Customer Reviews

Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition (P.S.)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Louise Erdich, the author, is of German and Chippewa descent. The story is about the Chippewa (aka Ojibwa) living on a fictional reservation in North Dakota and how one person's death affects so many lives. Lke a "dark twisting river - the bed is deep and narrow" as it meanders through the land and time.

The first chapter describes June Kashpaw, Chippewa mother and wife, off the Reservation walking down the boom-town of Williston, North Dakota, thinking of taking a bus home to the reservation. She meets a man at a bar, has a brief liaison, and then freezes to death walking home in a snow storm. The stories following cascade and are held together by her death, how her children, husband (Gordie Kashpaw), and others on the reservation are touched by the murder.

The story meanders in a unstructured way through short stories - interconnected - but could easily stand on their own. There are 18 Chapters in the expanded version. Characters from Chippewa and Mixed Blood families talk in mostly first person and connected through relatives or lovers over decades. Each chapter starts with a new character telling a piece of the interconnected story from their viewpoint. It takes awhile to understand which character is talking. The timeline is choppy and hops back and forth from the 1930's to the 1980's. It would have been good to have a "family tree" at the end of the book to see more clearly the interrelationships. However, I feel guilty saying that as the Chippewa don't believe in human measurement - of numbers, time, inches, feet, or quantification - as they are "all just plays for cutting nature down to size." The Chippewa feel the "grand scheme of nature is not ours to measure." The book has many ways to be interpreted and each reader has

There is a raw reality with the unique and eccentric tales of the families (Lammartines, Kashpaws, Lazarres and Morriseys). The reader pieces the complicated puzzle together. We realize that the basics of life are what we all need and want, territory, religion, culture, love, truth, forgiveness, family which are demonstrated in the tales - like the river of life mentioned in the book.

The title "Love Medicine" relates to the Chippewa belief that that geese mate for life - and if a couple eats their hearts, it will cure infidelity.

Louise Erdrich reveals and defends the culture as it clings to the past and clashes with the White Man's overwhelming culture, politics and laws. Like a fabric the weave of interconnectedness's of the tribe is key.

Love Medicine is an unusual book, a challenge to understand, but rewarding as a cultural eye-opener.

The dilemma of the colonized in search for an identity which is neither static and backward-facing, nor imposed by the worldview of the colonizer is the subject of Erdrich's Love Medicine. Her winding, free-flowing storyline mirrors her endorsement of the fluidity of family connections, one of the most significant difference between Euro-American and Ojibwa cultures. Defying the strictures of the novel, the anthology, or any other established writing style, Erdrich refuses to abide by the rules of Western traditions of fiction. A slap in the face to any notions of the superiority of such traditions, Erdrich's tales demand attention by being undeniably honest, and evoking empathy for even those characters who represent everything which is in opposition to Western culture, and zeroing in on the painful truths of America's imperialist history without subjecting the reader to a history lesson. One of the most important books on the Native American experience I've ever encountered.

This is a multigenerational story of two American families, the Lamartines and the Kashpaws, told in interrelated short stories. If you've never been on an Indian Reservation, you'll feel you have been when you've finished this book. You'll find love and desperation here. You'll come across despair. You'll see so much more than you bargained for when you started this book that is oh so special and oh so beautifully told.

Love Medicine, along with many other of Erdrich's novels, is amazing. This book, however, is challenging, so if you don't want to have to work things out, it's not for you. There are 8 narrators within this novel and it is not told in a linear fashion. Additionally, this novel is part of a collection that Erdrich has written, so things are left out that the reader finds out when reading her other books. Yes this book "jumps around" and repeats things from different perspectives, but Erdrich does so to give the reader a more in-depth look at the situation. Having read this novel two times, I also feel that one gains so much more after reading it again.

This book is challenging, enlightening, and wonderful. There are so many nuances tied into Erdrich's words which are fun to discover.

To the reviewer that couldn't get into the story by the first 20 pages or so...I felt the same, but had to read for college English class. Aroung 25% of the way into the story, the connection was made and I couldn't put it down!

Many, many years ago, in a public library, on the prowl for a new novel, I saw the title "Love Medicine" on a spine on in the stacks. I pulled down the book, read the first paragraph, and have been a Louise Erdrich fan ever since. Quirky and quaint, the characters walk off the page and pull the reader into a world of raw Dakota realities and enchantments.

This book is full of gorgeous description and haunting prose. A work of art. It also feels like a real story about real people, moving in the real world and through their own psychic landscape as well. So good it's scary.

Loved this book and the author. Louise Erdrich's writing style is so easy and real. Highly recommend this and any of her other books. Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition (P.S.)

This is the first Erdrich book I've read and it seems to me she is really one of the best writers writing in the States today. I'd always heard of Erdrich as a writer who writes about American Indian themes--maybe that was the publisher's marketing idea? If you want some insight into modern Native American lifestyle, sure, read Erdrich, but you could read this book just to read one brilliant American novel about whatever it happens to be about. She's a fantastic, extremely intelligent writer with awesome characterization and a very, very well crafted and original voice, who judging from this book writes about working-class people in the mid-north, many of them with Native American backgrounds. More difficult, this book has multiple main characters whose stories it moves between, but it's a unified story and vision. One seriously mega-talented author who has insight into the human condition and America as a place, and the people living there.

This was difficult to get through, and quite depressing, but it is a book I think most adults should read. We need to know more about the culture of the reservations. I thought the part about the nun and Catholic school was greatly exaggerated and anti-Catholic, as I personally received an excellent education for 8 years at a Catholic elementary school in South Dakota taught by kind and educated nuns. None of my experiences even came close to what was described in this book, nor was the religion portrayed correctly. Nevertheless, the book is passionate, interesting and well written. I am sure much of the culture of reservations was correctly portrayed.