Customer Reviews

The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" is Erdrich at her best. While I find all her works amusing and entertaining, works to be savored and not just read, Little No Horse pulls together the best elements of her talent. There is passion, death, humor (both subtle and blatant), excellent characterization, and a plot that is tightly bound from beginning to end while loosely juggled between various character points of view. Her characters, whether central or peripheral, are believeable, understandable, and in some ways ordinary while carving out a niche in the extraordinary or mysterious. There are wonderful tales within the larger story. Tales that are crafted well in themselves but always work towards enlightening the pathway of plot or character development. The book begins where "Tales of Burning Love" left off, but quickly moves back to 1912 so that those with little or no experience in Erdrich's novels need not worry about being left out. "Little No Horse" is both prequel and sequel. Entertaining on a surface level, but it also brings to light many issues worthy of reflecting on long after you are done reading. A true work of art.

I have enjoyed this author since her first book, Love Medicine. That said, I think The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse is one of the best stories in the realm of storydom - an engaging novel about commitment and love. I did not want it to end.

We learn in the first pages that Father Damien is a female once called Agnes. Agnes/Father Damien has a passionate life ride and the good fortune to befriend and be friended by many wonderful characters. All of Agnes' loves are intriguing and inform her choices. These include the music of Chopin and a drowned piano. Agnes' respect for the Ojibwe people influences Father Damien's belief that the Four Directions are as sacred as the Trinity and must be incorporated into all blessings.

My favorite character, the trickster genius, Nanapush, teaches Father Damien how to survive in practical ways, as in how to make snow shoes and how to unnerve an opponent in a game of chess. Father Damien is generously helped by Nanapush to regain his commitment to the living world in a sacred Ojibwe sweat lodge ceremony. Their discussions about the concept of the Catholic Devil, as opposed to the Ojibwe devils ( some good, some bad), the Ojibwe concept of "not time," and that even a pair of old pants can harbor spirit are wonderful passages to read and read again. Nanapush introduces the Father to a spirituality of wit and compassion and bone deep wisdom that causes his Agnes self to hope in her last breathing moments that she might bypass the devil she fears has conscripted her soul and even bypass the Catholic heaven for the Ojibwe version of the after life that she has learned to prefer as the most hopeful final option.

The character most will loathe, Sister Leopolda, the Puyat, is the best literary example of spiritual materialism I have had the good fortune to discover. Save us all from the Leopolda's of this world! And save us all from becoming her!! Let us hope that the canonized saints will not have to recognize her as one of their hierarchy and then be forced to reconsider their own worthiness!!! Leopolda is the product of terrible abuse. Her treacherous nature, however justified, is a great challenge to the harmony Father Damien so valiently strives to maintain. Their encounters are also passages to savor and return to. When Leopolda wants to repent, beware.

The irony of confusing material wealth and power over others - or even painting one's nails with a laquer called "Happiness" - in hopes of achieving perfect happiness permeates the novel. Ribald humor and miraculous serendipty are artfully balanced with sobering and historically true natural disasters and crimes of human disregard for our first people and the land. Above all, this is a joyous tale of one tormented soul's journey to beatitude.

Thank you Ms. Erdrich.

I'm going to have to reread the six novels that lead up to one. If Louise Erdrich never writes another novel about the folks in and around this fictional reservation she would have given us one huge and marvelous tale, encompassing the lives of characters who not only become the people we feel we've known (or, at least, wish we had known) but people who we feel have become our teachers: ones who teach us to see what is important; teach us to see grace and providence when things become irreversibly fouled up.

"Little No Horse" is a strange place. I won't go into too many details, but it is a place where women over age seventy still have enough sex appeal to make men obsess (sexy enough to make priests want give up the call) -- reminiscent of the women of the Old Testament, particularly Genesis.

In "The Last Report At Little No Horse" Louise Erdrich wrote less of the first person narratives -- which seemed to dominated the first six novels of this series -- telling the story predominately in the third person (my own opinion is telling a story from a third person perspective is much more difficult to do right). You need only open any page in this book to discover the work of a master wordsmith. Beautiful.

Although I have long been an Erdrich fan, I have to say that this book stands alone as one of the most beautifully written novels I have read in a long time. From a bear baptism to an ugly Virgin Mary to a death by flatulence, this book is alternately funny and poignant.

Louis Erdrich continues her tradition of intelligent, respectful and captivating writing with this book. Rather than elaborate on the specifics of characters and background in this novel, I will just say that this book gave me an overall sense of a writer who has found peace and come to appreciate life's joys.

