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Summary
Summary
"A fiercely imagined tale of love and loss, a story that manages to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival."
--New York Times
"[A] beguiling family saga....A captivating jigsaw puzzle of longing and loss whose pieces form an unforgettable image of contemporary Native American life."
--People
A New York Times bestselling author, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Louise Erdrich is an acclaimed chronicler of life and love, mystery and magic within the Native American community. A hauntingly beautiful story of a mysterious woman who enters the lives of two families and changes them forever, Erdrich's classic novel, The Antelope Wife, has enthralled readers for more than a decade with its powerful themes of fate and ancestry, tragedy and salvation. Now the acclaimed author of Shadow Tag and The Plague of Doves has radically revised this already masterful work, adding a new richness to the characters and story while bringing its major themes into sharper focus, as it ingeniously illuminates the effect of history on families and cultures, Ojibwe and white.
Author Notes
Karen Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where both of her parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976 with an AB degree, and she received a Master of Arts in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.
Erdrich published a number of poems and short stories from 1978 to 1982. In 1981 she married author and anthropologist Michael Dorris, and together they published The World's Greatest Fisherman, which won the Nelson Algren Award in 1982. In 1984 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine, which is an expansion of a story that she had co-written with Dorris. Love Medicine was also awarded the Virginia McCormick Scully Prize (1984), the Sue Kaufman Prize (1985) and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel (1985).
In addition to her prose, Erdrich has written several volumes of poetry, a textbook, children's books, and short stories and essays for popular magazines. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for professional excellence, including the National Magazine Fiction Award in 1983 and a first-prize O. Henry Award in 1987. Erdrich has also received the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the Western Literacy Association Award, the 1999 World Fantasy Award, and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 2006. In 2007 she refused to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of North Dakota in protest of its use of the "Fighting Sioux" name and logo.
Erdrich's novel The Round House made the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. Her other New York Times bestsellers include Future Home of the Living God (2017).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves, generation to generation, across blood and time." Erdrich (Love Medicine, etc.) embroiders this theme in a sensuous novel that brings her back to the material she knows best, the emotionally dislocated lives of Native Americans who try to adhere to the tribal ways while yielding to the lure of the general culture. In a beautifully articulated tale of intertwined relationships among succeeding generations, she tells the story of the Roy and the Shawano families and their "colliding histories and destinies." The narrative begins like a fever dream with a U.S. cavalry attack on an Ojibwa village, the death of an old woman who utters a fateful word, the inadvertent kidnapping of a baby and a mother's heartbreaking quest. The descendants of the white soldier who takes the baby and of the bereaved Ojibwa mother are connected by a potent mix of tragedy, farce and mystical revelation. As time passes, there is another kidnapping, the death of a child and a suicide. Fates are determined by a necklace of blue beads, a length of sweetheart calico and a recipe for blitzkuchen. Though the saga is animated by obsessional love, mysterious disappearances, mythic legends and personal frailties, Erdrich also works in a comic vein. There's a dog who tells dirty jokes and a naked wife whose anniversary surprise has an audience. Throughout, Erdrich emphasizes the paradoxes of everyday life: braided grandmas who follow traditional ways and speak the old language also wear eyeliner and sneakers. In each generation, men and women are bewitched by love, lust and longing; they are slaves to drink, to carefully guarded secrets or to the mesmerizing power of hope. Though the plot sometimes bogs down from an overload of emotional complications, the novel ultimately celebrates the courage of following one's ordained path in the universe and meeting the challenges of fate. It is an assured example of Erdrich's storytelling skills. