Badlands, A Novel
New Photo Illustrated Edition
by Melinda Camber Porter
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Apr 17 2017 | Archive Date Nov 17 2017
Description
New Edition Illustrated with 45 photos of the Badlands, the acclaimed 1996 Book-of-the-Month novel, Badlands, by Melinda Camber Porter.
"A Novel of Startling Lyricism." Publishers Weekly
““Badlands has a narrative with a weighty sensuality that carries the reader forward in a kind of drunken, dreamlike state.” New York Times
“Badlands is a very strong, very intelligent and very intriguing novel.” Joyce Carol Oates
“Melinda Camber Porter should be congratulated on Badlands: she knows her subject thoroughly; her vision is lyrical, yet unflinching. Badlands is an achievement.” Peter Matthiessen
“In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter has focused her English intelligence on America and rendered it as an uneasy dream of sex and death and abandonment, a mirage with the power of possession.” Joan Didion
Badlands received a Starred Review from Donna Seaman of Booklist. “In the South Dakota Badlands Melinda Camber Porter so powerfully conjures is a place where wounds don’t heal."
Advance Praise
Advance Praise for BADLands
“Badlands has a narrative with a weighty sensuality that carries the reader forward in a kind of drunken, dreamlike state.”
—New York Times
“Badlands is a very strong, very intelligent and very intriguing novel.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Melinda Camber Porter should be congratulated on Badlands: she knows her subject thoroughly; her vision is lyrical, yet unflinching. Badlands is an achievement.”
—Peter Matthiessen
“In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter has focused her English intelligence on America and rendered it as an uneasy dream of sex and death and abandonment, a mirage with the power of possession.”
—Joan Didion
“In the South Dakota Badlands Melinda Camber Porter so powerfully conjures is a place where wounds don’t heal. Its haunting pain and its sorrow is as evident in the despair of Indian reservations as it is in the harshly wrinkled earth itself. The presence of the dead is palpable, and it is their voices that call the poignant characters of this lyrical, unsettling drama to action. Adam, a New York lawyer, has come to the Badlands to help the magnetic, complex Henry Blackfoot protect the threatened burial sites of his Sioux ancestors. Adam’s English lover narrates, and she is an arrestingly poetic observer who is transformed by her experiences in this most American of settings. Blunt yet sensitive, she struggles to understand the spirit of the Badlands and her conflicting feelings for Adam, Blackfoot, and Blackfoot’s children. Porter’s lambent prose offers crystalline insights into how the personal subsumes the political, why love is an act of modulation, how desire can be chic and despair a comfort, and how the past is inescapable. A deeply affecting story of revelation and its repercussions.”
—Booklist (Starred Review) Donna Seaman
“In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter creates a novel of startling, dreamlike lyricism.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter brings the passions of a poet and the imagery of an artist to this most unusual look at America. The author is a British journalist who focused on French culture from Paris, exhibited watercolors and oils to an enthusiastic European audience and wrote poetry before moving to New York.
She wrote Badlands after a visit to the South Dakota Badlands. Her view of this place was thus unobscured by cultural presumptions, her observations more acute.
Readers are first introduced to Lakota land as the narrator, an unnamed young woman, and her lover, a lawyer, now New Yorkers, drive in for a working visit. He hopes to promote the case of Blackfoot who wants to reclaim German farmers’ land as sacred Indian burial grounds.
In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter may frighten readers with the power and raw emotion of such a primitive planet and people. However, her poetry captures the awesome possibilities of life and invites a contemplation and celebration of cosmic and timeless mystery.“
— Joyce Nelson
Post-Bulletin
Rochester, Minnesota
“Badlands is beautiful with this strange plangent cry through it. Badlands is an exquisite prose poem, but is absolutely specific about the American landscape.”
—Michael Hastings
(British playwright)
“Melinda Camber Porter is dramatic and writes dramatically about what she sees in South Dakota. She is an academic who’s learning to trust her instincts. To many who read Badlands, she will feel like an outsider, not the first, who has been struck by the Reservation and feels compelled to write about it. Badlands is a Book-Of-The-Month selection and has been praised by Joan Didion, Peter Matthiessen and the late, Louis Malle.
