GARDENS IN THE DUNES: A Novel [Hardcover]

Leslie Marmon Silko (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 1999

When Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead was published, The New York Times called it a "passionate indictment...that burns at an apocalyptic pitch". The flame burns even brighter with Gardens in the Dunes -- a magical combination of childhood idyll and bitter reality eloquently depicts the jungles of Brazil, and the great cities of the East.

A child of an ancient Indian tribe, Indigo is orphaned when soldiers raid and destroy her town. She is adopted by an American family, but the white education forced upon her clashes with the centuries-old wisdom of her people. Her new family expects her to abandon the deep, instinctive knowledge that has become a part of her soul. But Indigo cannot forget her past -- and she will change all their lives before finally returning to her own.

A masterful work of literature evoking the writing of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, this brilliantly imagined novel penetrates the conflict between Native Americans and the American culture in which they are obliged to live.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1900 the West was still wild. Anglo-Americans were tearing up the countryside in the name of progress, and pity the Indians who stood in the way. To this canvas Leslie Marmon Silko, author of such well-received novels as Almanac of the Dead and Ceremony, brings her brush. Gardens in the Dunes begins and ends at a hidden garden near the Colorado River on the California-Arizona border. But Silko covers ground that includes the early stages of women's rights, emerging female sexuality, the rape of the Amazon, early quack medicine, Gnostic mysteries, Celtic magic, and flower husbandry. Her palette has many colors, but everywhere the garden is a central theme.

Grandmother Fleet, one of the few remaining Sand Lizard Indians, tends a traditional desert garden while teaching the old ways to her granddaughters Sister Salt and Indigo. At a time of crushing hopelessness, Wovoka's Ghost Dance messianic movement appears, drawing in the girls and Grandmother Fleet:

While the others danced with eyes focussed on the fire, Indigo watched the weird shadows play on the hillsides, so she was one of the first to see the Messiah and his family as they stepped out of darkness into the glow of swirling snowflakes. How their white robes shined!

Indigo is also one of the first to sense the approach of soldiers and Indian police bent on breaking up the gathering. The action then moves her from the secret garden and small family to an Indian school in Riverside. She eventually flees the school and ends up traveling through Europe with an aristocratic Victorian family, as companion to an unmarried woman. Despite her many adventures and her exposure to a life of privilege and luxury, Indigo never loses her affinity for the traditions of her own people. Silko uses this novel to explore contrasts between Native American and European customs and morals--with white culture often coming up short. On occasion this ambitious novel strays into the political proper, but there's no denying the sheer force of Silko's prose and the sweep of her story. Gardens in the Dunes offers both a vivid portrait of 19th-century Native American life and a provocative exploration of disparate cultures' relationships to the world around them --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

Silko (Almanac of the Dead, etc.) is widely considered a master of Native American literature, but in this third novel, as always, the poet, short-story writer and essayist soars beyond the simpler categorizations that might circumscribe her virtuosic and visionary work. Indigo is one of the last Sand Lizard people, who for centuries have cultivated the desert dunes beyond the river. Young Indigo's story opens like a folk tale, outside place and time, but gradually circumstances become plain. It's the turn of the century, Arizona is on the verge of statehood and an aqueduct is being constructed to feed water from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. Displaced peoples strip the desert gardens, and Grandma Fleet takes Indigo and Sister Salt to Needles. There the girls' mother has joined the encampment of women dancing to summon the Messiah, who, to Indigo's wonderment, appears with his Holy Mother and his 11 children. Soldiers raid the celebration; soon Indigo and Sister Salt are captured and separated, and Indigo is sent to school in Riverside. She escapes and is found hiding in a garden by intellectual iconoclast Hattie, who adopts the child and takes her first to New York, then to Europe. The novel, expanding far beyond its initial setting and historical themes, is structured around intricate patterns of color and styles of gardening: the desert dunes are pale yellow and orange; in Italy, a black garden is formed from thousands of hybrid black gladioli. Significantly, there's also a parrot named RainbowAalong with a monkey named Linnaeus and a dog circus. Silko's integration of glorious details into her many vivid settings and intense characters is a triumph of the storyteller's art, which this gifted and magical novelist has never demonstrated more satisfyingly than she does here.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (April 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684811545
• ISBN-13: 978-0684811543
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #619,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanted Gardens, Lush and Vivid botanical descriptions, October 24, 2003

By 

Barbara "bnkf" (Union City, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: GARDENS IN THE DUNES: A Novel (Paperback)

I loved this novel because of its vivid descriptions of plant life and gardens. I live in an urban environment and flowers, trees, colors and scents are not part of my daily life. I just couldn't get enough, and Silko creates dazzling gardens everywhere throughout her book.

The first section is about a young Native American girl named Indigo, her Sister Salt and their Grandmother Fleet. They are making a life for themselves in a small town in the American Southwest around the turn of 19th century. Their greatest wish is to return to the home of their people, the Sand Lizards, and tend their desert garden in the dunes. But they are in constant fear of being caught by the white government and forced to live in schools or on reservations.

Although the beginning of the book is wonderfully descriptive, I became very engaged with the characters about 50 pages in. Indigo escapes from the Indian school and wanders into the gardens of Hattie and Edward, a wealthy married couple. Edward's monkey, Linnaeus, charms Indigo out of hiding and as the 2 get acquainted, we learn of Hattie's life.

Hattie was a scholar devoted to studying the role of women in early Christianity. However, the all male Harvard review board rejected her thesis topic and when she returns home, she meets and marries Edward, an older man with a professional interest in botany. Edward travels the world in search of plant specimens and his trip to South America to gather rare orchids is described in detail. In Brazil he was sabotaged, causing him personal injury as well as legal and financial difficulties. His leg was hurt so badly that intimacy is painful and unlikely for him, but Hattie wished to marry him regardless of their passionless future. With the intention of curing his money problems, Edward seeks out profitable citrus cuttings guarded closely by the Italians.

