Really interesting, and often heartbreaking insight into the realities of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show-- an absolute must-read.

A very interesting book. A historical fiction, that is moving and makes you think. At times it left me overwhelmed, at times it felt very pretentious. I'm not sure if that is due to translation or the authors writing style.

Its a short read, a unique read and at times an uncomfortable. In many ways I'm not sure exactly how a feel.. It certainly is thought provoking.

Very interesting, honest and deep. It's a quick read but so full of good insight.

What did I just read?

** Trigger warning for violence against Native Americans, including genocide. **

“However, the real spark was elsewhere. The central idea of the Wild West Show lay somewhere else. The aim was to astound the public with an intimation of suffering and death which would never lose its grip on them. They had to be drawn out of themselves, like little silver fish in a landing net. They had to be presented with human figures who shriek and collapse in a pool of blood. There had to be consternation and terror, hope, and a sort of clarity, an extreme truth cast across the whole of life. Yes, people had to shudder—a spectacle must send a shiver through everything we know, it must catapult us ahead of ourselves, it must strip us of our certainties and sear us. Yes, a spectacle sears us, despite what its detractors say. A spectacle steals from us, and lies to us, and intoxicates us, and gives us the world in every shape and form. And sometimes, the stage seems to exist more than the world, it is more present than our own lives, more moving and more persuasive than reality, more terrifying than our nightmares.”

“There’s no mistaking the sound of iniquity on the move.”

Originally published in France in 2014 (under the title TRISTESSE DE LA TERRE), SORROW OF THE EARTH is the first of Éric Vuillard’s novels to be translated into English. A work of historical fiction, it tells the story of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, which traveled throughout the United States and Europe, under various names, for thirty years around the turn of the century (1883–1913).

While the show featured a number of performers and attractions – including Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler; trick shooter Lillian Smith; Calamity Jane; and reenactments of the riding of the Pony Express trail and stagecoach robberies, to name a few – Vuillard centers the narrative on Native Americans, to great effect. The Wild West show employed a number of Indigenous performers, most notably Sitting Bull, as well as survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Perversely, these last were hired in part to perform in a reenactment of their own victimization; only instead of a massacre, the audience witnessed a battle: “the Buffalo Bill interpretation of the facts,” to quote Vuillard. Likewise, in Cody’s reimaging of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, none other than Buffalo Bill himself swoops in at the last moment to avenge Custer and his men.

In other words, the show glorified its star and ringmaster, while rewriting history and vilifying the oppressed Native populations. To add insult to injury, Indigenous people were recruited to assist in their own denigration.

With echoes of James Loewen’s LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, as well as a promise to deconstruct the spectacle of circuses and carnivals, SORROW OF THE EARTH piqued my interest. I plowed through it in one day … and was left feeling more than a little disquieted. Some of this, I’m sure, was intentional on the author’s part; e.g., a feeling of unease as to how the Native Americans were (are) treated. But the rest? Mostly I just couldn’t figure out what the heck Vuillard was trying to say. And that last chapter, wtf did I just read?

Perhaps it’s an issue of some meaning being lost in translation, but much of Vuillard’s writing is overblown and even a little pretentious. It’s clear that he’s trying hard – too hard – for a deep sense of philosophicalness, but the result often alternates between strained and comical. (e.g., “One night, the storm was so harsh, the sea so wild, that he began to feel afraid. At times, he felt he was dissolving into the sky.” A. How could you possibly know that? and B. What does this even mean?)

Additionally, there’s the narration. I went into the book with the erroneous assumption that the story would be told from the perspective of one of the Native American performers in the Wild West show. This is not the case. Normally, I wouldn’t hold my own misguided expectations against an author; except, in this case, I think the story would have been better served by having an Indigenous narrator. Instead, it feels rather detached. Bombastic, even, as the narrator makes GRAND STATEMENTS about a travesty as an outsider looking in. The narrator himself sounds quite like a showman, which doesn’t help his argument.

When Zintkala Nuni is introduced at the 37% mark, I thought for sure that she would be revealed as the story’s narrator. Just four months old at the time of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, Zintkala Nuni was found strapped to her mother’s back four days later. She was rescued, in a manner of speaking: initially cared for by members of the Lakota, she was later “adopted” by General Leonard Wright Colby (Wikipedia says she was “removed,” while Vuillard’s narrative has her being bought by Cody and promptly resold to Colby, to be used as a prop in his business dealings with Native Americans). Colby abandoned his family not long after, and his wife, suffragette Clara Bewick Colby, raised the girl, now named Margaret Elizabeth Colby. She spent time in a boarding school and, later, an institution for unwed mothers – possibly after being sexually abused and impregnated by Colby. She married, contracted syphilis from her husband; left him, and went on to perform in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as well as bit roles silent movies. She died in poverty at the age of thirty, struck down by the flu.

