Customer Reviews

A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich

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In an attempt to "solve" readers' problems, Beidler and Barton have simplified the structure of Louise Erdrich's interlocking series of narratives (Tracks, Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, Love Medicine)-- almost to a fault. In a painstaking but somehow wrong-headed exercise, they have straightened out the intricate and mysterious convolutions of Native American ancestry in these novels and recharted them as Western pedigrees. With similar de-mystifying intent, they have dogged each major and minor character through the entire series of novels and then collected every scrap of information in all the books under single headings bearing that chracter's name. While the authors should be complimented on their tenacity, the linear vision that permeates their "guide" is likely to send readers of Erdrich and other Native American storytellers in the wrong direction. This reductive study obscures rather than illuminates the magical power of Erdrich's asynchornous narrative fragments that loop and twist out of the reach of clock time into the realm of spirit.

I've been teaching Erdrich's fiction for a few years, and often have wished I could check my own sense of genealogy and character relationships. This guide does a good job of that, though it was published before THE LAST REPORT was published; we need an update to include that and subsequent works.