by Louise Erdrich
REVISED CALENDAR
Presentations
Elizabeth, Text and Context, April 1
Phaedra, The Sacred Hoop, April 3
Reading
Tuesday, April 1: "World's Greatest Fishermen" through "The Red Convertible"
Thursday, April 3: "Scales" through end of novel
Commenting
1st comment on/by March 31
2nd comment on/by April 5
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Love Medicine
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17 comments:
I assume this book is supposed to be a portrayal of modern Chippewa life and its hopelessness, but I am a big fan of the Tony Hillerman mystery novels. He is also extremely realistic about the poverty and the problems of alcohol on the Navajo reservation, but I find that he seems to respect and and try to preserve the rituals of the past through his very entertaining novels. I need to be guided a little to understand why this book received so many rave reviews.
I have read the first half of Love Medicine but I'm still not sure about the significance of the title. Have I missed something? Is it an Indian ritual? I think of medicine as being a healing force--is there some kind of happier resolution to the stories?
This book reminds me of Brewster Place with each chapter being about a different character with the characters somehow connected by family and culture rather than residence and culture. However, some characters have more than one chapter and sometimes the stories in the chapters are not on a contiuuim, just separate incidents in the same person's life.
Marie and Lulu seem to be the characters whom everyone else has some connection to. There were several times I would have been lost if the author had not had the geneological information in front. Marie and especially Lulu remind me of Cora Lee with their fecundity. However, their children seem to have more respect for their mothers and don't seem as angry as Cora Lee's children.
I find myself frustrated because I don't know more details. What happened to Moses Pillager? What is the significance of getting Fleur Pillager for the birthing? Surely the Catholic nun was not supposed to represent a typical Sister. Why was her character significant to the story? (A lot of symbolism I didn't understand.)
If I get to the end of the book and don't get any explanation of the curious little snippets of information, I am going to be upset.
Jeana
Well I just love this novel. I love everything about it. This is my second time reading it and I feel like I appreciate it in a way that I guess I probably just wasn't mature enough to recognize the first go round.
It's so easy for me to get lost in the detailed writing; her descriptions are amazing. It's the kind of novel that aspiring writers read and they think "wow, i wish i'd (or could have) written that sentence..."
Anways, I think there's a lot to break down in this book and there's a lot to keep straight (names, etc.) But the relationships are obviously convoluted and at times shrouded with emotion that we, as readers, are not clued into until much later in the novel (for instance, the scene after June's death between Albertine and Lipsha... i think Lipsha, it's so hard to remember the right name without my book in front of me).
And then there are all these wonderful symbols like the fruit pies, Albertine is supposed to watch over or the convertible itself. It's an English major's dream!
phaedra
I enjoyed reading this book. I will admit that I had to "get used" to it. The writing/format was a lot different from anything that I was used to. For that reason, it took me a long time to actually finish the book.
I found it difficult to keep the characters straight in the beginning, but as the story progressed and the same people started to show up in different stories, it was easier to remember the characters.
I'm wondering how we are actually going to be able to talk about this book since there are just so many people and so many events!
Also...I have read the whole book and I failed to make the connection to a community of women. Did I miss something? We will have to talk about this in class.
Elizabeth Bowman Phelps
I tried to make a character list, but whew, this one is the toughest so far to keep everyone straight, I think. Especially if you try to look at the "family tree" in the front of the book for help. Yeah, no help, just made it worse! I think it almost hurts me that I've read Tracks. Some of those names are familiar, so I think that's a problem as well.
Anyway, I can't help but feel bad for most of the major women characters in this novel. In response to Elizabeth's question as to how this is a community of women, they are a family who are sharing similar struggles and pain. Alcoholism, poverty, stereotyping, these are all issues that the women and men have faced thus far. It seems to only be getting worse as the novel progresses. There was also the chapter where Marie was at the convent, which is another community. I struggled so much with that chapter! I thought about when the "white man" came in and tried to "Christianize" the Indians. What a horrible experience! I think we have several issues to address in class. Can't wait!
