Customer Reviews

House Made of Dawn

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

"House Made of Dawn," by N. Scott Momaday, is an extraordinary work of American literature. In this book Momaday tells the story of Abel, a Native American whose life journey takes him from the rural world of his ancestors to the harsh urban environment of an American city. Along the way Momaday creates passages of great pain, beauty, and wonder.

Consider the book's opening lines: "Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different colored clays and sands." Prose like this gives the book a timeless, mythic flavor, and is stunningly complemented by naturalistic passages that explore such visceral topics as violence, sexual ecstasy, and alcohol abuse.

Momaday superbly evokes the people, animals, and geography of the rural West. His book also explores the significance of both oral and written cultural traditions. The book features one of the most intriguing characters in 20th century American fiction: The Rev. J.B.B. Tosameh -- "orator, physician, Priest of the Sun, son of Hummingbird" -- in whose character Momaday explores the collision between Christianity and Native American religious traditions.

"House Made of Dawn" has a somewhat fragmented structure. Like William Faulkner, Momaday expects the reader to do some work in assembling the greater story. But such work is rewarding. Recommended as companion texts: "A Son of the Forest and Other Writings," by groundbreaking Pequot Indian author William Apess; and "Mohawk Trail," by Beth Brant, a contemporary author of the Bay of Quinte Mohawk people.

Gorgeous writing about the mystical Indian culture and the personal tragedies that concurred with that culture's demise at the hands of the White Man -- authentic, serene, spiritual and heartbreaking. It's the story of Abel, raised in the old Indian culture by his grandfather and swallowed up by the "white man's" culture as an adult.

While it's beautifully written, this is a very hard book to follow. Momaday moves through time freely and the reader is constantly lost as to where he is and who his characters are and what any of them have to do with each other. He's constantly switching, with nothing more than a paragraph break, from myths and dreams and the present and the past and previously unknown characters that he picks up on mid-stream. There is very little background to the story until the very last chapter, and so if you've stuck it out til then you're rewarded. It all makes much more sense in the end. This is a book that merits two readings -- the first for the experience of its spirituality, the second to fill in the blanks of the story. It's only 200 pages but it took me four days to get through it - it slows you down when you're constantly back tracking trying to figure out what you've missed only to find that you haven't really missed anything - at least not anything that you know of yet. It's written very surreally and it gets a bit frustrating to tell the truth. There is alot to give Momaday credit for here though. It was an interesting experience but not one that would make me go and seek out everything else he's written.

Momaday's first of two novels (so far!) show any aspiring writer what to aim for. From his opening page to the last, we are treated with an amalgamation of myth, landscape, character and plot, clearly showing how 'author as mythmaker' can be accomplished without being ovedone. I have read this book several times and cannot get over how the land becomes more than setting; it becomes character. The intimate relationship that Momaday has with the southwest is obvious here, and should be a lesson to others who dare write about such sacred places in more superficial ways. Momaday is one of the countries leading writers, the first American Indian to win the Pulitzer prize, and a brilliant scholar. Anyone who has difficulty reading this book, as stated in other reviews here, clearly needs to reassess what one wants from literary fiction. This is not beach literature; he wants you to think and learn, besides understand. His novel structure is fantastic and asks the reader to go back, reread and comprehend. His descriptions of landscapes alone are worthy of many readings of this terrific novel.

N. Scott Momaday is one of my favorite authors, and I'm currently working on a semester project centered on his work. I must warn you, this book isn't the one to pick up for a reading assignment the weekend before it's due. The style and structure of all his novels, ESPECIALLY House Made of Dawn, can either create a transcendent experience where words become magic, if digested slowly, or a tedious skimming of very long passages.... His style is very original and does not set out to impress and entrap; it's beauty happening, and if you want to join it, you can, but don't expect it to stop and rest for you. I think this isn't always so true in Momaday's work, therefore I would recommend those new to him to check out The Ancient Child (my absolute favorite and his best work in my opinion) first. Don't expect to be completely done with this particular book after the first reading, though.For those very curious about Momaday, this should not be the starting point. For those familiar with him already,the style here is very different from things like The Way to Rainy Mountain and the Names, it's more severe. The book is divided in time sets, and it uses stream-of-consciousness in a massive way in certain parts...the main character, Abel, will not be a hero or somebody who stirs sympathy. The construction of the book is just as broken and stark as he is, but his New Mexican days are only some shards of the story; the time in Los Angeles is just as silent and inexplicable. Murder, sex, acculturation, and loss are just things that emerge and submerge without prediction and focus in this book, but not in a crass way; rather, in a very severe and hopeless (but not fatalistic or frantic) way. The book has many layers, and the one just described is not the one I chose to focus on. The Kiowa tradition is present in this book, as in all of Momaday's books, but this time it its deeper than it seems, even though it seems deep. And the blurred depictions of loosely interconnected characters, namely Tosamah, add a necessary comedy [OK, during the prayer meeting with the peyote and all the disciples' reflecting aloud, I almost choked laughing. "I want to give you something. These words. Listen." How anyone could not find this a riot is beyond me.] and consciousness to the fragmented life depicted here in blurs that creates a very complex novel.

