Resumen de Reparatory Justice Beats Retaliation in Louise Erdrich’s LaRose
Louise Erdrich’s fifteenth novel, LaRose (2016), is the third installment of the “Justice Trilogy” and resumes the author’s exploration of prickly themes such as historical and cultural trauma, revenge, atonement, and reparation. The novel opens with a tragic accident on the edge of an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota that upsets the uneasy balance of the Indian community. While hunting a deer, Landreaux Iron kills his neighbors’ five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. The accident produces a severe psycho-wound not only in the two families involved, but also in the Native community at large, which sees earlier collective ghosts come to revisit them at the turn of the new century. In an attempt to compensate for the pain inflicted and following an ancient tradition among the Ojibwe, the Irons decide to surrender their own five-year-old child, LaRose, to the Raviches. This generous act of atonement and restitution causes positive transformations in the main characters.