I had a lot of varying reactions to this book, but in the end I'd say it's worth a read with a big caveat that you'll need to get through what I found to be a pretty uninteresting and eventually inconsequential beginning. The book follows former nun Agnes as she transforms herself into the deceased (though no one but her is aware of it) Father Damien, newly installed priest at the reservation of the title. The story moves back and forth in time between the start of her transformation and the near-end of it as Damien is being questioned by another priest with regard to possible sainthood for a reservation women. The story also slips aside to offer many digressions and stories within stories involving other characters and the history of the reservation people. The wealth of characters and shifts in time make this a relatively complex read and I 'd recommend reading it in as few sittings as possible so as to remember who is whom and when and where. For those who may find it difficult to read quickly, there is a helpful genealogical chart inside the front cover (or at least, there was in my edition).
While the Agnes/Damien character needs to be set up for us and motivation created for her to take on the role she does, I found this opening section (about 60-70 pages) relatively uninteresting and at times overwrought in its writing (in particular its description of music and sex). I usually give a book 40-50 pages before considering giving it up, and had this not been a book for my wife's book club (we like to co-read and discuss) I'm not sure I would have continued. I'm glad I did, but the story really didn't hold any interest for me until Father Damien appeared on the reservation, and even then it didn't really get compelling until about halfway through. From that point on it steadily strengthened and the last (well, almost last) sections I found utterly beautiful.
Father Damien becomes more and more interesting, more and more human, more and more compelling a character as the story moves on. Several other characters are equally strong--natives Nanapush and Mary, young Lulu, an apprentice priest--but others are too vaguely drawn in relation to their importance to the story; it would have made for a stronger book to have had them drawn a bit more fully.
Stylistically, the book has many beautifully evocative passages, but just as many overwritten passages where the prose goes over the top. Luckily, the best writing comes at the end, drowning out some of the memory of the bad.
There is a nice tight thematic structure to the book I thought, centering around religion and love and sin and obligation, with nearly all the stories, main and side, touching upon those subjects.
While the structure is complex, with its shift in focus and character and time, it isn't overly so and not all that difficult to follow. Though many of the digressions were entertaining and also thematically connected, a few of them seemed out of place in tone and style, almost as if she had a few extra short stories lying around and decided to toss them in. Part of my negative reaction to them may be due to the fact that I have not read Erdich before, and it seems these characters are well known to fans of hers. Perhaps they enjoyed seeing more of them, but I could have done with less.
Overall, the book has some major weaknesses: a very slow quarter and only somewhat better second quarter, some over the top language and metaphor, an unnecessary endnote section (I'd prefer the book ending two chapters earlier), a relatively uninteresting "hanging question" (will the woman be sainted or not, who murdered one of the reservation people years ago). But in the end, the character of Father Damien and Erdich's penultimate section filled with beautiful language and thought redeems the book. Recommended with caveat, and if you find yourself putting it down early, try skipping ahead and trying again.

The sacred and the profane. Faith and eroticism. Earth-drying sunlight and earth-rending flood. Night and day. Heaven and Hell ... could any of them exist without their opposite?

In her new novel, "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," Louise Erdrich weaves the intricate and the uncomplicated into a story that is, by turns, extraordinarily tangled and beautifully concrete. Opposites dependent upon one another.

Maybe it's because Erdrich writes in sacred circles. Families, generations, places, events and individual characters swirl among her various novels. The Turtle Mountain-Pembina Reservation, which sprawls across the Red River halfway into North Dakota -- the setting for "Love Medicine," "Tales of Burning Love" and other Erdrich tales -- is again the crucible where Erdrich re-mixes the lives of the Nanapush, Kashpaw, Morrissey, Mauser, Pillager, Lamartine and Lazarre families. In her work, you'll recognize Faulknerian rhythms: a northern plains Yoknapatawpha where the Sartorises, Snopeses and Compsons are known by Ojibwe names, where voices shift like sand.

In circles where the literary air is more rarefied, Erdrich's juxtaposition of disparate concepts might be called *Manichean* -- relating to an ancient spiritual belief that life is governed by an endless battle between equally potent forces of good and evil, neither of which can ever annihilate the other. That's one way to look at it. But while her writing invites a number of interpretive methods and philosophies, it is Spartan and simply human, more Cather than Faulkner. In environs where landscape is less influential to life, readers might see only Manichean metaphors in rivers, forests and blizzards; in the West, it's just the way things are -- starkly contrasted depending on the time of day, the angle of sight, or the weather. The place that is good by day might be evil by dark. It is not just the stuff of Erdrich's writing, but her life, too.