I'd read and admired Momaday's short stories before I started reading HOUSE MADE OF DAWN. I recognized him as a major American writer and certainly one of the most acclaimed Native American voices in literature. Furthermore, as a person always interested and concerned with cross-cultural understandings, I wanted to appreciate this work as a powerful contribution to what a Native American author wishes to say about life. I must say I was surprised and disappointed by the novel. On the one hand, Momaday's eye and descriptive ability of moments, of natural beauty, and of the shifting sweep of weather could impress anybody. The colors, sounds, and tiny details are true American haiku, not often found in the novels of others. I would say HOUSE MADE OF DAWN was an epic poem unfortunately poured into the mold of a novel. The second strong feeling one gets from Momaday's first major work is of quiet loss---what the Native Americans once had and how, through the violence he scarcely mentions, it was all taken away. Abel, the protagonist, grows up in beauty in the Southwest, walks in beauty, but goes to World War II, has largely unspecified bad experiences, comes back twisted, but confident, couples briefly with a rich white woman, murders a white man, goes to jail, and emerges broken to try to survive amongst urban Indians in Los Angeles. Drink and anger consume him. Will there be any healing ? Momaday offers the frail hope of the old ways at the same time as he realizes the difficulty of holding on to them in the modern world. As a novel illustrating the difficulty of changing worlds, this one certainly has moments of brilliance, but there are caveats.

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN is a novel made of fragments. Each fragment contains beauty, contains understated truths, but the whole does not add up to a novel as I understand novels. I derived a feeling. I empathized with the characters as survivors in a time that was not theirs. But the `silent spaces' within the novel grew too great. I thirsted for a little explanation. I wondered what went on in Abel's mind, because I found only his memories of better times. I could not connect several of the events, some of the characters. They may be finely drawn portraits, but they walk alone, unconnected to each other. That is why I found this novel difficult, why I think that it could have gone directly to my heart if it were poetry. Comparisons to Faulkner are misplaced, I think, though HOUSE MADE OF DAWN does have that elliptical style. The great Southern author always concludes his story: you come to very powerful ends. Momaday's story is inconclusive. As far as beauty goes, perhaps Momaday's world is more beautiful, but it is less populated by well-rounded characters.

There is a lot that can be said about 'House Made of Dawn.' It is a very powerful story about the problems of Native American Relocation, and about the horrors of alcoholism and other vices which torment the Native Americans as a result of US reservation policy and, later, of attempted integration. The story is compelling indeed, and leaves an impression.

That having been said, there are a lot of things that make this book almost impossible to read. The narrative is broken and confused, and very frustrating (as has been mentioned by many other reviewers). The prose, for the most part, is very eloquent, and some of the descriptions of the landscape and of animals is very beautiful.

Still, this novel remains a headache to read. The story really isn't even resolved, and mountains of loose ends are left. The story is very good, but plan on working to understand it. I recommend 'House Made of Dawn' only if Native American writing interests you greatly or if you enjoy modernist writing.

This 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel alternates between vivid observations of nature coupled with intense word pictures which are a joy for the reader to enigmatic sketches that can leave the reader with a sense of bewilderment as to the possible symbolic meaning. This patchwork construction of the piece begs a second reading of the work even by the careful reader. This is not a work to be undertaken lightly but will be most rewarding to the careful reader.

The Author takes us on a journey through the life of Abel from his beginnings on the reservation through his tragic life in urban society to his eventual return to his roots on the reservation.

