Rachael's review
Love Medicine: A Novel (P.S.) by Louise Erdrich
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 initially, but I definitely have to go back and make margin notes even so). In fact, my copy of this is super marked up in the table of contents alone.
Anyway, the story bounces back and forth between a variety of narrators who each tell different versions of similar events and histories. The Native American storytelling tradition is very much present (as is the image of the trickster), but there's a lot more to it than just that. One of the things I found most interesting about this novel is the ...more
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 initially, but I definitely have to go back and make margin notes even so). In fact, my copy of this is super marked up in the table of contents alone.
Anyway, the story bounces back and forth between a variety of narrators who each tell different versions of similar events and histories. The Native American storytelling tradition is very much present (as is the image of the trickster), but there's a lot more to it than just that. One of the things I found most interesting about this novel is the ...more
