Product Description

Beautiful reissue of Louise Erdrich's most famous novel, from one of the most celebrated American writers of her generation. Set on and around a North Dakota reservation, 'Love Medicine' tells of the intertwined fates of two families, the Lamartines and the Kashpaws. The women at the heart of this extraordinary community are survivors in a harsh and tumultuous world, united and sustained by the strength and diversity of their love -- the sweet delusion of the flesh; the powerful pull of blood ties; the affection for the old ways vying with the irresistible lure of the new. Their voices mingle and blend to form a continuous braided sequence of narratives which pulse with the sheer energy and drama of life. Greeted with great critical acclaim when first published in 1984, 'Love Medicine' won the US National Book Critics' Circle Award. Louise Erdrich has now substantially revised and expanded the novel for this edition, to complement its companion novels, 'The Beet Queen, Tracks' and 'The Bingo Palace'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289912 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power' Toni Morrison 'A powerful piece of work! Louise Erdrich is the rarest kind of writer, as compassionate as she is sharp-sighted' Anne Tyler 'A masterpiece, written with spellbinding authenticity ! Louise Erdrich is the most interesting American novelist to have appeared in years.' Philip Roth 'The impression is of a river of memory bursting its banks and overflowing upon the page in an irresistible flood' Angela Carter 'A wondrous prose song' New York Times 'Erdrich presents a variety of voices: each forceful in its own way, each adding a different dimension -- cruel, sombre, humorous -- to what is cumulously a wondrous prose song! Love Medicine is finally about the enduring verities of loving and surviving, and these truths are revealed in a narrative that is an invigorating mixture of the cosmic and the tragic.' New York Times 'Love Medicine is the work of a tough, loving mind' Washington Post 'A dazzling series of family portraits!. This novel is simply about the power of love.' Chicago Tribune

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 six previous novels for adults, the first of which, "Love Medicine", won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.

Customer Reviews

"Love medicines...something of an old Chippewa specialty."
Published in 1984, this stunning collection of interrelated short stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Focusing on the lives of several Chippewa Indian families, and the white families with whom they also interact and/or marry, author Louise Erdrich depicts their traditional lives through some of the early characters and the way those lives change or become compromised through education, the introduction of religion by missionaries, and contact with modern society, through the later characters. The stories are set in North Dakota on or near a remote reservation, not far from the Canadian border, similar to the place where Erdrich grew up and where her parents worked as teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The stories reveal fifty years in the lives of the Kashpaw and Lamartine families from the 1930s to the 1980s, as they interact, intermarry, and ultimately try to figure out who they have become. Through her selection of details and her often lyrical descriptions, Erdrich creates vibrant local settings within which her characters tell their stories in lively, colloquial voices. Emotional, matter-of-fact, tormented, and sometimes angry, the characters are equally well drawn for both men and women.

The separate stories of Marie and Nector Kashpaw, which come together when they marry, occupy much of the very early years covered by the collection, but their stories also involve Lulu Lamartine, with whom Nector has a long affair. In the 1980s, Marie and Nector's "grandson," Lipsha Morrissey, tries to create a "love medicine" for his elderly grandparents in an old age home, a story filled with ironies and, ultimately, dark humor. Between these stories are the stories of other children, their parents, and their friends, as they try to deal with the immediate aftermath of war, the harshness of the prison system, unemployment, and poverty.

As the characters overlap and interact throughout the stories, which shift back and forth in time and across generations, the author conveys Chippewa culture, the families' resistance to and acceptance of change, the roles of strong women in holding families together, the hostility towards the federal government, and the sometimes overwhelming despair of those who live on the reservation. The characters' sense of pride and endurance elevate even the saddest and most wrenching stories, however, while the bleak humor keeps them from becoming morbid or sentimental. Dramatic, thoughtful, and powerful, Erdrich's collection creates an unforgettable portrait of two families who represent a changing Chippewa nation. Mary Whipple

Striking writing - exquisite characters.
Louise Erdrich writes exquisitely - you have to put down the book after reading some paragraphs just to take in and relish the images she describes. You can almost hear her characters whispering across a kitchen table or crunching through hardened snow; you can feel their dry, brittle hands, and smell their liquor breath. Some passages are as slapstick as others are desolate and fragile. It's simply a great read - Erdrich's writing is a gift. She should be remembered as one of the best.

Fantastic!
I can understand the reviews written by people who feel that this book can be spread out and difficult in terms of the number of characters and their complex interactions. I feel that this book is best taken as a sum of its parts, however, and I believe that Erdrich's subtle play of characters and emotions is revealing of what a remarkable talent she possesses. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I am extremely impressed by her successful use of poetic prose, which can be difficult to carry off without seeming maudlin.