Tales of Burning Love

Love Medicine #5

by Louise Erdrich

In her boldest and most darkly humorous novel yet, award-winning, critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist Louise Erdrich tells the intimate and powerful stories of five Great Plains women whose lives are connected through one man. Stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, Jack Mauser's former wives huddle for warmth and pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking and often times comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together in their love for Jack and in their lives as women. Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

Genres: Fiction, Native American, Indigenous, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Book Club

466 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to start by warning you: this book is painful. If you want to read a book about happy endings and hot romance, this is not the book for you.

I'm not even one hundred percent convinced some of the love expressed in this book is about what most would consider "real" love. But then, Erdrich suggests just as much with the title. Love is hardly ever initially an act of wisdom. Love burns. Love scars. Love rips you to pieces and leaves you a desiccated corpse by the side of the road. Love is blind because it consumes you and makes you ignore everything you thought you loved before. It's as foolhardy and obsessive as grief, which is another extreme experience of love in and of itself.

This is especially true if you love the wrong person, and many of the women in this book undoubtedly fell in love with the wrong person. The man they loved--the man some of them still, on some level, love--is not a good person. He's selfish, short-sighted, and completely irresponsible. But with divorce rates as high as they are, I'm willing to bet that most of us have had experience with loving the wrong person at some time or another and know the experience well. Many people will recognize this type of "burning love" and realize that these characters are very real, very flawed people who all are broken by love in different ways.

Not all love burns the same way. In some cases, love smolders, warms, and endures. There are some examples of this in the book--which I don't really want to talk about explicitly, due to the fact that they really spoil some great reveals in the story. Not all of this enduring love ends well either, though, as the heartbreak of living without even the right person can result in destructive acts.

The simple truth is that love is an experience that transforms, both for the better and the worse. Love will not leave you the same on the other side. Books that end with "happily ever after" end too soon. The truth is on the other side of those words. Most of life is lived, and most of love is endured, beyond "happily ever after," and while it's not always pretty, it will inevitably leave you burning, changing, and somehow beyond what you were before.

[Ann M · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of my least favorite books ever. This is the one I threw in the creek one winter. It became encased in ice and was beautiful.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erdrich likes to bookend her novels, and I find this volume very interesting because it goes further, bookending her whole sequence of five books. It starts, just Love Medicine (#1) did, with June walking out into the snow to die. The protagonists of The Beet Queen (#2) are the parents of one of the major characters in this book (Dot) and Fleur, the star of Tracks (#3), is the parent of the other (Jack). Finally, the pivotal sequence of Tales of Burning Love all happens on the same night as the pivotal events of The Bingo Palace (#4) ... and in fact Tales of Burning Love resolves the (very) dangling plots from The Bingo Palace. (And it's the resolution of those plot elements simultaneous with the plot elements of this book that gives Tales of Burning Love much of its strength.)

Beyond all of that, it's nice to note that Tales of Burning Love was good where The Bingo Palace that preceded it often felt trite and unpleasant. I don't think that it held up as well to reading aloud as reading to oneself though. That's primarily because of a huge digression in the middle of the book where all of Jack's ex-wives talk about him. The stories are compelling, but the break in the forward narrative is much more obvious when it takes weeks to get past it.

Overall, quite enjoyable, though I'm no longer certain I think it's Erdrich's best book.

[Clarissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louise Erdrich ist für mich eine der ganz großen Autorinnen unserer Zeit. Ich bin so dankbar, dass ich noch so viel von ihr entdecken kann, da ich erst am Anfang stehe.
Ich liebe ihre Protagonistinnen, die so vielschichtig und echt sind. Selbst Nebenfiguren wie Familienmitglieder sind so komplex, dass ein ganzes eigenes Buch in ihnen stecken würde.
Tut euch einen Gefallen und lest Louise Erdrich.

[Sondra Wolferman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was sort of enjoying this book until, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the author decided to throw in a horrific scene of animal cruelty in which a dog is dragged to its death behind a pickup truck. Since this gratuitous scene of cruelty did nothing to further the plot, nor to illuminate the characters of the participants, I can only assume the scene was placed there to shock and awe the reader at a point where the novel was beginning to run out of steam. Some might argue the scene helped to depict the character of the male protagonist, but any halfway intelligent reader would have realized from the first chapter that Jack Mauser was a jerk. Unfortunately the novel went on for more than a hundred pages after that. I enjoy a good sex scene as well as the next person, but some of the erotic scenes in this novel made me queasy. I awarded the second star only because I have read Erdrich's work in the past and enjoyed it,especially her short fiction. But I just didn't get the point of this long, dreary, and overwritten novel.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who peaks at their sixth novel??? Brilliant, kind, intimate, breathtaking. I am in awe.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Erdrich-novel.

