Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine

book data

2177 ratings, 4.02 average rating, 206 reviews (more data...)

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published

November 18th 1993 (first published 1983) by Harper Perennial

binding

Paperback, 384 pages

literary awards

National Book Critics Circle Award (1984); Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (1985)

isbn

0060975547 (isbn13: 9780060975548)

description

The first book in Louise Erdrich's Native American series, which also includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace, Love Medicine ...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 2731)

All ratings | 5 stars (718) | 4 stars (849) | 3 stars (458) | 2 stars (80) | 1 star (19) | avg 4.02

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Kirk

Kirk rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

03/28/08

bookshelves: currently-teaching

Read in June, 1987

Erdrich's first and still best-known work (because it's the one most often taught) has become something of a model for the contemporary short-story cycle, with interconnected stories devoted to a variety of interrelated characters spanning three (almost four) generations. The strength here is less in story (which centers on a love triangle and its effect on family ties) or character (vivid as they may be, they're still devoted women and unreliable men) than in style. I wouldn't call it lyrical b...more

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9 comments

Luisa

Luisa rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

08/20/07

Read in May, 1995

recommends it for: novel & short story enthusiasts

To write a novel, start with a good short story. Then, write another. Then, another. Recycle your characters, put them all together, and you have a novel.
Yes, I'm being glib. Actually, I'm a big fan of Louise Erdrich's work. She transitioned from poetry to short stories into novels, and while the transition was not seamless, it was, and still is, a journey and a growth the reader can experience with her. Her early novels do read like short story collections with the imagistic i...more

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Kate

Kate rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

01/25/08

Read in November, 2007

I read "Love Medicine" as an anthologized short story twice before I finally picked up the entire book. "Love Medicine" is one of the three most moving short stories I've ever read. Lipsha Morrissey's voice, his eye on the world, his confidence in his gift to heal, and . . . well, this implies the wrong metaphor, but his faith in the midst of suffering, his longing to connect to his own history despite its knotted-ness makes him a vivid and resonant character. Don't we all ha...more

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Tattered Cover Book Store

Tattered Cover added it (review of isbn 0060786469)

12/01/08

bookshelves: staff-recommends

recommended to Tattered Cover by: Rob B.

Rob says:

If you haven't treated yourself to the storytelling of Louise Erdrich, this is a great place to start. Her characters are beautiful, tragic, fun and flawed. Sometimes all in the same person! Her subsequent works develop many of the people introduced in Love Medicine. Lots of great reading to be had!

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Amy

Amy rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

02/15/08

Read in March, 2008

This book actually earns six stars for the passage near the end about being "in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms."

I read this book because I remember that my grandmother loved it and I'm trying to read all of her favorite books. What if you could read all the same books that someone else read in their lifetime, in the same order, at the same age?

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Alex

Alex rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

09/22/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in September, 2008

Breaking from chronological order, this book's characters span four generations of two Chippewa families. The characters are linked through memory, love, skills, genetic traits, or better yet, commonalities that resurface in an ever changing lanscape of an american reservation.

The structure of the novel stressed the metaphysical embraced by both early American poets and the Natives of our land.

After her house burns down, Lulu Larmartine muses, "How come we've got these bodies? T...more

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Rebecca

Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

09/19/08

bookshelves: fiction, native-american-themes

Read in September, 2008

recommends it for: college students who are required to read it

2 stars simply mean that the book was acceptable. I learned something, but I didn't always enjoy reading it. I found the writing to be uniquely honest and blunt, which creatively illustrated the issues which some Native Americans face. The book is a collection of stories. Yet, it was difficult to remember who was related to whom and how. At times, I became confused and I didn't care enough about the characters to solve my "confusion" problem. I didn't want to spend my time reread...more 2 stars simply mean that the book was acceptable. I learned something, but I didn't always enjoy reading it. I found the writing to be uniquely honest and blunt, which creatively illustrated the issues which some Native Americans face. The book is a collection of stories. Yet, it was difficult to remember who was related to whom and how. At times, I became confused and I didn't care enough about the characters to solve my "confusion" problem. I didn't want to spend my time rereading any part of this book. I was hoping for a tiny bit of happiness amongst the stories of these complex, depressing characters.

