air deep into his lungs and rises above the ground.
“Flight, he tells me, my name is Flight.”
There is no greater crime in the history of America than the near genocide perpetuated by people of European descent on Native American peoples. In this collection of stories, Sherman Alexie offers a razor-sharp critique without rancor, with pathos and humor. In a line of descent from other Native American writers, including Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Alexie tries to make sense of the present in the context of a past that has been smothered under layers of revisionist art and history. The voices of these writers are beautiful and deeply threatening, challenging our ideas of who we are and what we have done to become that thing we think we are. -
These were my favorites from Alexie’s collection of 24 short stories that he published in 1993 under the The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Alexis is an exceptional writer who has won many awards. This is one of his earlier works but remains popular today.
1. Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ At Woodstock
2. Indian Education
3. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
4. Witnesses, Secret and Not
5. Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show
All of the stories in this book are about youth or young adulthood. Not only are they all relatable but some are highly poignant. The stories feature the alienation and isolation associated with being a young Native American. It is a common thread that connects all the stories even though the names and locations often change.
5 stars -
Sherman Alexie writes about the real. When the real becomes too real, it transforms into the magical. And vice versa.
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Emulating my Goodreads and blog friend, Buried in Print, I stretched out my reading of this short story collection for almost a month! I didn't blow through it like a novel, which had been my short story habit before. I LOVED this collection, savoring my daily story. It's got that Alexie mix of sad and funny, full of quirky details, some mundane, some magical. Each story is an exploration of being an Indian (Alexie's term) in America, both on the reservation and off. Lots of broken families and broken dreams, but also love, basketball glory, dancing, and delicious fry bread. I re-watched the movie "Smoke Signals," which is based on a story here, and it was good, as I remembered it. If you've never read an Alexie story, you really need to pick this up.
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I am so happy I ended the year and met my goal with this book. This has very easily become one of my favorite books ever.
There is nothing like reading something that was written with emotion behind it. The last time I read something similar was Just Kids by Patti Smith, but where JK was written with nothing but love, Alexie writes with anger. The emotion is raw and his poetic nature shines right through a short story collection. I loved every single story.
I bought this at a used book sale for 2 dollars and I can't believe anyone would give this book up, but I guess I'm glad they did because I loved it. 5/5 -
It really isn't fair of me to rate or review this book, because it is very clearly not written for me. It's like asking your 100 year old grandmother to review a Metallica concert. Like asking your six year old to review sashimi. Like asking your husband to rate the pain of childbirth. Like asking a white woman to review the stories of a Native American man.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories about the experiences of various Spokane Indians living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. In many cases the stories don't appear to be very literal. There is quite a poetic element that runs through them, and in my opinion you almost have to be Native American to be able to penetrate the meaning behind
Sherman Alexie's words. I can tell that the stories are saying something, and that they have resonance. But the story running through stories isn't for my ears, not for my eyes. I am an outsider to it, and I can't penetrate them to arrive at the deeper meaning or comment.
I can't even say for sure whether or not I enjoyed the book. Certainly I enjoyed some of the characters. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Norma Many Horses, and Victor were all fascinating. Certainly there was depression and passion in the stories. But that's like saying, "I like the cover of that book," but never opening it and reading it, or opening it only to find out it's in a language you can't understand.
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alexie's most famous book. was developed into the indie-movie hit smoke signals. a collection of inter-connected short stories that follows a few central characters through reservation life in the latter half of the 20th century. american indian myth, religion, and traditional culture all are addressed by alexie as he attempts to find a place for them in contemporary life. also, the paradox (and alexie seems to argue, at times, crutch) of the reservation is exposed. alexie's prose is wonderful and his descriptions apt for their subjects (dream sequences, drunk sequences, lonesome sequences). no answers are given, or even attempt to be given by alexie. this collection simply gives the reader an idea of what growing up as an american indian on a reservation may have been like in the past 30 years.
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This is the book that really made me fall in love with Sherman Alexie, made me want to name my cat after him, made me go on to read everything I could find of his. I had seen the movie Smoke Signals, which was written by Alexie based on this book, a few years before and though I had liked it very much and my mother has me do my Victor/Thomas calls often, it took me awhile to actually read the collection of stories the film was based on. Alexie has a repetitive way of writing, that you don't really notice until you have read several of his books, and it is this is what creates a whole nother world. Not just the world of an Indian reservation, but a world where these characters actually come to life and breathe.
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Well, I still like Alexie, but I had higher hopes for this collection of short stories, because I really loved Ten Little Indians. The duality and complexity that I've found in his other books and short stories was missing for me in this collection. I didn't really laugh or cry and instead, I just felt blah by most of the stories. My two favorites were DISTANCES and INDIAN EDUCATION. It's not like these two stories were the most upbeat or anything, in fact far from it, but they really resonated with me...beautiful prose and great imagery...LOVED THOSE TWO STORIES. Anyway, I still enjoy his writing and will read more of his work, but The Lone Ranger... just didn't really do it for me.