The pivotal event in "The Last Report" is a Dakota flood that not only sweeps Agnes away on the lid of a piano, but also represents her spiritual evolution -- her ordination, if you will -- into Father Damien. A heaven-sent event, delivered by the Muse of Metaphor into the fervid imagination of a writer in need of a symbol? In fact, it is a scene inspired by the 1997 flood on North Dakota's Red River. It is certainly an apt spiritual metaphor, but it is also a simple account of how fortunes are so swift to change in the Western landscape. Pick your poison, dear reader: Mysticism or reality. They both work.

The part-Ojibwe Erdrich, like indigenous writers Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko, deftly blends mysticism and dark humor in a complex, compassionate amalgam that, when burnished, not only reflects the Indian experience, but human existence in any color, at any moment in time.

I loved this book! My favorite of Erdrich's books is Antelope Wife, but "The Last Report..." ties for second with "Bingo Palace." I would say Last Report is one of her finest works. Great character development, depth, insight, and many doses of humor. Much of the humor in this book seems to be directed at the ways in which people interpret and understand Catholicism, but it also can be seen as an extention of how people understand their own circumstances and make meaning of them. A definite must read. Sort of felt a little like reading the John Powers books (Last Catholic in America, etc.) plus all that we have come to love and respect from Ms. Erdrich.

N A ONCE INNOCUOUS river, during the 1997 North Dakota flood, helpers rescued a woman in a billowing white nightgown floating by on the lid of a piano. Fascinated by this aquarelle image, author Goldberry M. Long wrote of a distressed heroine, Agnes, climbing on top of her piano and floating away to a new life.

Further inspired by the image, the author, Louise Erdrich, started work on this intriguing and beguiling new novel, written during the flood. Louise Erdrich is of both Ojibwe and German-American heritage. This unusual duality surfaces frequently in her creative writings, as with Father Damion Modeste (a modest devil?) a near 100 year-old character in her story. Writer Erdrich states in an interview, Modestes character begs the question, Are the personae we deliver to the world intrinsic to us or assumed by us?

Father Modestes faces a dilemma; the Vatican wants to enquire into the background of Sister Leopolda, a candidate for sainthood. Only Damion knows of her ability to perform miracles, yet remaining capable of evil. For years he wrote directly to the Pope concerning his parish and included details of the miracles occurring at Little No Horse.

However, he withheld essential facts until his last report. It reveals the unusual situation concerning Sister Leopolda and thundering facts concerning himself.

Characters from Erdrichs previous works feature in the book. Gerry Nanapush appears in an uproarious sequence involving a mousy moose.

In addition to its sizzling plots and powerful set pieces, we learn much from this book about Turtle Mountain Ojibwe culture. Its roots appear in ancient Manichaeism, a religious dissension that built on Christianity and tried to make its practice universal. It died out around the 5th century but revived in the 20th when its ancient scriptures resurfaced in Turkestan and Egypt.

Erdrichs style makes for great extracts, several from this book appeared in The New Yorker

Louise Erdrich creates a fascinating tapestry in her novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The characters are slowly woven in and out of the story until an intricate work of beauty has been created. This is a story of a search for hope and faith that begins in an unusual manner. It begins with Father Damien writing for answers from Rome as he has for many decades. It is revealed that Father Damien is not who many believe him to be, but the question remains, is Father Damien the person that God needed Father Damien to be. The tale then steps back into how Father Damien arrives at Little No Horse, where many people enter into the tale. When Father Jude, arrives to investigate whether Sister Leopolda, a nun at the convent in Little No Horse, really deserves consideration for Sainthood the past is unwrapped layer by layer.
The questions of faith, suffering and sacrifice are examined, when does one supercede the other to elevate each to a higher level of love and true caring.
The story started out very slowly but, halfway through this novel, each page became a gem and when the story had ended it was a wonderful tale.

An unusual life journey - that of Agnes Dewitt originally from rural Wisconsin, briefly a nun, then a passionate affair with Bernt, hostage in a bank robbery and then, after assuming the identity of the deceased Father Damien Modeste, a priest living on an Ojibwe reserve. This is a many layered reading experience with much about the lives of native Americans in the twentieth century, comic scenes to make you laugh out loud, moments of intense passion, and spiritual theme throughout reconciling Ojibwe spirituality with Catholicism. The novel begins with Father Damien at an ancient age being visited by the younger Father Jude Miller who has been sent to interview him about the possible sainthood of a nun from the reserve, Sister Leopolda, finally Father Damien is compelled to revisit events of the past and to tell his story.

At times Erdrich's writing is more like poetry than prose, though the different stories were beautifully told it was all somewhat disjointed for a novel, hard to keep track of the characters. What really held my attention was the idea of someone living as the other sex for an entire lifetime, this is what makes this book unique and unforgettable for me. I was curious all the way through as to what would happen when the "Father" died, that kept me turning the pages and was pleased by way the end finally came for Agnes.