Four Souls

I enjoyed revisiting some of the characters from Little No Horse. ( )

Erdrich is a masterful storyteller. We are at the north Wisconsin reservation, sometime after WWI. We are following the story of the lives of some Native and some immigrant characters. Fluer (the Four Souls) is after her land, but she is both the nemesis of the white man who stole her land, and whom she came to kill, and his slave- she succumbs to him. There is also Margaret and Nanapush- a delightful pair living on the reservation, and a great story of the four of them. ( )

Astonishing.

The novel opens in stunning form, moves on to exceptional and moving and then tapers off into just run of the mill fantastic with surprises and delights waiting for the reader like something just round the corner of the trail.

Let’s start with the exceptional. There is a sequence, early on in the novel, were Erdrich is describing a house built for a lumber baron. You’ll have seen houses like this in films and, if you live in the States, you may even have seen one in the flesh, or the brick (although after reading Erdrich, you learn that it’s very much the same thing).

Erdrich describes, in loving, hateful detail, a grand house, built for a lumber baron, built by an architect, to be grand, imposing and a statement. And it is. It’s a statement about the greed, the misery and the desperation that it takes to build a house like this. To get a house like this.

The sequence only lasts a few pages, but it’s spellbinding. She describes how the wood to construct the house has been stolen and tricked from Indians who are now wondering, with all the trees gone, how the hell they are going to stay warm this winter. They are not worried about cooking because when the trees went all the animals that they hunted buggered off too. Even the squirrels. There’s a gruesome description of how the bricks have blood baked into them, which sweats out when they are used to build a fireplace.

And of course all of the craftsmen are cheated out of their wages.

This house could not be more cursed if it had been built on an old Indian burial ground. Indeed, it’s worse, because the house is built of the death of Indians, the theft of their land, trees and living and the consequent misery. In building the house, the lumber baron constructs a curse around himself.

The owner of the house then, is something of a bastard and yet as the book progresses one cannot help but grudgingly like him. Realising the extent of his sins, he has damned himself and this house is a penance.

While wrongs are righted and vengeance is extracted from the swindling swine (although it’s had to extract vengeance on somebody who is bent on self destruction, as will become apparent), life back on the reservation, now bereft of trees, is a picture of domesticity. The contrast is stark. In the city, the rich white man sits in his mansion, wracked by horrors and living in a curse he has woven for himself, wishing his own end, while on the Indian reservation he has deforested, folk live in shacks and trap their lunch (and occasionally stranger game) yet strive for domesticity.

One of the central characters in the novel is Nanapush, an ancient old man who has the truly remarkable ability to fuck things up that any bloke will recognise instantly. Any man, ever, who has had the ‘ohno’ moment, be it sending an indiscrete e mail via ‘copy all’ or assembling Swedish furniture back to front, will smile and cringe simultaneously.

More importantly, if you are a bloke, and have ever thought ‘this will really please my significant other’, then proceeded to, for instance, produce two tickets for a forthcoming rugby international while simultaneously remembering that the day of the match is when you’re supposed to be going to a wedding fayre (always ‘fayre’, don’t ask me why) and realising that the tickets are going to be more use to you than the wedding fayre, judging by her expression, then this is the book for you.

At once hysterically funny and cringe-making, Nanapush’s activities are the perfect comic offset to the dark and terrible deeds happening in the cursed house.

Because Nanapush is a corking example of that most common of males: the type who believe that if they can just keep their fuck-ups concealed long enough, they can put enough good deeds in the bank to offset the wrath of the woman when stupidity is exposed, at the same time ensuring that one is not too attentive and thus arousing suspicion, then everything will be alright. Not true. ( )

My favorite author - I love all her novels and the characters she brings to my world. She shows us, if we have eyes to see, the quantum universe that Native American (and other indiginous peoples) have always lived in. It is a wonderful place. ( )

This is Fleur's story as told by Nanapush, her adoptive father, and Polly Elizabeth, the sister of her Anglo husband's ex-wife. Fleur may be the most enigmatic of Erdrich's characters -- the "witch" of the Ashinabaage -- the Morgan le Fay of Erdrich's North Dakota tribe. I am fascinated by Fleur -- her passion, her connection to the land, her neglect for human relationships. She is, at once, in modern parlance, a sociopath, and in ancient practice, a shaman. She may be Erdrlich's most enduring creation. ( )