Sorrow of the Earth. Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

This slim volume by Eric Vuillard takes us on a very powerful journey in its scant 192 pages. Originally published in French and translated into English by Ann Jefferson, it packs an emotional punch that few lavish biographies or epic novels are able to do.
 
The narrative is pure quicksilver, hypnotic and shiny, slipping this way and that around the incontrovertible bluff of the greatest showman of all time, Buffalo Bill Cody, who created the mass spectacle to which thousands flocked in order to witness for themselves recent historical events in the Wild West. Woven throughout are fictional impressions of Cody’s private life, his spurious beginnings and carpetbagger associates, his womanising, even his town, Cody in Wyoming, and how he became consumed by his own legend and ultimately unable to distinguish truth from the showman’s lies.
 
There is equal force in the retelling of Sitting Bull’s relationship with Cody and how this stately Native American was reduced to being part of the freak sideshow for fifty bucks a week. Then there are the the cast of other  “injuns” who are jeered at, insulted and made to recreate their own massacre every night, only to rise and fight and die again the next day, and the next. Most of them are now forgotten and lost to history, like stunt rider Feather Man who had a fall in Marseilles and died in agony, “all alone on the other side of the world, unable to speak either French or English” with no-one to claim his body and whose remains were eventually discarded in a communal grave. The disturbing tale of Zintkala Nuni (Lost Girl), the infant survivor of Wounded Knee, is especially poignant in how she fell victim to good intentions, transient curiosity and ultimate degradation at the hands of white men.
 
Real history and imagination mix so well here, that it is difficult to slot this book into a specific genre but its impact is in its poetic prose and its brevity. Even the busiest reader can find the time for this rewarding work on how the tragedy of show business is a spectacle that ".... 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 that our own lives, more moving and more persuasive than reality, more terrifying than our nightmares.”

Five stars.

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(With many thanks to Edelweiss for the advance reading copy.)

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(For more examples of the fine writing in this book, an edited extract can be found here on The Independent book review site.)

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