The Plague of Doves (2008)

I think this book is more than a little difficult to describe. But, essentially, it's about the lives of various people living on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, and in a nearby small town. It's about a shocking murder that took place many decades before and the massive injustice that followed, in which three innocent Indian men were lynched. It's about the complex, tangled consequences of that act, reverberating down through the generations as the families of the victims and the perpetrators intertwine. But mostly it's about the people that were shaped by those events, directly or indirectly, and about their individual stories. It's beautifully written, in a slow, intricate, meandering sort of way, and I found it quite compelling, the sort of novel that lingers with you for a little while after you turn the final page. ( )

Fiction -- the telling of stories -- is often the most effective way of revealing truth, and Louise Erdrich is masterful at doing just that. Louise Erdrich tells stories about Native Americans, people often overlooked and/or subjected to continuing racism, many of whom live in conditions that would shock white Americans, who sadly seem largely unaware. Such is the ongoing legacy of genocide. Erdrich is herself of mixed blood -- Ojibwe and German -- and she sets her fiction on a North Dakota reservation and its environs, based on Wahpeton, where she grew up. It is to Erdrich what Yoknapatwpha County was to Faulkner.



Her books share a multiple narrator structure, with characters getting their own chapters, able to tell the story from their individual perspectives. In THE PLAGUE OF DOVES the horrors of a past lynching weighs heavily on everyone in the town of Pluto, described by one character as aptly named, since Pluto is the “coldest, loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable body in our solar system”.

"In 1911, five member of a family -- parents, a teenage girl, and an eight- and a four-year-old boy -- were murdered. In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time, 'rough justice.'"

The legacy of these murders is the story's territory. Erdrich writes beautiful prose, filled with stunning, magic images: doves carpet the land, men are burnt to black by lightning but survive, and dreams are precognitive visions. For all the enchantment of the language and imagery, however, the details are grounded, earthy and perfectly mundane. The combination is revelatory and intoxicating. ( )

parts of this were astonishing, and other parts simply foundered. i kept being reminded of toni morrison's paradise and unfortunately the comparison left this wanting. there is too much left undone for me to be satisfied, too many characters who only exist to be the windows onto other characters. it all feels unfinished. ( )

Fantastic book - the stories and personalities weave themselves in so beautifully in these rich tales, that upon finishing the book I had to start all over again, skimming it to see all the references that had flown past me on first reading. Highly recommended... ( )

Fantastic book - the stories and personalities weave themselves in so beautifully in these rich tales, that upon finishing the book I had to start all over again, skimming it to see all the references that had flown past me on first reading. Highly recommended... ( )