One story is about June. A beautiful, Chippewa woman who wanders through life. She has a husband, whom she loves, but she does find herself leaving at times only to find "comfort" with random men. She has a son with another man and basically gives the child away. This child is raised on her reservation by a white woman, Marie, who is married to chairman of the tribe, Nector Kashpaw. It is after an encounter in a car, with a drunken man from a bar, that June freezes to death.

Another central story is about Nector. He marries Marie, but he never gets over his love for Lulu. Eventually, he has a five year affair with Lulu. Nector LOVES Lulu and he loves Marie. One day, Nector decides to leave Marie for Lulu. He leaves a note and goes to Lulu's house. He mistakenly burns down Lulu's house (while waiting for her) and then decides to return to his wife. Marie pretends she never found the note and accepts her husband's return because she loves him so much. There comes a time when Nector starts to go crazy and then he ends up choking to death on a turkey heart. This turkey heart was supposed to be a type of "love medicine" to cure him of his fascination with Lulu so that he could be happy with Marie. It wasn't Nector's plan. It was his actually his "son" Lipsha's idea.

Oh, Lulu was quite a character. Lulu's hair burned off from the fire which burned her house down, which required her to wear an obvious wig. Lulu's sleeping around caused her children to all look vastly different from one another. And then, Lulu becomes blind in her old age. Marie is so loving and forgiving that she volunteers to care for Lulu, a.k.a. her dead husband's former lover. Like I said, it's confusing, and also creative. ...less

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Mary Angela

Mary Angela rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

07/26/08

bookshelves: advisory--09, currently-reading

Read in August, 2008

Love Medicine is centered around a Native American Family who suffers from the encrouchment of caucasians on their lands in North Dakota. The Majority of the family members drink and have been abused in their childhood in varrying degrees which fuels the continuing abusive attitudes they have toward one another. The book is uniquely crafted out of seperate short stories, however they all interlock at some point. Repeating symbols such as fish, water, and love medicine act as the thread to the en...more

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Karen

Karen added it (review of isbn 0060786469)

04/30/08

bookshelves: advisory2007-2008

this book is a complex story of 2 native american rival families, both dealing with the struggles of life. Their consistantly being forced to evacuate the land they own and move into a smaller reservation while all the government really wants is their land for money. You experience the loss of life, the birth of life, love, sensuality etc. You learn of values and morals, traditions and religions, sacrifice and plain out craziness. The title comes from a ritual that native americans use to have. ...more

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Eileen

Eileen rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

05/24/08

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Eileen by: anyone who wants to explore the Native American experience

The other night at our book group meeting to discuss LOVE MEDICINE, we discovered that our newest member is, like author Louise Erdrich, part Ojibwe. Needless to say, our discussion was very enriched and colored by her stories about her own Native American experiences.

Erdrich's first novel is more like a series of short stories and brief introductions to all her follow-on novels. In each subsequent book she picks up a "thread" of one character or branch of the (incredibly complex) ...more

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Sara

Sara added it (review of isbn 0060786469)

02/05/08

recommends it for: starbitrary

The rating system is starting to get to me. It is one way that the internet is rearranging values by inventing new value systems that are increasingly circumscribed. I mean, what choice do I have if my reading does not fit into five stars? Maybe it is too good or unreadable or maybe I just don't think lit up stars are an applicable way to express how I felt about it. What if I begin to judge everyone by similar ratings? I am walking down the street thinking "Oh. She is for sure two s...more

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Ben

Ben rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

01/12/08

That Erdrich is one of the great geniuses of our time, is, I would think, a settled matter at this point. This early work makes pretty clear how we have collectively arrived at that conclusion.

Described as a novel, Love Medicine is more of a collection of interconnected stories, each told from a different point of view. Each of the stories can stand on its own, but when one reads the entire book, the cumulative impact is borderline overwhelming.

I don't know that any other book has ever evoke...more

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Rachael

Rachael rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

11/29/07

This sounds like some cheesy romance novel, but it's far from that. I first encountered it in an American novels course, where you usually run into things like Gatsby or Huck Finn. Initially, this seemed like an odd choice in such a setting, but it belongs.