Melinda Camber Porter was bowled over by the strength of her reaction to the Badlands and the Reservation. This experience opens the book: ‘There is a wound in this country, a gaping wound, wide as the open sky that graces it, hidden deep in the earth and covered with the sentimental growth of wheat. It is Indian country. As in South Africa, the Homelands were reduced to dirt track roads and empty spaces, so in this country, there is a bleeding wound, a sorrowful land stretching for miles that few tourists visit. The population, reduced to statistics, welfare dwellers, alcoholic, lives in an unending nightmare of ghetto that has been excommunicated for good.’
Melinda Camber Porter will seem to dwell on the pain—whether it’s the pain of love or the pain of history—though she protests that she’s quite a happy person and does not have a depressing vision of South Dakota, Pine Ridge or Native People. She says quite sincerely that she believes she’s found the heart of American culture in South Dakota.”
—Ann Grauvogl
Sioux Falls Argus Leader
Sioux Falls
South Dakota
“Badlands is an extraordinary book. Its imagery makes one think of William Blake. Better than a novel, it reads like a fierce poem, with a devastating effect on our self-esteem.”
—Louis Malle
(French filmmaker)
“Making sense of the kaleidoscope that is American culture, with all its fractured images, manifest contradictions and anarchic verve, is a daunting task for most Europeans. At the same time, as Tocqueville proved, they may be best equipped to decipher the code. For British-born artist and writer Melinda Camber Porter, the stream of impressions began to coalesce not in Manhattan, but in the Badlands of South Dakota. So transfigured was she by her experience there among the ghosts of Native American civilization that she set her new novel, appropriately named Badlands, in this magical landscape. The novel reflects this realization, and much more, given the almost uniform praise afforded Badlands. A dominant theme of her paintings—the interplay of eroticism and spirituality—also suffuses her fiction. Upon moving to the States from Paris, Camber Porter was struck by the apparent inability of Americans, as a whole, to discern the difference between pornography and the erotic. In Badlands, the narrator moves steadily through the novel to a kind of epiphany. She grows intoxicated by her vision of life, which comes through an appreciation of the world of dreams, states of ecstasy and, in Camber Porter’s words, “Native American easefulness with the world of visions.” Camber Porter regards spiritualism as a vital force in a culture. In America, she says, it is as valuable to people, as anywhere else.”
—Bill Thompson
The Post and Courier
Charlotte
South Carolina
“Badlands is Melinda Camber Porter’s vision of America. ‘America is very spiritual and very technological at the same time. It is such an emotional, passionate country but there is a constant conflict between the spiritual and the materialistic,’ said Melinda Camber Porter. The lasting effect of the dramatic South Dakota landscape and the area’s long and tragic history led to Melinda Camber Porter’s novel, Badlands.”
—Rocky Mountain News Margaret Carlin
Marketing Plan
New YouTube Videos of Author Discussing the Novel:
Badlands, a novel by Melinda Camber Porter
Discussed on South Dakota Public Radio - YouTube
Melinda Camber Porter’s South Dakota YouTube videos from her 1996 interview with Carl Gerky of South Dakota Public Radio. Melinda describes the South Dakota landscapes and discusses her novel, Badlands, set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and her poetry and painting book the Art of Love.
Volume 2, Number 7: Badlands, A Novel, set at Pine Ridge and Badlands, South Dakota
by Melinda Camber Porter
[Brain add cover] New Edition with 46 photos from the Badlands and Pine Ridge
1996 Book-of-the-Month Club Selection
ISBN 978-1-942231-51-6 (2017 Worldwide Reviews: Booklist,
New York Times, Rapid City Journal, Sioux Falls Argus Leader and
worldwide
Melinda Camber Porter discusses Badlands on her YouTube Channel:
Melinda Camber Porter reads from Badlands video 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZn8sQ1McVk
Melinda Camber Porter visits the Badlands, video 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TWhP6Ps6yo
Melinda Camber Porter on writing Badlands and Pine Ridge Reservation video 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRW3GLxq2rI
Melinda Camber Porter on poetry and other writings, video 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMcTQzYAx3o
Melinda Camber Porter Archive of Creative Works
Joseph R. Flicek, Director
Volume I: Journalism and Volume II: Art and Literature
ISSN: 2379-2450 (Print), 2379-3198 (Ebook), 2379-321X (Audio)
flicekjr@pipeline.com and www.MelindaCamberPorter.com
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Camber_Porter
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIflCaF2qpHh8uQgffSXLDQAvailable Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781942231516 |
| PRICE | $49.99 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Elena C, Reviewer
"Badlands" is a peculiar novel, although it's only a novel in a very loose definition of the word. But it is stunning nonetheless.
