The Translation of Dr. Apelles

We imagine that Treuer’s novel could be a Rorschach test for readers. Is it a “reimagining of the Native American novel,” as Graywolf claims, or is it a “love story,” as the subtitle contends?

We’d like to stake a third position: It’s a rich and contemplative novel that says more about memory than love, though the interaction between the two is the novel’s driving force.

Dr. Apelles is a middle-aged Native American and a translator of native texts in his spare time. His day job is as a librarian at RECAP—a warehouse for books that have never been read—toiling beside, but rarely speaking to, the enchanting Campaspe. While at a local archive, he discovers a text that only he can translate. Having found a document for which only he is the exact match throws into relief the loneliness of his own existence. There is no perfect complement for him.

The story alternates between Dr. Apelles’s and the one in which he’s enmeshed, a fable of two beautiful Indians, both orphaned to wild animals. The boy and girl grow up side by side, and though both poor and subject to numerous disasters, their love for each other trumps their bad luck. As the love between the two Indians in the story grows, so it does between Apelles and Campaspe.

But the “love story” tag on this book is a red herring. In prose that bloats to ostentatious when necessary, and shrinks to a beautifully unadorned specificity otherwise, Treuer is most curious about how our memories shape us, and what it means for those memories to be shared. The pretext for this exploration is Apelles’s reluctance to share his past with Campaspe as they grope their way into love. But as Native Americans, both Treuer and Apelles want to know how to tell a story—how to share memories—without being defined by past myths and caricatures. The love story allows Treuer to explore his concern for a culture that, more than any on this soil, is most reliant on memory, but whose memories have also been plundered by faux folktales. Bits of polemic arise now and again throughout, Treuer is clearly scornful of those who try to prove their “Indianness” by appealing to hackneyed mythologies. His best argument is the book as a whole; a completely new and lovely artifact.

It’s a novel that is so intellectually rigorous and emotionally stirring, we’ve already told everyone who will listen to read it. And now, we’re telling you.—Jonathan Messinger

Treuer reads Sunday 24 and Monday 25.