[David A Townsend]

Memory is overrated. People with satisfying and beautiful memories are, of course, the ones who harp on the value of retaining a detailed picture of the past. She on the other hand was more interested in erasing hers. Like a person piecing together a blanket, some quilts are beautifully colored- Hers was made of darkness.

[Julietta · Rating 4 out of 5]

After taking a breath to assimilate all the depth, fear, confusion, near death experiences and tangled, interlocking plot webs of "Tales of Burning Love", I'd like to share the following:

First of all, THIS is NOT love. There are no 2 characters among the 5 wives and the 1 husband who love each other even remotely with the possible exception of 2 of the female characters. There ARE however SOMETHINGS that are burning...revenge? lust? injuries? pain? a building?

For a better definition of love, please see my review of the non-fiction book "All About Love: New Visions" by bell hooks. Not that we need there to be real love to "enjoy" a book, no matter what its title. This particular tome is more of an elongated, staccato march to death by Jack Mauser, the anti-hero. (And no, I'm not going to tell you what happens to him or June, Eleanor, Candice, Marlis or Dot: the wives, in order. Let's just say that they're teetering precariously close to death's cliff.) As is her wont, Erdrich intersperses Jack's tale with POVs from the other characters, in this case the wives.

This is an edge of your seat story. Other reviewers have said that they felt the wives story portion was too long. I disagree. We needed that third of the book to really understand each woman, her personality and her relationship to Jack.

I did knock 1 star off of the score because of the lengthy obfuscation. I'm usually the first one to enjoy obscure references, poetic visions, magic realism or Erdrich's trademark juxtaposition of Native vs. catholic traditions. I like to be thinking and deciphering. However, this was a little too much even for me!

So far, in my quest to complete the entire 8 book "Love Medicine" series, I've read the following:

1. Love Medicine, 2. The Beet Queen, 3. Tracks by Louise Erdrich, 4. The Bingo Palace, 7. Four Souls (out of order) and just now 5. Tales of Burning Love which means that I only have 2 left to finish!

6. The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse and
7. The Painted Drum.

Here are a few lovely, non-spoiler passages by the author to give you the nudge to read this book:

About mothers transmitting joy to their kids or embryos.

In the long sweeping rush of her feelings, she took me into her arms and rocked me. As she moved back and forth in that quiet rhythm a penetrating sweetness assailed me. She was happy, tremendously happy, and I could feel her lightness. The two of us were floating in the chair. The intuition of her joy came on as a kind of blue and oceanic feeling, but it was sharp, as well, and it flashed through each nerve and left me lighted, as though I lay in a dry electric field still pulsing with friction. Before birth, in just this way, our mother's joy translates into us, sinking cell by cell into the body, forming mind, providing the hinge of differentiation.

Now, there is the love we were looking for in the title: mother/child love!

About Jack and his tools, or is it really? Another unexpected comparison from Erdrich.

He had a wall of shelves on which he kept his collection of favorite things: a few hand-planes, old handsaws with lovingly scrolled handles. What he really cared about were the levels. His oldest one was a plain wood with brass fittings, and he had a French model, the spirit in the glass held by two flying angels. Next to it, a number of antique Swedish levels and some odd homemade ones he'd restored himself. I liked Jack for his levels, the fact that he kept them, and sometimes I went down there just to sit near his shelves. That night, my dog slumped on the floor at my feet. I pictured the ethereal little tube of lime-green fluid fixed inside of me where no child would ever grow. My heart was sinking in my ribs, my fist was clenched, but I breathed deeply until the air bubble was centered between the double black lines.

The lovely writing in the previous paragraphs is reason enough to read this. In addition, these paragraphs are also examples of the many times the author wraps up a chapter with an extremely unexpected comparison. I've often found myself gasping in awe at these endings. I believe this is the case because many of these chapters began as short stories which then turned into linked stories to form a book. Since I'm a huge fan of the short story form, I'm a huge fan of these books!

Thanks to the author for reprising the evil nun, Leopolda, who has a lengthy set of appearances here. I'm still hoping that Shawnee Ray, from "The Bingo Palace", will show up again in the couple of books I've got left to finish. Unfortunately, she was not in this one. Guess she didn't fit in. Deep sigh!