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In reviewing Tales of Burning Love (1996), we observed that "the power of narrative and the salvation of love have always been Erdrich's quintessential themes." Those themes remain crucial to her latest novel, but here they only sporadically shine through a cloudy sky: "History is grief and no passion is complete without its jealous backdrop." In her characteristically swirling narrative style, Erdrich tells the story of two intertwined Ojibwa families, the Roys and the Shawanos, and the fiery love that scars their souls and inhibits their freedom. We hear many voices in these overlapping and interconnected stories, jumping in time and place from a cavalryman who bayonets an Indian woman and then saves an infant girl to a reservation dog who avoids the soup pot and becomes a canine Greek chorus, but the axis around which the entire cast rotates is an event, not a person: when a smooth-talking trader abducts (or maybe just entices) a beguilingly beautiful woman from a powwow and takes her with him to Minneapolis, a tremor is felt on the mythic seismograph, echoing the past and foreshadowing the future. Some readers may have difficulty with the narrative jumps and the rich overlay of magic realism, but for those willing to slowly immerse themselves in this nonlinear world as one soaks in a hot bath, the rewards are many. Erdrich's image-rich prose seduces the reader just as her trader lures his Antelope Wife and as the other lovers across generations forge their connections ("His low, vibrant voice sank down the front of Mary's dress"). And while it is those passionate connections that again provide salvation for Erdrich's storm-tossed characters, we feel equally the power of connections to constrain, to keep Antelope Wife from stretching the horizon. --Bill Ott
Guardian Review
This cult author is of part-Ojibwa Indian descent; and her admirers testify that her pastoral tales of the North Dakotan nowhere are as enchanting as E Annie Proulx's of Newfoundland. Personally, I find her diffuse "poetic" style defeatingly soporific. It would help if she concentrated on a single storyline, but the key metaphor for this three-generational family saga is a broken string of beads, and the reader is forced to chase narrative threads wherever they roll. "Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and time" states the narrator. "Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it." This is all well and good, were she not then to hop backwards and forwards across generational lines as the mood takes her. Best to tune in to the more enjoyable vignettes as they whiz past. The bit where someone or other gets walloped with a frozen turkey was good. The rest, I'm afraid, seemed a bit of a blur. Caption: article-dsdad.1 This cult author is of part-Ojibwa Indian descent; and her admirers testify that her pastoral tales of the North Dakotan nowhere are as enchanting as E Annie Proulx's of Newfoundland. Personally, I find her diffuse "poetic" style defeatingly soporific. - Alfred Hickling.
Kirkus Review
Erdrich's stunningly imagined sixth novel follows the trail blazed by such well-received predecessors as The Bingo Palace (1994). Over several generations, a strange symbiosis binds, as it divides, two families, the Roys and the Shawanos. Erdrich begins with a cryptic imageof women sewing beads into an indiscernible patternthen briefly tells the story of Scranton Roy, who is drawn westward by the vision of a mysteriously beckoning woman, but who, having failed to find her, goes into service with the US Cavalry. During a raid, Roy kills an old Indian woman and then rescues an infant girl whose cradle is strapped to the dog that carries her. He raises the girl as his own, until her mother, Blue Prairie Woman, comes for her. Shortly after, the newly motherless girl is sheltered by a herd of antelope, who somehow sense she's one of them. She'll return again to ``civilization,'' to begin a cycle of restlessness and unbelonging that afflicts her descendants and the men who love them. From this haunting beginning, Erdrich fashions a powerful and dauntingly elliptical tale of obsession and separation that moves backward and forward through time from Northern Plains Indian settlements to present-day Minneapolis. Its preternaturally striking characters (whose tangled relationships will be understood best by those who know Erdrich's earlier fiction) include: Klaus Shawano, who acquires ``the antelope woman,'' but cant keep her; several sets of twin daughters, all frustratingly distant from the men who claim them; Richard Whiteheart Beads, who causes the deaths of those he loves and attempts to take his own life when his beleaguered ex-wife remarries; andErdrich's most brilliant inventionthe ghostly ``windigo dog,'' a creature magically akin to the humans it patiently serves and protests. Too many explanations are hastily knotted together at the end, and a genealogy would have helped, but few readers will complain. This is realism at its most magical, in a novel as satisfying as any Erdrich has written. ($125,000 ad/promo)
Library Journal Review
Erdrich suffuses Minneapolis with Native American spirit. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