We learn a little of Zintkala Nuni’s fate from Vuillard; the problem is, the story requires some prior knowledge of these events, as Vuillard’s writing can sometimes prove confusing (so damn flowery!). Suffice it to say that the narrator is not Zintkala Nuni, but remains a distant, third party observer.

Finally, as a reader who doesn’t claim any Native American ancestry, I’m not comfortable speaking to Vuillard’s sensitivity or accuracy. Overall I thought the story was compassionate and probably more authentic than most of the white supremacist BS you’d find in American History textbooks. Certainly it inspired me to want to learn more. But what the heck do I know?

Vuillard does employ a number of terms that are both offensive but also appropriate for the time period (e.g., savages, bums). Several times Vuillard insinuates that the Native Americans’ time is coming to an end – “The spectacle that seized upon the Indians in the final moments of their history was not the least of the violence perpetrated against them.” – which is both insulting and untrue. For example, this myth formed the basis for the title of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s 2016 book, “ALL THE REAL INDIANS DIED OFF”: AND 20 OTHER MYTHS ABOUT NATIVE AMERICANS.

In summary, SORROW OF THE EARTH shows promise, but is at least partially undone by the author’s over-the-top writing style.

** Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review. **

Éric Vuillard’s ‘Sorrow of the Earth. Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business’ is a very short book, notwithstanding its large font, occasional blank pages and use of an entire page for each chapter heading and most of the photographs. Indeed, what one basically has here is an essay rather than a book.

The book has been translated from its original French. Unfortunately the author’s pretentious style has not been lost in translation.

He writes, for example, that a spectacle “must catapult us ahead of ourselves, it must strip us of our certainties and sear us. Yes, a spectacle sears us, despite what its detractors say. A spectacle steals from us, and lies to us, and intoxicates us, and gives us the world in every shape and form. … Spectacle draws its power and its dignity from being nothing. It leaves us irremediably alone, with no wound to see the light of day, no trace of evidence. And yet, in the midst of this noisy vacuum, in the great pity we feel, even in our very scorn – there’s something there.”

Or take Vuillard’s incoherent ramblings on the subject of reality:

“Reality is an excessive thing; it’s everywhere and nowhere; and for some time now it seems to have been fading. It’s strange, and it’s hard to explain: reality is still there but it’s as if it had lost its substance. Everything you thought it was founded on has suddenly been disrupted, altered, damaged, exposed. Nothing looks the same; everything seems to have been swept up by speed, money and trade! And you can’t really say what former dreams and images fill you with regret. What do we regret? What society? What ideal? What sweetness?”

I can tell Vuillard precisely what I regret, namely, his padding out his book with this sort of sorry stream-of-consciousness verbiage.

Vuillard provides no bibliography, so it’s impossible to know the sources of his information. It is nevertheless fairly clear that his imagination far exceeds what the sources can tell us. Thus describing the meeting at which John Burke recruited Sitting Bull for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show he tells us that “Between two compliments he [Burke] rearranged his hair, pushing it back and clamping it round his ears.” I think we can safely assume that this minute detail was not recorded and what we therefore have here is the frustrated novelist Vuillard supplying ‘colour’ because he lacks the confidence or temperament to allow the historical facts to speak for themselves.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, a few more pages on, and Vuillard presumes to tell us what was in Sitting Bull’s mind (“Sitting Bull feels a profound solitude … In that moment, he forgets everything”), mystically divined from his appearance in a particular photograph. This is not only unhistorical but profoundly patronising, which is ironic given that a central message of Vuillard’s book - insofar as a farrago can be said to have a message at all - is that the treatment of Sitting Bull and the other Native Americans in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was incredibly patronising.

When Vuillard fleetingly and ill-advisedly engages with historical fact he is apt to get it wrong. Thus he writes that after one season with the Wild West Show Sitting Bull “abandoned his acting career” when in fact it ended because the Indian Agent refused him permission to leave the reservation. Similarly, readers coming to the chapter entitled ‘The Massacre of Wounded Knee’ expecting to see that event placed in the context of the Ghost Dance will be severely disappointed, although they will be informed that a snowflake is “like a weary little secret, a forlorn and inconsolable touch of gentleness”. If you enjoy this kind of blather then you can look forward to the book’s last chapter, which is entitled ‘Snow’.

Anyone who, despite this review, makes the mistake of reading ‘Sorrow of the Earth’ will discover a very brief passage in which Vuillard writes insightfully about Buffalo Bill becoming the victim of his own myth. In so doing they will have an experience akin to finding a small denomination coin in a vacuum cleaner dirtbag full of fluff.

It is a pitifully insufficient reward for the general sensation of feeling soiled by coming into contact with Vuillard’s sloppy thought processes and garrulously self-indulgent prose.

Sorrow of the Earth is a short read about Bill's Wild West show and the Native Americans impacted by it. This book explains the horrors of enacting some of the most brutal massacres of Native Americans in Bill's Wild West show. It tells us how Bill used a dead native child as a show piece to attract people. While this book waa hard to read at times as it depicted the tragedy of this show I think everyone should read it to learn it's history.