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

A new top favourite of Erdrich's works. Resolution for so many characters that we've met along the way. Cannot wait to branch out from the Love Medicine series and meet new folks, but I'll miss those little glimpses, mentions of Lyman, Leopolda, Fleur, Dot.
The Love Medicine series is seven titles of interwoven town saga, intergenerational family narrative, pure magic on the page. It handles indigenous spirituality, love (familial, platonic, romantic) and desire, the importance of connection to the land and the wisdom of elder generations, trauma of colonization and white settlement, revenge and restoration. It's a series for all times. I simply adored it.
This volume, Tales of Burning Love, is the final novel in the series. It was phenomenal, one of my favourites in the series and a new favourite novel of all time (not that I recommend reading this out of sequence). It rivals Tracks for nuance of writing and plotting and The Bingo Palace for loveable, memorable characters. I gave it 4.5 stars purely because it took a little while to get going and I was antsy for more of the wives stuff, the same rating I gave the forementioned.

As a series, this is 5+++ stars. One of my newest favourite authors, newest favourite series, and one I will continue to recommend til I'm as old as Nanapush. Not just for the series itself but for the friendships I've built around reading these books with friends. Immeasurable joys and learning from these books.

[etherealfire · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel about a man's relationships with five women and the effects it has on all of them. A great big beautifully written read. Set in North Dakota in contemporary times, it touches on various cultures. Each of the five women are very different from each other; their only real common ground is their ex-husband who seems to bring calamity to everything and everyone he touches.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tend to forget details of everything I read and see, but I'm left with an overall impression. I read this book every few years because I remember how much I like it, and I always enjoy it.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wondered many times while I read this why I put off reading it. I am a big Erdrich fan, but she needs be taken in small doses. This one isn't as tough on the reader (and her characters) as her others. In fact, she infuses more humor than in the others I've read, I think.

As in many of her novels, this one also takes place in and around Argus, North Dakota. A few characters have appeared in other novels, and I even recognized a couple of incidents retold here from a different perspective.

I'd like to call Erdrich's characters dysfunctional, but perhaps they are just weak and occasionally somewhat inept. Ok, so maybe that's dysfunctional, but maybe not too dysfunctional. These characters were a bit quirky.

None of us asks for life in the first place. It is only once we have it, of course, that we hang on so dearly.

Jack Mauser, Eleanor, Candice, Marlis, and Dot hang on dearly. Not expertly, just dearly. They make do the best they can while loving as best they can. Everyone messes up. Everyone tries to make the best of having messed up.

You might not give this one 4 stars. I hope I don't mislead you.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

I both liked and disliked this novel.

I gave it 5 stars because no one can dispute that this woman can write. Every sentence is well-crafted and she drowns you in the poetry of her language- in a good way.

That's why I liked it. The beautiful language was stunning. The subject matter is compelling and Erdrich always does a fantastic job of blatantly allowing her female characters to be sexual creatures.

I didn't like the characters. I didn't realize before I started to read that this book is a companion piece to some of her others and had I known I would've refreshed my memory to better understand the connections from previous novels I've read.

Eleanor and Dot are okay but only okay. Candice, Marlis, and Jack are completely despicable. Not once could I understand why any of the women were attracted to such a scumbag like Jack. Plus I felt learning Candice and Marlis' stories (which were unbalanced to the other two women) could've entirely been eliminated and nothing would've been missing from the novel.

I'd recommend it for the sheer pleasure of the philosophical and seductive nature of her writing, but she definitely has better novels.

[Klaas Roggeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this volume a long time ago in a second hand bookshop, because I really liked Tracks. This one isn't up to the same level though. It features some intriguing scenes, like four ex-wives/widows trapped in a car during a snowstorm after returning from the burial of their former husband, but there are too many weaker moments between those brief sparks of imagination. I usually like short novels, writers who manage to be concise and precise and with 450 pages this definitely falls eh short of that ideal. Meanwhile I kind of failed to see what was so great about this guy that he managed to woo these four (or five) women so easily, but that might just be me.

[Thea · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best book that I have read from Louise Erdrich.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually 3,75!
Love any Erdrich for the language, the way she writes about love, the feelings! Couldn’t follow this one in some spots though.