An Englishwoman travels to South Dakota with her American boyfriend Adam, who has agreed to represent Henry Blackfoot, a Sioux man who's initiated a lawsuit against a local white farmer whose land, he claims, has Sioux sacred sites on it. But once Adam arrives, he discovers that it's just as much about Henry's relationship with Marta, the farmer's wife, as it is about sacred burial grounds. Henry Blackfoot is a compelling man, but he's not the noble Indian Adam was looking for. The narrator, meanwhile, finds herself peculiarly attracted to, even obsessed by, Blackfoot. What follows is less of a structured narrative than it is a dive into the narrator's attempts to understand herself, America, and her homeland.
The question of what is America and what is Indian country looms large in the story: as the opening lines say, "There is a wound in this country, a gaping wound, wide as the open sky that graces it, hidden deep in the earth and covered with the sentimental growth of wheat. It is Indian country." A few lines later, the narrator concludes that this may be God's Country, but in that case, "one would be tempted to believe that the Good Lord had sick ideas about white and red and yellow and black skins, and that even when the Indians built their churches to him, even then he left them unrewarded with a dank plot of land, and worse still, no will to make it blossom green with rare scents. To see these people one feels sad with oneself. For to have myth and magic in one's past, to be part of the childworld, believing in mountains becoming men, and such, seems to be the stuff of which failure is made."
Throughout the story the narrator, Adam, and the Dakotans they encounter wrestle with this problem: that this glorious, sacred landscape has been covered over with a thin but disfiguring layer of the trashiest detritus of modern civilization, corrupting the native peoples along with it, who hide from their troubles in alcohol, and look to sleazy Wild West Shows for a renaissance. "You can't go seeing the land like this," the narrator wants to tell one of the local boys, "day in, day out, missing her beauty, the way she is, just because she was once the garbage can shaped by government treaties. This land wakes up in the dawn with more ecstasy than I've seen in Italian sunsets over the Arno, with more grace than the summer light dancing on Mediterranean waves. For now, the land is startling, mauve rim of the horizon, cutting the moon's huge face as she sinks, and the Badland buttes stretch to eternity, prisms of light making rainbow waves, one after the other, over her wrinkled rivers of still mud. You can't go on seeing the land castrated, sad just because they left her to you as a prison, a way of keeping you out of the fertile land, where the farms are white and Jesus prospers."
But there's nothing the narrator or anyone else is able to do to save the self-destructive characters from their destruction, and the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed as it becomes increasingly violent and tragic. As she confronts the awakening sexuality of Blackfoot's daughter, the narrator is carried back to her own awakening sexuality, which now rules her life so that she chases after Adam, Blackfoot, and a tribal policeman she happens to encounter as she's driving along with Blackfoot's daughter, whom she may have kidnapped in order to save her from her own budding desires. Intense, dark, and fragmented, with possible parallels begun but never fully explored between the Badlands and the narrator's own England--both are full of ancient sacred burial grounds--and between the persecution of the Native Americans and Adam's Jewish father, who had to flee Nazi Germany, "Badlands" is a rich, slow, challenging read, with scenes of disturbing sexuality juxtaposed with scenes of lyrical beauty. A story not for everyone, but for those who wish to flex their reading muscles while plunging into the most beautiful, most terrible part of America, highly recommended. The photographs in the new edition, taken by the author during her own travels across South Dakota, add another layer to this already multi-layered work, and are beautiful and evocative in their own right.
My thanks to NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
Polly K, Reviewer
Although the title indicates a novel, this is much more than that. Based on Ms. Camber's travels to her husband's homeland of South Dakota, the descriptions of the land and its peoples are awe-inspiring. Set in the times of the violent and heart-breaking destruction of a native peoples' homeland, the corruption of their life style, and the differences skin color can make, I recommend this book to the more adventurous reader.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
General Fiction (Adult), Historical Fiction, Multicultural Interest