Erdrich is part Chippewa/Ojibway, and this book is set on a Native American reservation in a time period spanning about seven decades, beginning in the 1930s. It reads a lot like a Faulkner novel (except more readable, at least initiall...more

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Ryan

Ryan rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

10/23/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2005

recommends it for: anyone

Read this because this was Amanda's choice in our book club. Was a little hesitant because I sort of need to stumble into liking a female author. I'm a bit of a chauvanist when it comes to reading. I do like a lot of female authors, but I don't seek out new ones ( I know I should-I don't know why I do this but I'm aware that I do) I need to be broadsided with them. It was slow going in the beginning, I didn't really get into the characters..especially the mom and the more the novel went alon...more

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Christy

Christy rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

04/16/08

bookshelves: native-american-lit, readinglist1

Read in April, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Love Medicine is as beautiful a novel as it is heartbreaking. Its beauty both protects the reader from the harshness of the events described and draws the reader into those events to more fully experience them. Told in a series of interlocking stories by a varied cast of characters, Love Medicine is about storytelling, the complexities of love and relationships, and the difficulties of finding a home and of finding one's way there.

At first, the method of storytelling--the a...more Love Medicine is as beautiful a novel as it is heartbreaking. Its beauty both protects the reader from the harshness of the events described and draws the reader into those events to more fully experience them. Told in a series of interlocking stories by a varied cast of characters, Love Medicine is about storytelling, the complexities of love and relationships, and the difficulties of finding a home and of finding one's way there.

At first, the method of storytelling--the alternating narrators, huge cast of characters, and wide range of time covered--makes the novel challenging to read. It is initially hard to keep track of who's who (and the family tree at the beginning of the book helps immensely with this project) and to remember how events connect to each other. But the further into the book you get, the deeper you are immersed in the web of lives Erdrich explores and, although I personally still had to repeatedly refer to the family tree for guidance, the easier it is to see how one person's life impacts those of many, many others. This interconnectedness is made even clearer by Erdrich's technique of showing the same events from more than one character's perspective. It fleshes out the occurrences and the characters. This technique not only helps to cement the plot and relationships but it makes the book less about any one (or two or three) individuals and more about the community as a whole.

This, as the title indicates, is a novel about love, but it does not present a sweet or romanticized version of love. Love is dangerous, painful, healing, and frequently accompanied by ambivalence or hatred. Many loves die, either through abuse, neglect, misunderstanding, or physical death of one partner, but it is ultimately love that still makes things worth doing, that allows Lipsha Morrissey to feel thus about his newfound father:

"So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in a shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand" (366).

Another element of the novel in which there is found both hope and loss is the idea of home. The novel begins with the death of June Kashpaw and this death haunts the rest of the novel. June walks into a snowy night alone and dies, but her death is described as a way toward home: "Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home" (7). Coming home here is both a release, a transcendent experience for "the pure and naked part of her," bound up in allusions to resurrection (Easter) and miracles (walking over it like water), and an ending, a death.

By the end of the book, the idea of going home is revisited and complicated. After Lipsha (who is June's son) says goodbye to his father and just before he begins his drive back to the reservation, he reflects on the landscape around him: "I'd heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that had once covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside [the car:]. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home" (367). The image of the river that used to be an ocean and the people's place on dry land points to all that has been lost, to the great gap between the past and the present, between reality and myth, that cannot be closed. The home of the past (that his grandmother and others involved with the American Indian Movement are intent on reinstating) is gone forever. Lipsha's return home, therefore, is to a different home, a home in the present, on dry land. In this way, this passage's emphasis on the idea of going home--not only for Lipsha, but also for June, who is associated with the car--is not only a return to but a restructuring of this idea. Lipsha has a clear morning, a good road, and a sense of closure regarding his parentage and his place in the world. He, unlike June in the first chapter, returns home with his eyes wide open and in the clear light of day. He knows, realistically, where home is and can find his way there. ...less

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Steve

Steve rated it:

07/12/07

Read in June, 2007

Before I had yet read Karen Manuelito’s examination of the intersection of interests between indigenous “womanisms,” highlighting particularly the commonalities between the experiences of African American and American Indian women, I noted the similarities between the emphases on female experience in Morrison’s Beloved and Erdrich’s Love Medicine. It’s not by accident that Morrison’s is one of the strongest voices in the chorus of praise on the back cover of the novel, noting that ...more Before I had yet read Karen Manuelito’s examination of the intersection of interests between indigenous “womanisms,” highlighting particularly the commonalities between the experiences of African American and American Indian women, I noted the similarities between the emphases on female experience in Morrison’s Beloved and Erdrich’s Love Medicine. It’s not by accident that Morrison’s is one of the strongest voices in the chorus of praise on the back cover of the novel, noting that “(t)he beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power.” Indeed, that tension between stylistic passages of lyrical beauty and heart-rending and impossibly brutal content becomes the hallmark of each author’s narrative. In each work, the principal female characters have had to suffer oppression and misunderstanding both from the outside “white” world and within their own relationships with husbands, sons, and lovers. Erdrich and Morrison each ultimately put forward the possibility of an empowered female subjectivity through privileged access to the community of other women.

