The Antelope Wife [Library Binding]

Louise Erdich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

Past and present combine in a contemporary tale of love and betrayal influenced by Chippewa tradition, myth and legend. 'Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.' Rozin and Richard, living in Minneapolis with their two young daughters, seem a long way from the traditions of their Native American ancestors. But when one of their acquaintances kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, the connections they all hold to the past rear up to confront them. Soon the patterns of their ancestors begin to repeat themselves with truly tragic consequences. No one is better placed than Louise Erdrich to chronicle the Native American experience, and in 'The Antelope Wife', she has created an utterly compelling portrait of three generations of one family, who are more closely linked than they could ever imagine. Shrouded in myth and steeped in imagery, this is also a tale of heartbreaking realism which manages to retain a warm and irrepressible humour and belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Louise Erdrich's magical novel The Antelope Wife opens, a cavalry soldier pursues a dog with an Ojibwa baby strapped to its back. For days he follows them through "the vast carcass of the world west of the Otter Tail River" until finally the dog allows him to approach and handle the child--a girl, not yet weaned, who latches onto his nipples until, miraculously, they begin to give milk. In another kind of novel, this might be a metaphor. But this is the fictional world of Louise Erdrich, where myth is woven deeply into the fabric of everyday life. A famous cake tastes of grief, joy, and the secret ingredient: fear. The tie that binds the antelope wife to her husband is, literally, the strip of sweetheart calico he used to yoke her hand to his. Legendary characters sew beads into colorful patterns, and these patterns become the design of the novel itself.

The Antelope Wife centers on the Roys and the Shawanos, two closely related Ojibwa families living in modern-day Gakahbekong, or Minneapolis. Urban Indians of mixed blood, they are "scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together in new patterns, new strings," and Erdrich follows them through two failed marriages, a "kamikaze" wedding, and several tragic deaths. But the plot also loops and circles back, drawing in a 100-year-old murder, a burned Ojibwa village, a lost baby, several dead twins, and another baby nursed on father's milk.

The familiar Erdrich themes are all here--love, family, history, and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations, stitching them into patterns as complex as beadwork. At least initially, this swirl of characters, narratives, time lines, and connections can take a little getting used to; several of the story lines do not match up until the book's conclusion. But in the end, Erdrich's lovely, lyrical language prevails, and the reader succumbs to the book's own dreamlike logic. As The Antelope Wife closes, Erdrich steps back to address readers directly for the first time, and the moment expands the book's elaborate patterns well beyond the confines of its pages. "Who is beading us?" she asks. "Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of the earth?... We stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the edge, and only catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string, and the woman's hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon." -- Mary Park, editor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 240 pages
• Publisher: San Val (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417648333
• ISBN-13: 978-1417648337
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,157,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her debut novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel, The Plague of Doves, a New York Times bestseller, received the highest praise from Philip Roth, who wrote, "Louise Erdrich's imaginative freedom has reached its zenith--The Plague of Doves is her dazzling masterpiece." Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Erdrich is back on track with this novel, July 16, 1999

By 

Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Antelope Wife: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was disappointed in Louise Erdrich's previous novel, *Tales of Burning Love*, which I thought was overly sensationalistic--a bit "Hollywood" for my taste. In *The Antelope Wife*, however, she has returned to an approach that is reminiscent of her first and most triumphant novel, *Love Medicine*. She writes in a style that may be difficult for some readers to accept--no,it's not "obscure" in the sense of a James Joyce novel, but she changes voices, time frames, and situations constantly. The result is a tapestry-like narrative that is uniquely effective, in my view. Erdrich has a way with words that is rare in today's literary world, despite the countless novels that are published annually. Moreover, because of her own Native American heritage, she is able to convey with incredible effectiveness the realities of past and present life and consciousness within those Indian cultures with which she is familiar.

This is a fine work, one that makes me look forward all the more to Louise Erdrich's next book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, haunting, January 28, 1999

By 

K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Antelope Wife: A Novel (Paperback)

With each book, my admiration grows for this writer. Her attention to detail, characterizations, interweaving of mysticism and reality -- and with all, an original dash of humor laced with sadness. As with Burning Tales of Love, she weaves many disparate threads together, creating a narrative blanket that you never want to unwrap from. I've read everything she's written, and in this day when prizes such as the National Book Award mean so much in sales and recognition, it amazes me that her work isn't at least among the finalists.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Oh, Deer Me, October 10, 2006

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Antelope Wife: A Novel (Paperback)

I have admired Erdrich's writing in the past---"Tracks" and "The Beet Queen"--so I was looking forward to reading another of her novels. I must say I was disappointed here. Though Erdrich, like N. Scott Momaday, has a highly poetical style and her pages are filled with beautiful images (which is certainly a positive characteristic), a novel after all needs to have a strong story line or a point. Beautiful sentences and poetic expressions do not make a story, even if spiced with magical realism, sex, recipes, and colorful beads. As a literary testimony to a section of Native American experience, THE ANTELOPE WIFE has great merit. But as a novel, in the company of all the novels of the world, I felt that in this case, Erdrich tried to stretch out her career and write the next book though her heart was not in it. Perhaps it was a bad time in her life. The novel felt to me as one written by a person "trying to be literary". She writes of the mixed and intertwined fates of all those people of the Anishinabe world---Indians, whites, men, women, strong and weak---like beads on a string. The Indians come out holding the short stick. Within this framework, individuals play out their fates, violence and love intermingling with mystery and mundane existence. The characters somehow do not rise above their initial characterizations. The women are stronger than the men for the most part: they endure while the men often fall into alcohol and despair. The author writes in graceful style, but not much depth. I felt---at the risk of sounding snotty---that THE ANTELOPE WIFE belongs more in the category of `chick-lit' than in `American literature'. I once read part of a novel by Amy Tan, but could not finish for similar reasons. I did read THE ANTELOPE WIFE in its entirety, because Erdrich's writing differs favorably from most other authors', but I grew tired of the soap opera quality of this story.