This is a beautifully written novel about a man Able who is struggling to find his identity and place in life. He is a Native American from New Mexico who is convicted of murder and when released moves to Los Angeles. He is torn between the choice of his traditional Native American culture and the Americanized culture of LA.
Momaday writes the novel in a modernist tone, switching perspectives, narrators, and even periods of time. He writes in the present in the past using flashbacks, he then will throw in a few myths and maybe some history. This makes the novel very difficult to follow chronologically at times, even though each chapter is dated. The majority of the book is told from the perspective of Able, his character I found to be fairly under developed a long with many of the other characters. The novel seems somewhat allegorical at times because of this, especially with the character Ben Benally. He is Abel's friend and roommate in LA and a portion of the novel is told in his point of view. He is a simple character who represents a huge concept that is vividly portrayed throughout the novel. This is the idea of Native American Assimilation; Ben Benally represents the assimilated Native America, Abel the man who cannot choose if he wants to assimilate, and then Francisco (Abel's Grandfather) the traditional "ideal" Native American. This is all very confusing to pick in a first read though, because there are so many different things going on and ideas being tossed around at once that the reader is too overwhelmed to do anything but decode the plot.
Despite its confusing nature, Momaday is able to portray some of the most beautiful nature images a novelist can. He describes an eagle in flight as if he is the eagle, a grasshopper framed by the moon like his lover, and suicidal fish like the miracle of birth. "They were golden eagles, a male and a female, in their mating flight. They were cavorting, spinning and spiraling on the cold, clear columns of air, and they were beautiful. They swooped and hovered, leaning on the air, and swung close together, feinting, and screaming with delight." His tidbits of Native American myths and history add to the allegorical feel of the novel, and make for an interesting read.
This is a wonderful novel despite Momaday's modernist writing style, and switches in perspective and time. It does require at least two reads though, do not expect to sit down and thoroughly understand it the first time through. Do expect it to get better with each read, for the descriptions to become more alive, and the themes to become more real. For the patient reader who enjoys modernism, Native American literature, or just overall beautiful writing this book can be what you want it to be. I highly recommend this book, and if it does not fit your liking the first time just try, again it will only get better.

After reading this powerful novel I went to the Internet and read a
translation of The Navajo Night Chant - House Made of Dawn. This can
present a kind of framework for reading the book as the story of Abel
is not a straight forward narrative, but an elegiac chant on one
Native American's cultural alienation and cycle of self-destructive
behaviours. The same spiritual connection to landscape found in the
Navajo Night Chant is displayed by Momaday in this novel, so that
place is intimately connected with identity and Abel's dislocation
from his place has as much to do with his alienation as his experience
in war. Momaday's feeling for his main character, for landscape and
for language is deeply moving, making this book a rewarding and
layered experience.

The House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday is a well written novel that takes you on a journey through the eyes of a young Native American named Abel who is struggling with drug and alcohol problems, and issues with relationships.
The fashion in which the novel is written is very unique and powerful. The narration switches back and forth between several characters throughout the novel. This is very effective in catching the reader's attention and holding onto it tightly the duration of the novel. Although this is a successful way of writing, it can also put a limit on the number of readers that can understand and enjoy the true value of the novel. With the constant narration changes, the can be difficult to comprehend and the follow. The average reader may have trouble with this book.
The plot is interesting and also fairly diverse. As the novel goes on the plot thickens and the main character is involved in several relationships and altercations. Each individual happening that the main character experiences has purpose and ties in to a complex meaning to the characters struggles and life. This too can also be a weakness in the writing, because once again it may be hard for the average reader to keep up with the plot. The author does not paint the whole picture for the reader; he describes the facts and leaves the reader to interpret the rest. The reader has to think the put together the whole plot and ideas behind the story.
The setting has a huge impact on the novel and really almost becomes its' own character in the story. Throughout the book it becomes more and more descriptive and plays a large role in the plot; it really is crucial. The author paints such a vivid picture starting off on the first page, in the first paragraph; it almost feels like you are there in Walatowa with Abel seeing the sights, hearing the sounds, and smelling the smells.
The House Made of Dawn is strongly written and although it limits what kind of reader can read the book and really understand and enjoy it, the words are very powerful and have a lot of meaning. The novel effectively illustrates problems that Native Americans struggle with, and issues that they deal with to this day.