Dalva

By Jim Harrison

^{“James "Jim" Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) was an American writer known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors. He has been called "a force of nature" and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.}

^{Harrison published Dalva in 1988, his best novel according to him. It is a complex tale, set in rural Nebraska, of a woman’s search for the son she had given up for adoption and for the boy’s father, the lover she never forgot, who also happened to be her half-brother. There are 3 chapters in Dalva and 3 voices also. The voice of Dalva, the voice of Michael and the voice of J.W.Northridge I, the great-grandfather of Dalva.  Harrison glides easily from one character to the other. Dalva was born in his dreams just like Northridge. He saw her on the balcony of her flat in Santa Monica looking at the ocean and this dream took him to Nebraska, a magnificent and mysterious country, where the Lakotas Sioux and the big herds of buffalo lived.}

^{And to go from one world to the other, he uses Michael, one of many of Dalva’s lovers, a selfish, cynical and witty professor specialised in history who wants to write an essay on Dalva’s ancestors.}

^{So Jim Harrison takes us to rural America, its wild nature, its grasslands, meadows and rivers of which he gives a wonderful description. His prose is really beautiful. Domestic animals ( like dogs, horses or geese) are part of nature, part of his own world. One of us put the accent on the behaviour of the geese which is so similar to human behaviour. They live in couples, within a group, with a hierarchy. There is a dominant goose that protects the flock and their territory and can become aggressive in case of danger. Jim Harrison talks also about wild animals  that kill to survive contrary to men , much more dangerous  animals, who kill without reason.}

^{Jim Harrison is a connoisseur when it comes to plants and birds.} 

^{Dalva who is in the heart of the story is a magnificent portrait of a very modern woman in  search for her son taken from her at birth. She has 1/8th of indian blood in her veins and therefore is very much influenced by her ancestors who in their time lived or fell in love with Indian squaws. Her life has been a succession of tragedies but she is nevertheless a very strong, self-sufficient and free thinking character, with much empathy for the vulnerable people around her.We can mention as an example the way she is fighting to free a young boy from the power of a corrupt uncle and losing her job consequently. Although she appears very much in control, very sure of herself, she is vulnerable. She was seen as acting like a man when it comes to her sexual life and can be compared to Beryl Markham on that level. We feel for her because she never seems to be completely happy. She misses so many people in her life. She never could let go until the end of the book when she discovers that you have to let the dead bury the dead and move on with your life.}

^{Throughout the narrative, Dalva invokes the memory of her pioneer great-grandfather John Wesley Northridge I, whose diaries vividly tell of the destruction of the Plains Indian way of life at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of his diaries, Northridge was a idealist missionary and scientist interested in plants but through the years he lost his faith understanding gradually that the Church wanted to evangelise the Indians, to impose the white man’s culture on them instead of listening to their needs. When he understood that the new Americans wanted to destroy the Indians under the pretext that they were savages who could not exploit their country, he took sides for the Indians ‘cause to the extent of blending into their community.}

^{Michael, the third most important character in the novel, is an alcoholic driven by sex, food and drugs, not very attractive and completely out of touch with the nature around him. Generally his character was not very  appreciated except for one of us who thought he was interesting and funny and made her understand Dalva’s character better.} 

^{He was the necessary link between Dalva and the ghosts from the past haunting her life: her great -grandfather, her dead father, her dead lover and the son she had to be separated from.}

^{In an interview J. Harrison said that when the Americans arrived in America there were 10 million Indians and in 1900 there were only 250000 left. The same for the buffalo. 75 million buffalos were killed within 20 years and what for, not for their meat but because they were a necessary part of American Indians survival. In fact,the white men wanted their land for reasons of cupidity. They acted like all the European colonial powers who stole the countries of other people.}

^{He reminds us of other genocides in the past (the Jews, the Armenians, the Tutsis etc… ) It all comes back to the greed of having more power. The massacre of Wounded Knee (Nebraska) in 1890 is one of the worst in the American history. The American Army killed 350 women and children  and 150 warriors in a Indian reservation. Which made Northridge lose his mind.} 

^{For some of us who see the Americans through the eyes of our parents who were in admiration for what they did for Europe during the Second World War, it was a shock to realise that this genocide happened not so long ago. At least they recognise it today.}

^{Another thing, you certainly noticed that there is much talk of good dishes, recipes , food and wine. I read somewhere that J. Harrison wrote about food at a certain time in his life. He certainly was living his life at its fullest.}

^{I’ll finish by quoting one of the passages in the book that explains the character of Dalva and all the other attractive women.}

^{“You have to study very hard and find some (subject or) profession you are obsessed with because in culture it has been hard on the attractive women. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop the kind of character that can withstand this bullshit. … Don´t waste your time on men who talk and stare but don´t listen to you"}

^Paulette