Hattie becomes attached to Indigo and persuades Edward to let Indigo travel with them. Edward has planned a trip to Italy and en route they visit their families in Long Island where we get a glimpse into the frivolous lives of the wealthy and visit their cultured gardens. Indigo meets other Native Americans whose land and lifestyle has been taken from them. The story turns to Sister Salt who is now living in the Southwest with other Native American Indian girls. Sister Salt has become a laundress and works in an area where the government is building a dam to divert water to California, taking more life-sustaining farmland away from the Indians. Meanwhile, Indigo, her pet parrot Rainbow, Hattie and Edward travel to England and visit enchanting gardens in Bath, then more charming gardens in Italy where Edward pursues his illegal scheme. There is an underlying theme of the deification of snakes and the worship of the Mother figure that is explored and lends an air of mysticism to the novel.

Throughout the story Indigo and Sister Salt long to be reunited with one another and we always wonder if it will happen. The story could have been edited in several places and I was upset by the violence against Hattie in the end of the novel. Could the author have still made her point without Hattie's loss being so extreme? Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely and I loved the journey it took me on. It is laced with many issues that are thought provoking and still relevant in today's world: feminism, religion, environmental awareness, class structure, oppression and beliefs about our relationships with others, the earth and our spirituality. I loved Indigo, Sister Salt and Hattie. I loved the mesmerizing Ghost Dance, Grandma Fleet's apricot tree, the lively Linneaus, the miniature farm animals, the Rainbow parrot, the eccentric Aunt Bronwyn, the allure of long distance travel by train and by boat, the snake in the water hole and most of all the lush and enchanting gardens.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mature Silko sends us back to European wisdom tradition., July 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: GARDENS IN THE DUNES: A Novel (Hardcover)

Review: Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko

When Leslie Marmon Silko advised Gary Snyder not to look to native American traditions for his poetry, her anger was justified. Garden in the Dunes, Silko's latest work in hardback, may represent the author's mature outlook, synthesizing native and European traditions in one fascinating work which, nevertheless, carries her earlier message. Documenting the horrors of Western European culture as they manifest in the culture of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, Silko manages to send Hattie, her Caucasian heroine, back to Europe, much as Hawthorne sends Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Indigo, the child heroine of the novel, encounters everything from a cruel episode recalling D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover in the northeastern United States to manifestations of early goddess figures in an Italian black garden. The latter are most recognizable to the child as emblems of her own Sand Lizzard culture, one related to but independent of other Southwest Indian cultures. Silko's condemnation of greedy white males is balanced by Hattie's abortive attempt to bring forth a thesis on the heresies of Southern France, particularly that related to Mary Magdalene. Eventually, Hattie pays the price for her naivete, though she has educated Indigo in the process, loving her and receiving affection from the child in return. More clearly organized and faster paced than Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes provides readers with an intriguing, web-like tale of a host of characters, Messianic traditions involving the Ghost Dance, and Biblical symbolism of the Garden of Eden. Lyrical descriptions of gardens, natural plant life, and wide-ranging, episodic action make this poetic book a page-turner, especially for readers who savor fine writing. Thematic motifs of Silko's other works, including the rape of the land and its inhabitants, resonate with Silko's earliest novel "Ceremony." Evil is still at work, though it isn't always the European culture that manifests it. Witchery akin to that witnessed by Lecha in Alaska in "Almanac," a manifestation of the covert 500 year's war waged by native peoples against Europeans, and by Tayo in World War II's wounded, robs characters of life and humanity as they pursue ill-gotten gains. Hattie's husband is too busy trying to recoup his fortune to serve the goddess, as his wound suggests he should have been doing. The real and symbolic impotence of Hattie's marriage drives home root causes, having and gettting, resulting in 50% divorce rates in our time. The adventures of Indigo's monkey and parrot provide comic relief as well as commenting upon the actions of the characters. But, the return of the serpent to the pool in the dunes drives home the allegorical nature of Silko's narrative. A dramatic read, Garden in the Dunes is a classic, for its structure, range of characters, archetypal symbolism, and indictment of what ails us at the turn of the millennium. Leslie Marmom Silko points us in the right direction with beautiful prose, telling European Americans to examine our traditions for the heretical truths and healing to be found therein. She asks us to explore our European gardens while giving us the gift of parallel truths common to all inner traditions. Like Snyder, we need to integrate and balance our lives by restoring European goddess wisdom, avoiding paths of greedy cultural or ecological insensitivity that bring disaster.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Found Treasure, March 11, 2000

By 

Mamalinde "mamalinde" (Dallas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: GARDENS IN THE DUNES: A Novel (Hardcover)

While on a camping trip, I settled into this amazing book. Still can't quite identify it -- is it a Botany book? a social treatise? travel book? feminist tract? religious thesis? history book? Visually stunning: the well dressed little Indian with the parrot on her shoulder and the monkey holding her hand; ancient stones and mists of Bath; lusty sun soaked gardens of Italy; the clay painted Indian dancers; a hammock on a boat in the Amazon; the high spirited Hattie; the self-absorbed Edward; all the magnificent gardens -- how on earth does Silko make the transitions in such a believable manner? Yes, of course, the author has an agenda, and magically shows us a version of what she considers important. Mamalinda believes this book is best enjoyed beside a body of water, settling into the trees or by the light of the campfire, and crawling into and living within this masterpiece... and Mamalinda will be looking for the author's other books!