The Plague of Doves Pdf Summary Reviews By Louise Erdrich

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The Plague of Doves Pdf Summary

The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation.

Part Ojibwe, part white, Evelina Harp is an ambitious young girl prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

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The Plague of Doves Review

Mal Warwick

TOP 500 REVIEWER

5.0 out of 5 stars A searing look at Native American life today
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2016

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Just try to imagine a novel that encompasses all these elements: a lynching on an Indian reservation, a young woman’s lesbian awakening, a man’s kidnapping of his wife, a multiple murder, a collection of rare postage stamps, a dim-witted Catholic priest, a rape, a twisted messianic preacher, a valuable violin, a woman’s murder of her husband, a tragic automobile crash, and an extended stay in a mental hospital. If a novel is a work of fiction in which “something happens,” as Joseph Heller once suggested, Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Plague of Doves, has the makings of at least a dozen books. Yet somehow it all works, through the magic of Erdrich’s surpassing genius.

Multiple narrators, on and off the reservation

The Plague of Doves is set in North Dakota, in the small town of Pluto and the nearby Chippewa reservation. Erdrich tells her story through the perspective of four narrators, with additional stories nested into their tales as elders recount the tragic history of the region. The story overflows with characters, and it takes awhile to understand how closely they’re all connected. The suspense builds, the pieces fall into place, and the the full picture eventually emerges in startling clarity. The Plague of Doves is a brilliant example of a story in the hands of a writer at the peak of her art. It’s at once a snapshot of Native American history, a coming-of-age story, and a novel of suspense.

As the title suggests, a time when passenger pigeons darkened the skies of the American West figures in this tale. Their “numbers were such that nobody thought they could possibly ever be wiped from the earth.” But they were, just as surely as the herds of thundering buffalo were reduced to a handful of survivors — and the Native American population itself was nearly exterminated.

No stereotypes on this reservation

A young woman named Evelina Harp, one-quarter Chippewa like the author, is the first of the book’s four narrators. Here’s how she thinks of herself: “I didn’t really fit in with anybody. We were middle-class BIA Indians, and I wanted to go to Paris.” And here’s how she describes her family: “We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers, and bureaucrats. The wildest of us . . . is a short-order cook, and the most heroic of us (my father) teaches.” In other words, you won’t find any stereotypes on this Indian reservation. Yes, alcohol has taken its toll on some of the characters, and others have acted out their response to the genocide in their heritage, but every one of their stories is unique. In the words of one tribal elder when speaking about a young man who had turned to drugs and crime, “He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen. A mistake, but one that we kept trying to salvage because he was so young.” Erdrich’s characters are as real as they can be.

About the author

Louise Erdrich is a National Book Award-winning novelist of mixed Native American, German, and French heritage. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, which her maternal grandfather served as tribal chairman. Both her parents were schoolteachers. LaRose is her fifteenth adult novel.

Oddsfish

4.0 out of 5 stars Many Sparks, But Little Flame
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2009

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I’ll admit that I was disappointed with The Plague of Doves. I’ve read a little of Erdrich’s work in the past, and this novel had certainly drawn some praise. It has its moments. You see many instances in the book of Erdrich’s genius, but it doesn’t add up, somehow, into a full novel for me. The whole thing just didn’t quite live up to expectations.

The novel feels a little more like a collection of stories than like a novel, though the characters are all related to one another in some way. Some of these stories are wonderful. The most living sections of the book are those that possess a folkloric quality and have to do with the older members of the novel’s community, Mooshun and Shamengwa. Mooshun, now a grandfather, is sort of a trickster figure at moments (his pranks on the Catholic priest are the funniest and most entertaining parts of the book), and his storytelling is the key thread to tie the novel together. Years ago, he was the only survivor among a party of Obijwe hung for the murder of a white family (they were, of course, innocent). That story, and the mysteries that surround it, is gradually told throughout the novel, with information added by multiple characters, and most of the characters are shaped in some way by the tragedy. Shamengwa, Mooshun’s brother, provides a sort of spiritual center to the novel, as he plays music from his violin that gives voice to sorrows that truths that transcend words.

Other stories within the book, however, do not seem to fit with these. Particularly, the middle section tells the story of Billy Peace and his family as he founds a cult and as his family tries to survive his increasing sadism. That middle section is much more violent and grotesque than the rest of the book and seems, in terms of plot, tone, and theme, to be very disconnected from the other stories. Some stories, such as Evelina’s, are fine in and of themselves but seem to stifle the development of the other trains of thought in the book.

I guess that’s my main issue with the book, which may not be an issue for others. Once I finished the book, I found myself thinking that it was like a puzzle with many pieces which don’t fit together. No thought or impression or image is brought to completion. It was difficult for me not to contrast The Plague of Doves with the last book I read, Jhumpa Lahiri’s story collection Unaccustomed Earth, in which many separate stories do seem to work in harmony with one another. The Plague of Doves contains many great moments. It’s certainly a readable and often enjoyable book. But its disparate parts fail to work together to create something entirely memorable.

About Louise Erdrich Author of The Plague of Doves pdf Book

Louise Erdrich Author of Future Home of the Living God — Louise Erdrich Author

Karen Louise Erdrich is a American Author of novels, poetry, and children’s books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-e…

From a book description:

Author Biography:

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991).

The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.

She is the author of four previous bestselling andaward-winning novels, including Love Medicine; The Beet Queen; Tracks; and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay’s Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children’s book, Grandmother’s Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.