He was still just a little boy when his mother entrusted him with the family secret: His great-grandfather was a Native American with whom his great-grandmother, who worked as a teacher in a mission school in America, fell in love. He was murdered shortly afterwards and Reichlin’s great-grandmother returned to Switzerland. The whole thing sounded like a strange, exotic fairytale. Yet, many years later – the boy having since grown up to be a moderately successful author – he sets out on the traces of his forebears, using his great-grandmother’s journal entries as an Ariadne’s thread to search for his Native American roots.
Yet the entries prove to be imprecise – indeed, often they seem to be wrong altogether. The story of his ancestry grows increasingly porous the deeper her delves into it, learning about the fate of the Arapaho and other Native American tribes that were forced onto reservations as settlers arrived from Europe, took the land for themselves and supposedly civilized it. The more he identifies longingly with the highly developed Native American culture, the angrier he grows about the settlers’ disdain for it. Yet when he tries to live for a while like his Native American ancestors, in an isolated hut in the woods of Manitoba, he is forced to realize that he, too, is seen as an unwelcome intruder.
Linus Reichlin’s suspenseful – philosophical, even – novel about the difficult path of finding and keeping one’s identity is a novel full of doubts and questions that are of interest to anyone alive in our day and age.
