Product Description

The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land.

He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85850 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 198 pages

Review

"Authentic and powerful. Almost unbearably authentic and powerful...unlike any writing I have ever read...Anyone who picks up this novel and reads the first paragraph will be hard pressed to put it down" -- C leveland Plain Dealer

"Superb." -- 5900

About the Author
N. Scott Momaday is a young Kiowa Indian who has lived on several Indian reservations in the Southwest. He is presently a member of the English Department at the University of California in Santa Barbara. As a poet and scholar, he is known for his studies of Emily Dickinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman; House Made of Dawn is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

An essential work of Native American literature
"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.

Beautiful but frustrating prose
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.

Writing at its Best
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.