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Books : Four Souls : A Novel (Erdrich, Louise)

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Four Souls : A Novel (Erdrich, Louise)

by: Louise Erdrich

List Price: $23.95
Price: $4.95
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Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: July 01, 2004
Sales Rank: 821577




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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate on the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Louise Erdrich reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and these works are as beautiful and lyrical as anything she has written.

Tracks

Set in North Dakota, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance -- yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The listener will experience shock and pleasure in encountering characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Four Souls

A strange and compelling woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her.

Performed by Anna Fields.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating:  out of 5 stars

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - A Joke on itself
At the end of Louise Erdrich's Tracks, the fearsome, fetching, dangerously divine Fleur Pillager--a Chippewa earth mother so idolized by the author as to seem a form of creative self-caricature--finally walks away from her beloved patch of Dakota forest, abandoning it to the whim and destruction of white loggers and tribal sellouts. Erdrich's latest finds the indomitable Fleur trudging all the way to Minneapolis, where she hires on as a laundress in the home of a wealthy timber baron simply in order to take his life in revenge. Fortunately or not, however, Erdrich doesn't like her dishes served cold, and soon a bedroom farce breaks out amid the tragedy. Thus Four Souls juxtaposes the silly and the somber, the ribald and the elegiac. Nuance heeds the DO NOT DISTURB sign and generally stays away.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A Great Story Told Well
Louise Erdrich is among my favorite authors. She weaves moving, human plots together with the intricacy of a well-told poem. Her landscapes make one gasp and her characters make one believe. So it is through this biased lens that I picked up Four Souls, read it, and also loved it.

Fleur Pillager walks to Minneapolis to kill John James Mauser. That's the premise, but along the way she devises a punishment worse than death. See Mauser stole her family's land and clear cut the prized trees, leaving her family as poor as destitute as the rest of the Ojibwe in Northern Minnesota. What's her plan? Nurse Mauser back to health from his poison-gas induced illness and get him to fall in love with her.

It's such an accomplished story told beautifully that I really can't add ... Read More



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - The changing world of American Indians and a good story
Through the years I've read several books by Louise Erdrich. She's a good writer although sometimes I find her narrative to be a bit confusing. This is the case in her 2004 "Four Souls" in which she uses a character she's used in books before, an American Indian woman named Fleur Pillager.

The book had a good beginning. It's set in the Midwest in the 1920s. Fleur is out for revenge against the wealthy white man who had stolen the Indian's land. Her plans are to make him suffer, but she soon discovers that he is very ill. She becomes a laundress in his household and manages to cure him with the intent of making him suffer later. Things don't work out exactly as she planned though and, as the story unfolds, she becomes hard to understand.

There are several narrators. ... Read More



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Yet another stellar novel from Louise Erdrich
I've read most of the author's works and while I would not say this is my favorite, I have to say that she has matured so much as an author over the years that this is a must read book. I particularly like how she shares imagery and concepts in this book without feeling the need to explain them to the non-Anishinaabe audience, and potentially interrupting the poetry of the work itself. - It was amazing how she brought back to mind things I knew and had forgotten, simply through the force of her writing. The greatest impact for me was the effect the book had even 4 days later - the themes of this book are both universal and incredible. Thank you for such an outstanding book!



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A Star Made From Love
From Fleur's amazing journey into and out of the whiteman's world, to the creation of a dress solely from nature's materials contrasted with the building of a house with materials obtained through greed, destruction and death, to the quest to find a name for a son's spirit: this book is radiant.
It is a relatively short book, but it is full of the range of human emotions including the humor of love.

Nanapush, the tribal leader yet also foolish husband,carefully painstakingly carves a star out of an old bean can in an attempt to hide from his wife, Margaret, a trail of errors. He tells her the star fell from the skies, through the roof and floor.

"From outside, the sun, striking sudden from behind a cloud, then threw a fierce shaft of light in our direction. It slanted ... Read More


 


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