**
“She saw it all.”
The four words that endInlandread like the debris from a breathtaking literary explosion.
The impetus for it?
Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JUN CEN FOR EW
A horde of ghosts, a blind camel, and a sip of water.
Rarely, a literary ending comes along that feels too perfect to limit to safe, vague praise.
(It was nominated for the National Book Award.)
That she’d follow it up with a western?
You could call the move bold.
But the shift feels seamless.
Frontierswoman Nora makes upInland’s heart.
“That they could be sentimental of the unspoken truth of their friendship was enough.”
This had required hardening….
Even if she had wanted to remain soft, the work would not allow it.
And if Desma, if her own mother…were hard women, then Nora must be, too.
His sections are written in the first person, addressed to what at first reads like an unknown entity.
Only later do we realize he’s talking to a camel.
This camel, called Burke, is Obreht’s brightest creation.
He is Lurie’s companion across endless redrocked landscapes.
They bond as Lurie rides and hides among the United States Camel Corps a real historical thing!
“Who would speak of these things when we were gone?”
All this and I haven’t mentioned that both Nora and Lurie talk to the dead.
And Lurie sees ghosts everywhere he goes; they occupy, and soon overwhelm, his very being.
Which brings us to the ending.
By the time Nora finds them in the dark of the night, Lurie is dead, Burke close.
Fate drought, Evelyn, grief has brought these souls together.
“The sorrow of its suffering journey what the hell did she know of its suffering journey?
rushed into her, like a dream of the abyss.
There was nothing at the bottom.”
So Nora shoots Burke lays him to rest.
The scene is powerful in a muted, pained sort of way.
She listens a little more.
What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry.
When Nora sips the water, she really does see it “all.”
Time and memory collapse into each another.
She tastes the journeys of Lurie and Burke and so many others who’ve come and gone.
She will fight another day.A
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