Word: erdrich
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Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) introduced Louise Erdrich as a writer with a bold talent and exotic demographics. Both novels drew deeply from her background in North Dakota, where her German-born father and Chippewa mother worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's use of history, legend and experience was sophisticated. She is a 1976 graduate of Dartmouth, where her husband Michael Dorris, who is part Modoc, is a professor in the college's department of Native American studies. She has a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, a pocketful of literary...
...short, Erdrich, 34, is not the sort of woolly regionalist who captivates critics with untamed energy and an earthy style. She seems to have a plan for her career; she obviously has a blueprint for her imagination. Although set in an earlier time, from 1912 to 1924, Tracks is part of a projected four-novel cycle that began with Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. Characters from the previous novels appear as youngsters in the new one. The narrative is again moved along by different voices carefully boxed in separate chapters...
This time, Erdrich goes to the sources of her saga's bloodlines. Nanapush, a Chippewa elder born in 1862, begins with a stark account of an epidemic that devastated his people during the winter of 1912. "Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken," he laments. Pauline Puyat, born around the turn of the century, picks up the pace with a fanciful tale about one of the survivors, Fleur Pillager, a young girl | who grows to inhabit the book as the central symbol of endurance and revenge. Fleur...