The Nature of Things

Louise Erdrich builds the characters in this book with infinite patience and care until they completely come alive for the reader. We feel as though we could reach out and touch them, have a conversation with them. Perhaps they are so real because they are based on real people that the author loved. All of the books in her ongoing Chippewa chronicles feel personal, but this one feels almost visceral. It is a story derived from her family history. The night watchman of the title is Thomas Washashk (the word means muskrat) and he is based on Erdrich's grandfather who was, in fact, a night watchman. Thomas works guarding a factory where the women of the Turtle Mountain clan work during the day to fashion gemstones as drill bits for Defense Department ordnance and for watches. The factory must be protected at night from potential thieves. It is the major employer on the reservation and vitally important to the Turtle Mountain economy. One of the women who work in the factory is Thomas...

How do you decide what books to read? I read reviews by reviewers whom I respect. I take recommendations from family and friends who know what I like to read. I look at the best sellers lists. I look at the magazine Bookmarks , which compiles reviews from various places and assigns a rating to books. And then I choose from all those sources the books that appeal to me and that I think I might enjoy reading. It's a system that works well for me. I rarely pick up a book to read that turns out to be a total stinker. And then there are some favorite authors that I will read regardless of what the reviews say or whether anyone recommends them. Louise Erdrich falls in that category. Her latest book, Future Home of the Living God , got very mixed reviews and, for the most part, they were not kind. Bookmarks' assessment, after compiling the reviews, was "Not recommended, even for Erdrich fans." But I was undeterred. I thought the book had an interesting concept. It seems that...

LaRose by Louise Erdrich My rating: 5 of 5 stars Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. That's my considered opinion. Every book of hers that I've read has shone with the light of a transparent power, a use of language that is deceptively plain but rich and transformative. Like her Native American ancestors, it seems that she has taken from the anglo culture and language that which she can use, but she has retained the best parts of her heritage that help her to make sense of those things and to keep them from overpowering the sensibilities of the unique society from which she came. She does it all again in LaRose , her latest novel. LaRose is the third book in a sort of loose trilogy that started with The Plague of Doves , continued with The Round House and now reaches (perhaps) a conclusion with this book. Or perhaps there will be more books set in this community of the Indian reservation, a place where different characters and their ancestors recur and where the past seem...

This is a story that, unfortunately, resonates with current events happening all too often on Indian reservations in this country. It involves violence against Native American women by white men. It is a problem which raises knotty jurisdictional issues for law enforcement. This may sound familiar to those who follow the news out of Washington. During the debate over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act last year, certain Republicans in Congress balked at some of the provisions because they did not want Native American courts and law enforcement to have authority to arrest and prosecute white perpetrators of such crimes. This is the issue that is at the heart of Louise Erdrich's latest book about Ojibwe culture, the National Book Award winner,  The Round House. The events in the book take place in 1988. In the spring of that year, Geraldine Coutts, an Ojibwe woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is the victim of a horrific rape. It leaves her physically battere...

It's only within the last year that I've begun reading the works of Louise Erdrich. Don't ask me why I waited so long. After all,  The Beet Queen  was published in 1986 and  Love Medicine  in 1984. She was always on my radar, but there are always so many books to read and so little time. Belatedly, I have entered Erdrich's world and I'm very glad to have finally made it here.  Louise Erdrich writes about ordinary people. They are not superheroes, or even heroes (for the most part) in the common understanding of the word. They are people who struggle to play the hand that Fate has dealt them through nature and nurture (or lack of nurture) as best they can. They go through life never really understanding their own motives or what makes them tick. Mostly, they are too busy making a living to give much thought to that. Even so, these characters sometimes have flashes of insight that just about literally take the reader's breath away.  In this, as in other of he...

Reading this book reminded me of trying to work a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the box top picture. You begin to wonder if these pieces REALLY fit together or have you forced them. Will there be a recognizable picture when you finish or will it just be a splatter of dots that mean nothing? One doesn't expect Louise Erdrich to tell a linear story and she certainly doesn't in  Tracks . It is a thoroughly non-linear, stream-of-consciousness kind of tale, an Ojibwe tale. Her storytelling has been compared to Faulkner's and one can clearly see why in this book. Erdrich employs two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline. Nanapush is an old man who is telling stories to his granddaughter, Lulu. He is telling her about her origins and how she came to be who she is. Pauline's story is her own - a story of how she came to be a bride of Christ - but tangentially, her story also touches Lulu through Lulu's mother, Fleur. Fleur was a woman of power. Her community ascribed those...

Louise Erdrich can surely string words together! What is amazing to me is that in this, her very first book, published in 1984, she was able to string them together with such a sure and confident touch. The book is now 27 years old and I don't know why it took me so long to get to it, but I'm very glad that I finally did. The stories told here of the Kashpaw and Lamartine families of the Chippewa Reservation - and off the reservation - stand up well over time. They are just as relevant, poignant, and funny, that is to say just as human, today as when first published. The stories begin with a death, the lonely death in a North Dakota snowstorm of a Chippewa woman named June Kashpaw. She was just trying to make her way home at Easter in the deepest snow that had fallen in the area in forty years. Although June disappears from the book in the first few pages, her presence lingers throughout. She continues to impact her family and everyone who cared for her. She is never truly dead...