Sunday in The Sun: Louise Erdrich
Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, read a review of Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible by Carole Goldberg, former book editor of The Hartford Courant. Some exceprts from the review:
Erdrich’s first story collection (HarperCollins/494 pages/$27.99) may make you wonder why the Pulitzer judges have not yet awarded her Erdrich the prize for fiction. This all-you-can-read buffet of stories, some well-known and some never before published, as well as versions of material from three of her 12 novels, represents her work spanning the past 30 years.
It is a magnificent feast.
Erdrich, whose mother is French and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) and whose father is German American, sets her tales largely in North Dakota and Minnesota, on reservations and in small towns and the Twin Cities. ... Ranging back to the ancient peoples and forward to the present day, she weaves history and irony, bawdiness and spirituality, humor and violence into an endlessly unfolding narrative, as these 36 stories demonstrate. ...
The pain and pleasure of love is an undercurrent in much of Erdrich’s work, and she evokes with equal ease lyrical romance and raw animal coupling. Passion of a warped nature is explored in "Saint Marie," in which a would-be novice and a domineering nun are locked in a dance of shocking abuse. Memorably linked religious, musical and physical ecstasy — and brutal violence — is at the mysterious heart of "Naked Woman Playing Chopin." ...
"A Father’s Milk" is Erdrich at her lyrical, mystical best. Here Fox, a repentant cavalry soldier, saves an infant girl after he helps massacre her tribe and miraculously nurses the starving child: "It seemed, when he held her close upon his heart as women did, that the child grew angry with longing and desperately clung, rooted with its mouth, roared in frustration, until at last, moved to near insanity, Fox opened his shirt and put her to his nipple."
The girl will later find her true mother, her true tribe. She moves on.
The story remains with you.
