This is an uncomfortable comparison, because we have so many strange stereotypes about predator/prey. I think I came upon it last night, half asleep: Atwood and Silko are predators Erdrich is not. Atwood's books are full of hard-eyed, fierce love. I was about to write, "Atwood and Silko focus on Truth, Erdrich on Love." But that's not it. When I try to touch the difference, it slides away under me. There is an essential difference between the sensibilities of a Margaret Atwood or a Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich, for all the "feminine sensibility" of each. She writes with some political and moral fervor, touching on the history of injustice that is the heritage of every Indian writer as surely as slavery is for the black, but she is not above moments of magic realism, as when Jack is crushed by the marble Virgin and lives. Nanapush's wife Dot Adare, Jack's fifth wife and once the protagonist of The Beet Queen)? The nuns? What new territory? Check your notes.Įrdrich writes with a cohesive vision of a Faulkner in love with his home, with the precision of Leslie Silko, and with a feminine sensibility as sensual, strong, and thoughtful as that of Margaret Atwood she has staked out the Pembina region (the northeast quadrant of North Dakota) as her Yoknapatawpha County. Gerry Nanapush, Erdrich's mythic remaking of Leonard Peltier, and the Lamartines all play a significant part in the action. Tales of Burning Love, which one reviewer described as a mainstream novel outside her standard venue, actually begins by introducing us to the man that June Morrissey walked away from, that fateful night in Love Medicine, and ends with Jack Mauser back 'home,' building the Bingo Palace for Lyman Lamartine. The books are very much like vision itself, with the play of distance and focus and light.
Her books wind around a group of families through a half-dozen generations, and her characters appear and reappear as the landscape resolved to new definition. Her milieu is the old Turtle Mountain/Pembina Reservation, which sprawled across the Red River halfway into North Dakota. Minnesota is turning into a hotbed of Indian writers, and Louise Erdrich is the best of them. Read my full reviews of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and The Antelope Wife.
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