Well, Phaedra & Elizabeth pretty much said what I had in mind. I agree with P. about the general enjoyment I'm getting from this book and the quirky, original writing style. I also agree with E. about the "community" aspect. I don't really see the women coming together, voluntarily or otherwise. It seems they're more concerned with men and children than with each other. But maybe that's the mark of this community - the women commune based on their proximity and history, but each one is almost isolated from the others. Of course, since the novel is made up of separate stories from separate voices, we have to assume that there's more hidden than revealed - we only get a glimpse of the lives here and there. As far as this construction, I agree with Jeana that it's frustrating not to know the whole, or at least most, of the story (I'm certainly in an "agreeable" mood tonight, aren't I?:) And if you think about the women in the Kashpaw family all coming and going separately and together, and cooking and looking after the men and the babies (and the pies!), I suppose it could all come together into a (somewhat odd) community of women.
I really love Marie's character. She's just so herself all the time. And it was such a great moment when she and Rushes Bear reconciled and aligned through the difficult childbirth and Rushes Bear tells Nector that she has no son now, only a daughter - that's really priceless. That was a scene of community for sure, but it doesn't seem to last.
I read further than the assignment because I was thinking until yesterday that we were supposed to have the whole thing read. So I'm pretty sure that Lipsha will be my favorite character and "Love Medicine" the best chapter, but since that's in the latter part, I'll save it for comment #2.
This novel so far has been somewhat difficult to follow with the extended families of the Kashpaws, Lazarres, Nanapush.. It's interesting how the characters are presenters as different after marriage. I thought the chapter on Marie Lazarre was interesting when she went to the convent to become a saint. Her relationship wiht sister Leopolda was strange and dark, with their mutual obsession with sin and Satan. Marie is head-strong and ambitious. LuLu is the same way but in a different form, more of a seductress. Nector's character is frustrating with his lack of plans. He just goes with the flow and hopes everything just falls into place for him because that's what he's used to, being always admired. Rushes Bear reminded me of Shug because in the beginning she was cruel because she felt threatened but later becomes supportive and appreciated. I like how Rushes Bear and Marie are able to find common ground in their mutual loneliness.
I keep thinking about how the characters, both men and women, are drawn back into the community after leaving. Like Albertine coming back after June's death, and June herself coming back and leaving, and trying to come back but dying. Interesting. And also it is intriguing how everyone in the story is connected. I guess this is where I assumed the community aspect came into play, but the community also involves men--but not neccessarily in a good way all the time. I like having some of the story told from the men as well. I find Lipsha to be interesting as well. I want to learn more about him. I love the part with Marie and Leopolda when Marie is young. Leopolda is such an ugly person and evil person, yet she convinces Marie that Satan is in her.
cindy
Sorry to post this comment so late at night but I just finished reading our assignment because for some reason I started reading Joy Luck Club and went to comment on it and realized I was off a week so I had to go back and read this one. My schedule for this class has been so messed up lately!
I absolutely love this book so far. Like everyone else has said, it is really difficult to get used to reading but her style of writing is so absolutely amazing. I find myself re-reading several sections just because it was so good I wanted to read it again and just focus on the language. I also think the novel brings up several important issues concerning Native American life. Most people don’t realize how much they really suffered at the hands of the “white man.” We hear all the time about Africans being enslaved and the horrible events they had to deal with, but we treated the Native Americans just as poorly.
It’s interesting how the styles between The Women of Brewster Place and Love Medicine are so similar by having most of the chapters told from the perspective or story of different characters, and yet they seem so different because of the way this novel is written and all of the extra attention to detail that Erdrich provides to each of the stories. I definitely prefer Erdrich’s writing over Naylor’s, but I am a pretty detail oriented person. I read someone’s comment about the importance of some details which, as I was reading, I never even wondered about. I do think, though, that in some of the stories more details should have been provided, especially the stories of Moses Pillager and the Fleur Pillager for the birthing. I actually found myself wondering the same things that Jeana had asked about. I am certainly interested to discuss this novel in class tomorrow and hear some different perspectives on it and hopefully work on getting all of the characters straight!
So, I keep getting my posting days mixed up. Oh well, I'll give it a go anyway. A few other people have mentioned Erdrich's unique writing style. Phaedra (I think) called it the kind of writing aspiring writers covet. I sort of found it distracting. While I agree with the commenters above, her descriptions certainly are beautiful, but sometimes I felt like that took away from the story. By the time I'd read a paragraph about the particular way light from the fullish, roundish, cheese-like moon twinkled off the eerily still water and into the curious brown eyes of a young girl in a hand-crafted boat , I had forgotten what in the world she was doing in that boat in the first place. Forgive the exaggeration; I'm sure you get it.
