I doubled-up again this month with two books by one author, Louise Erdrich. I found Plague of Doves (2008, 313 p.) on a B&N discount table. After finishing it, I reread The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003, 389 p.), a novel I fell in love with on a plane trip several years ago.
Louise Erdrich’s books are narrated by amazing characters that mirror her ancestry, German and French/Ojibwa, and small town North Dakota near tribal reservations where she grew up.
In Erdrich’s books, the narrative chapters move back-and-forth between the present day and the past, fiction and legend, lyrically weaving the interconnection of the multiple narratives. As one character says: It’s all blood here.
In Plague of Doves, Evalina (and the reader) comes lately to the revelation that her beloved Mooshum’s (Grandfather) tales are really the sad oral history of miscommunication between Native Americans and immigrant settlers of the upper Midwest.
The Master Butchers Singing Club contains the most vivid description of caring for a dying person that I have ever read. A second reading did not diminish the power of the description of Delphine and Eva’s nonverbal bond.
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