[Erin || erins_library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi friends. I really should have posted this review at the end of May, but here we are! This was read as part of #erdrichmedicinereadalong, and currently we’re reading The Antelope Woman. If you’d like to join us for a video discussion taking place the weekend of July 10th, please let me know!
⠀
I was pleasantly surprised to realize this was connected to the Love Medicine series. It was really lovely to be back in the world Erdrich created and deepen connections to characters and aspects of the stories. There was closure for a couple of loose ends from The Bingo Palace that I appreciated. This book was less about the story and more of a deep dive on the characters (which I enjoyed). The book follows John Mauser and four of his wives and is written alternatively between all their perspectives and stories. Much of the story flipped between his 2nd wife and 5th wife (Dot!), as well as Mauser. The book really picked up about halfway through when the four ex-wives came together and started sharing their stories with each other as they relate to their relationships with Mauser. And it was fascinating to get inside the minds of four very different people. I found Mauser extremely frustrating. But I loved reading it.
⠀
It’s hard to look at this book as a stand-alone without rating it as it fit into the Love Medicine series as a whole. For that it was an excellent wrap up to the entire collection, by filling in story holes and giving new perspectives. Erdrich is so talented at making you think you know enough about a moment, but revisiting that same scenario in a later book and shifting everything you thought you knew. For that I can’t recommend enough that you read the entire series (chronological or publication order), but they do function as standalones. You’ll just be missing out if you don’t read them all. The choice is yours.

[Mackenzie Marrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nebraska Library Commission Book Club Spotlight - November 7th, 2024

We are introduced to Jack Mauser on the day he met, married, and lost his first wife. Now, years later, his four other ex-wives gather together after tragedy and find themselves retracing the steps of their predecessor. Dot, the last wife; Candice, the young mother; Marlis, the dentist; and Eleanor, the only one who still loves him. All four women, unable to cut themselves entirely from Mauser, were taken in at one point or another by his earnest but selfish ways. Stuck in Jack’s car during a blizzard, they recall their relationships with the man as wild and passionate as the storm outside.

“Love is brutalizing, a raw force, frail as blossoms, tough as a catgut wire.”
- LOUISE ERDRICH

Tales of Burning Love is about more than just blind, passionate love. It follows the trauma of loss, ruinous devotion, and religious ecstasy. The stories the wives tell intermingle and blow with the raging storm outside. While Jack Mauser may be at the center of each story, his involvement, and true nature shape and lead the women far beyond his reach. Their hopes and aspirations start or end at his feet. For Adult Book Club Groups looking for stories to curl up with as the weather gets colder, Erdrich’s prose and darkly humorous storytelling are enough to keep you burning through any storm.

[Rivera Sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five wives, one man, six stories colliding in a display of personality fireworks (especially at his funeral) that ring surprisingly true to real life experiences we've all had. These are complex (and very different) women, each with her flaws and strengths. You find yourself rooting for them all, and ultimately for the floundering husband. This novel traverses familiar landscapes in Erdrich's work, giving the reader the sensation of the social nets and snares of small town/rural region where your past always catches up with you and all the faces are familiar - for better or for worse. The energy stumbles when the wives get stuck in the car in the blizzard, but its worth the eddy of their backstories to find out if they survive or not.

As a writer, it made me pause to consider what The Dandelion Insurrection: Love and Revolution or Billionaire Buddha might have looked like from the vantage point of the other characters . . . how would the corporate president in The Dandelion Insurrection have told the story of the uprising. Fascinating to consider these perspectives.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Erdrich blows my mind. First, she introduced me to a culture into which I had no entree', no insight, so I had to just suspend any disbelief and go with it. After several books, I started outlining the characters, because a person who may drop in to a previous story can be a main character in this story, and it is fun, if like family lore, you can sort of remember how this person relates to that person.

Each book provides more pieces to the puzzle.

In this book, we see a death we have seen before, at the very beginning of the book, and we see it from another, more complete perspective. We are in the mind of her husband, the much-married Jack, who marries five wives, some very quickly and while he is not exactly thinking clearly. In his defense, he really does try to be a good husband. Mostly he is dealing with wives he barely knows, and women in general are somewhat of a mystery to him.

What I love about Louise Erdrich's eroticism, is that it is both breathtaking, and often hilarious, as good sex should be.

We also get a good re-visit with Sister Leopolda, a character from more than one previous book, an unlikely saint - but aren't we all?

As in real life, events happen which are not fully explained, and are sometimes inexplicable. In the midst of a busy time, in need of a good escape, Louise Erdrich pulled me through once again.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 I wavered repeatedly between 3 and 4 stars while reading this. I liked it overall, and liked parts of it a lot. At times the first-person narratives of the multiple characters grated because they were mostly all written lyrically, with great skill and poetry, exactly the way real people do not talk. This was particularly annoying as these narratives were supposed to be spoken aloud to others. There are also third-person sections, sometimes focusing on minor characters, and it feels like there are too many threads in the novel to really contend with. It's almost as if Erdrich took a bunch of unrelated short stories and fragments (in fact, I recognized one chapter from a quite similar short story of hers, "A Wedge of Shade") and wove them into some sort of quilt. This works well at times, and not well at others. Finally, I'm not a fan of the "irresistably magnetic scoundrel" trope (in the 18th c novel Clarissa, known as "a rake, a rogue, and a profligate"). By the end, though, the way she takes the theme of love and opens it up in all its fearfulness, wonder and celebration, carries the day.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I debated for a while between giving this novel 4 or 5 stars. But it truly deserves 5 stars. Erdrich, like always, writes beautifully and poetically and crafts a novel so good that when you finish it you want to to handle your used, paperback, scuffed-up book as if it were a priceless artifact.