Manuelito utilizes a number of theorists to support her own contention that Alice Walker’s notion of “womanism” is particularly helpful in understanding the particular experiences of women of color. As Janet Montelaro notes of Walker, “by foregrounding maternal subjectivities in her novel, Walker creates a prose fiction that conforms to her definition of womanist: it represents not only African-American women’s dependence on and support for each other, but also their commitment to self-esteem and their resistance to obstacles that would deny them a meaningful role in the creation of culture” (178). This seems to underline several common threads in Morrison’s and Erdrich’s works—they center many of their narratives on the specific struggles of women as their characters chart a balance between the prerogatives of nurturing, protecting, and providing for children, and the need to establish a strong sense of self-worth and individual dignity. There are correspondingly many different facets of womanhood available to strong women of color (such as Mother, Othermother/Othersister, Grandmother, Mother as Spiritual Leader, and Warrior) that aren’t as readily accepted within Euro-Western traditional roles.

Many of these unique facets appear in the story of Marie Lazarre (later Kashpaw). When we first encounter her, she’s a fourteen-year old girl pitting herself against the worst excesses of a colonizing form of western Christianity, embodied in the abusive and monomaniacal nun Sister Leopolda. Although the white authority figure makes use of familiar stereotypes that she borrows from the “civilization-savagism paradigm” to which Manuelito alludes, continually racializing the Devil as Indian—a figure who resides in the wilderness outside the convent—Marie resists the damaging internalization of this rhetoric by linguistically turning the tables on her oppressor. She does this by controlling the telling of events through her own narration and by uncovering the true motive behind Sister Leopolda’s efforts to gain Marie’s soul—the raw exercise of domination. Her description of the convent’s exterior demystifies it and strips it of its holy and God-ordained aura: “Gleaming white. So white the sun glanced off in dazzling display to set forms whirling behind your eyelids. The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side” (44-5). ...less

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michelle

michelle rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

06/14/08

Read in June, 2008

recommended to michelle by: Ruth Pittard

A book like this makes me wish I could live up to that English BA that I supposedly am. Still reading...
---------------
Louise Erdrich has an amazing grasp of metaphors and descriptive language. The most shocking aspect of the novel so far is Marie's violent and soul churning encounters with Sister Leopolda. The first person narrative jumps between characters and years, dividing voices and perspectives which changes your sympathy and empathy for characters often, but not confusingly.
I'm dis...more

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Lambeam

Lambeam rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

12/03/08

Keep your finger on the page with the family tree on it. If you do that you will be able to follow an engaging history of an unlikely family made up of the familiar and the outlandish. Obviously Erdrich found inspiration from her own cultural sources but that does not quite explain all the poetic inventiveness. Great story.

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Firecooked

Firecooked rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

06/02/08

bookshelves: bookclub

Read in June, 2008

For the first time I know of, over half the people in my boodgroup didn’t finish the book. Clearly not a page-turner! The book is especially hard to get started, its about an extended group of Chippewa families in North Dakota. It jumps around in time, and the family relations are impossible to keep straight (the later editions of the book have a family tree in the front, but others said that didn’t really help). What did help was to read it as a series of short stories, and not worry so...more

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Christie

Christie rated it:

(review of isbn 0060786469)

12/28/07

Read in January, 1990

recommends it for: those interested in what real rez life is like

i visited the reservation where this story takes place. my ex's mother drive me past all the houses where the "characters" lived and explained to me how the rez was not happy about louise's book. it was quite interesting. i actually read this a couple of years before moving out west, so it was ultra fascinating to have the chance to realize how fiction and truth meet and mingle. that trivia aside...the book was as much an eye opener as the visit was. debunks the way we romanticize the ...more

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