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A lightning fast read, and very powerful short stories about what it is to be 'Indian,' and one of the greatest and most tragic collections of short stories I have read (Which is a feat in itself). The prose is breathtaking and so very, very, sorrowful. The lamentations of a decimated, dying, destroyed people robbed of their land, culture, and heritage. I'll most definitely be reading more of his work. If you haven't pondered the spiritual torment of the Native American people, this book can put you in touch with a sliver of their loss; if only because the loss is immeasurable.
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This collection has become something of a modern classic and is likely one of the most assigned books in American English classes today. I've known of Sherman Alexie and this, his most famous work, for years now, but it was only when traveling through Washington state that my desire to read more local authors finally led me to pick this one up.
As the blurb on my edition says, this is a collection of "everyday" stories, as if that means anything. "Everyday" for whom? Based on these stories, each new day in Alexie's life is pretty much the same as the last one, full of the same characters, the same sorts of metaphors, the same nondescript dreams.
You read one of these stories, you've pretty much read them all. The same tone and voice echo throughout.
Why are this book and its author so worshipped? I think it has something to do with the fact that for years Alexie was the only Native American author writing about Native Americans that anyone knew of. If he was a white author, I don't think anyone would give a damn because the writing on its own isn't anything special.
It's vitally important that literature features a wide variety of viewpoints and that the authors we read reflect the diversity of the world we live in. Fortunately, authors today are far more reflective of America and the world in general. Native writers like Tommy Orange are winning awards for their writing.
That's the key. The identity of the author shouldn't play a part in determining what is or is not great fiction. If you slapped a blank cover on "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and excluded the author's info, would anyone deem this one worth remembering? -
With a title like that, I just had to give it a try. I didn't realize it was collection of a stories, partly autobiographical, of growing up on Indian Reservation. Some of the stories were surreal, many heartbreaking with some humor, but they all took me to a place I've never been before.
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In this compilation of short fiction stories, Sherman Alexie shows the sempiternal hardships and difficulties that Native Americans endure. The Native Americans in this book are located on Spokane Reservation, Washington State. Through the book’s depiction of this multi tribal society, the reader is presented with the conflicts and strife the Spokane people face. Alcoholism and discrimination run rampant in the lives of these Native Americans, who endlessly try to find their identity amidst a nation that wants to take it away. While The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven thoroughly illustrates the difficult lives of those living on the reservation, I did not enjoy the book. The narration is neither clear nor systematic, and the stories are not placed in chronological order. This makes it difficult to follow each character’s sequence of events. Alexie also focuses more on themes and symbols than building a storyline, which sometimes left me wondering about the specificity of each character’s events and actions. While Alexie’s style grants an ample opportunity for profound analysis, it does not yield to an emotional connection with Alexie’s two central characters, Victor and Junior. From beginning to end, these two characters battle with identity, a profound theme in the story. Toward the beginning of the book, Victor moves into Seattle to try and adapt to American society. In the end, he moves back to Spokane Indian Reservation after constantly being judged through stereotypes of a typical Native American. Junior also experiences problems fitting in with society. After having a child out of wedlock with a caucasian in college and being discriminated against by his teacher, he does not know where he belongs. When choosing between school and the reservation, he states, “It’s a matter of choosing my own grave” (242). Victor and Junior struggle to find their identity because they do not fit any societal norm. As a result, they live in perpetual exile. While this book effectively uses these two characters to convey the theme of identity, the lack of plot, action, and structure is my reason for giving it two stars out of five. Unless you want to deeply examine and analyze a book with profuse, opaque content, I suggest you leave this one on the library’s bookshelf. ~ Student: Matthew M.
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A tepid 3 stars for this collection. A friend at work is an Alexie fan, and when I came across this book for 50 cents at the library, I picked it up. None of the stories were bad, some were quite good, but I never connected with any of them emotionally, and too many felt self-consciously contrived.
There were two moments of connection, however, that make me willing to read more Alexie and just pushed this volume into the 3-star range.
The first one comes up in "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock," where Alexie writes: "'I guess. Your father just likes being alone more than he likes being with other people. Even me and you.'" (p. 34)
The second connection occurred in "Witnesses, Secret and Not": "Anyway, there we were, my father and I, silent as hell while the car fancydanced across the ice. At age thirteen, nobody thinks they're going to die, so that wasn't my worry. But my father was forty-one and that's about the age that I figure a man starts to think about dying. Or starts to accept it as inevitable." (p. 213) -
I went through different emotions while reading this book. The first time I picked it up I read a few pages and decided I wasn't in the mood to read it. This last time I picked it up I actually thought it was a different book, but read it anyway.
It's interesting the way Alexie writes, combining vulgarity with such a poetic voice. The first story made me want to put the book down again, but my brother convinced me to trudge on. The second story had a bit of what I assumed my brother loved about the book, that poetic voice that made the ugliness beautiful.
I liked the way this collection of short stories revolved around the same characters. Some stories were written in first person, others in third. I found a few of the stories to be tiresome and a few others very enjoyable. Mostly it made me feel a little sad and wonder if all Indians really are alcoholics. My brother promised a happy ending, but I din't find it to be happy exactly. It was more a kind of contendedness. -
Sherman Alexie makes his short stories feel like poems. All very well-written, albeit depressing. Funny at the most inappropriate times, and very entertaining.
Three other equally good Alexie novels:
Ten Little Indians,
Flight, and
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