Her characters were exceptionally portrayed. They were so fully human they felt almost hyper-real. Even the more minor, supporting characters were not flat. In fact, the reason I wondered if I should give it 4 stars is because I just have a hard time reading novels about people I don't like, and at some point or another in the story I hated almost every character. But I don't think anyone would be able to argue that it's for lack of cliche, fully-formed characters that some of the protagonists inspire rage.

The only real complaint I have about the book is tiny: In my edition, the cover along with the title made the book look like a cheap Harlequin romance, and that made it embarrassing to read at work or on the subway.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was introduced to Louise Erdrich’s work in college during a Plains Lit class. We read _Love Medicine_, and I was hooked. I read _The Beet Queen_ and _Tracks_ on my own, and loved them as well.

However _Tales of Burning Love_ and I have a long, difficult history. I bought the hardback on a discount shelf in a bookstore probably 20 years ago. I have started & stopped reading the book multiple times over the years. Finally, during “stay at home” orders, I pushed through.

As always, Erdrich’s characters are alive and multi-dimensional. Her descriptions are rich and often show her love for the Great Plains and its people. The story is interesting in places interspersed with the magical & the mundane as other reviewers have said. What I missed was a tight storyline. The novel slowly meanders through the plot, at times painfully so. At 452 pages, it’s by far the longest of her novels that I’ve read.

I’m still a big Erdrich fan. I’m just not sure where I stand on making a recommendation yet...

[Bernadette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm finally finished! I thought I would never complete this book. Not because I didn't enjoy reading it (although, the nature descriptions made me come close to nodding off at times), but because I've been so busy and hadn't the time to devote to it.

Anyway, the tales in question are those of four women who were married to the same man (at different times). The tales, and other parts of the book, are rich and dense, the way Louise Erdrich always writes. So much detail, as if every word were true. The character development is off the charts, as evidenced by the fact that I disliked one of the wives. As she does a lot, Erdrich re-introduces the reader to characters from previous books and, in this case, part of the story actually picks up where a previous novel left off. Very cool.

Out of all the Louise Erdrich novels I've read, this one, though it's not the best one I've read, is definitely one of the best.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much considerate character development and resolution in this book. And what a wonderful use of landscape to transform characters and fix a reader. I wish I’d keep a notebook for all the lovely ways she described the interiors, death, turmoil, landscape, emotions, people, growth and love. And how wonderful to have a glimmer of insight into how the depth of indigenous contemporary life might have interwoven into the lives that were thrust upon them.

I was thinking that if I’d read this 30 years ago, I might have been a better person sooner, but one never knows when you’ll be ready deeper thoughts about love, empathy and understanding. I’m so happy to have found Louise Erdrich’s works in mid-life, wish more folks got sucked away into her beautifully written prose.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story about 4 women trapped inside a car during a blizzard, sharing stories about their dead ex-husband, has all the things I love in it about Louise Erdrich: the fantastic and the strange, the beautiful and the everyday, all mingled together in that overcrowded car. Plus, it manages to answer a few unresolved questions about some of her other novel's characters, too. But, as others have said in their reviews, not Erdrich's best work, and so not a great representation of her work. For that, try Tracks or The Master Butcher's Singing Club.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do love Louise Erdrich, and I might love this book, but it's NOT a four star book yet in my personal lexicon. Four stars means I might recommend it enthusiastically, five stars means I'll keep it and re-read it. Three stars means I enjoyed it but will probably not urge anyone to read it. But...this may change as I give it more thought in the next few days. So--this is a temporary, place-holder review...unless of course my estimation of the book does not change, in which case this rating and these luke-warm words will stay just as they are today.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty good book. I enjoyed the writing - as well as the ridiculous situation that brings four ex-wives of the same man together. The identity of the hitchhiker was even a surprise to me. All in all, it was certainly strange, but I certainly enjoyed reading it. I liked the way the women's different stories came through their P.O.V.s.

[Kristi Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't actually finish this book the first time because I lost interest at about page 250. The whiny, fighting ex-wives was enough for me! But my daughter convinced me to finish saying it all came together in the end. And it did. The writing was beautiful, but the plot sometimes drawn out. I am glad that I finished it though.