Now I have to tell you all a story. Yesterday, I had a fight with some lovely people in the testing office over my GRE registration. To make a very long and very complicated as short as possible, I came home yesterday angry. Things had not gone my way. I lost the fight, and my $140 test registration fee. What did I do? I cleaned. Everything. I scrubbed the toilets and showers and sinks, but I still wasn't done. I got on my hands and knees and cleaned the bathroom floor with a scrubber sponge. Later that day, I was catching up in Love Medicine, and I read the part about Marie waxing the floor after she read the note from her husband. I, of course, noticed the coincidence. Isn't it funny how we have to exercise whatever control we can (even if it's only over the dirt on our floors) in the face of situations out of our hands?
I finished the book this morning and I'm still not sure what to think. I'm an analytical and logical thinker(I think that's why I enjoy great literature so much: it reveals superb language and vivid imaginations that are beyond my talents), but I can usually ponder over a story and really appreciate its truths. Some of the phrases and paragraphs in this book were so symbolic and filled with imagery that after several re-readings, I still couldn't grasp what the author was trying to say.
I loved Caitlyn's comment--sometimes I thought Erdrich's language was a tad pretentious.
At the end of the book I noticed that Anne Tyler had written a rave review. I love Anne Tyler--I think especially because of her extremely eccentric characters and their life situations. She brings such a sense of compassion and allows the reader to feel such non-judgmental empathy toward her characters. Then I thought--that's what Erdrich has done. Probably, in real life, we would not let our children go "play" at these characters' homes (or at Brewster Street). Through literature, we appreciate and gain an understanding of their history and their lives.
I am still upset that characters are introduced with comments that lead you to know there is more to the story, and then you find out there is really another story, another book. I want closure in this book.
My older son gave up two years of doctoral work in economics because he was accepted in the MBA program at Dartmouth. He graduated last May, and we were able to visit. A beautiful New England setting, but the other parents were definitely in a different monetary class. I betcha Dean and I were the only blue-collar hands-on business people there. I do want to read The Painted Drum, though.
I read an article not so long ago in a news magazine that talked about the monies being made in casinos. Because of organizational structure, the article implied that the vast wealth went to the leaders of the tribe, and that not much of the money filtered down to the others.
I can't wait to get to class so that I can understand what I read!
Jeana
This was a novel that grew on me. I had to really get into the story before I began to like it...maybe halfway through. What is interesting, to me anyways, is that this same novel is assigned in my 20th century novels class on American Addiction...we are discussing it in two weeks...it will be interesting to see what a class with a different concentration (and different instructor) will do with the novel. I am also eager to find out what happens to the characters in the other novels....thank goodness I am graduating in May and can read for pleasure again and choose what I read...hope they have some of her other stuff at MrK's!! Like many of our other novels, I wish we had more time to spend discussing this one...there is just so much. I would like to study more about the culture hero and trickster figures Dr. Cajka introduced us to as well...very interesting. As well, the idea of Lipsha as a part of the community of women...or not a part...I would have to reread to come up with a solid argument either way...but I like to think of him as part of the community.
cindy
I wish I'd gotten to stay for the rest of class on Thursday to hear the dialogue on the women's community, the fragmentation/boundaries/dichotomies in the novel.
I think this book is probably one of the hardest for me to find a collective and unified women's community. And I think that's because westerners have this ideal about friendship, individualism and collective goals that form communities. So this book really stretches our cultural boxes i think and forces us to look at community in a different light. Like I was talking about in class, the concept of the Sacred Hoop is basis enough for a community of women and with a concept of connectivity like that there can't help but be a women's community.
So in some ways, I guess the community is both looser and tighter. Looser in that the women don't have to be connected by similar goals or common experiences or even friendship. Tighter in that, the Sacred Hoop is a connected bond of life that can not be broken, such as western communities based in friendship could be broken.
This is one of my favorite novels I've ever read but I think I'd have to either read it over and over again or move to reservation to appreciate it completely. And I don't think they'd let a Jewish girl from ETSU live on a reservation with them.
phaedra
I really thought about the concept of the community in this book and how it relates to the most recent books we've read in this class for the past few days now. What kinda surprised me is that I saw this connection through the concept of a tragic heroic figure sort of connecting the community/communities in the novels. In this one of course it is June and later still her, just through Lipsha. I think if you examine a couple more of our novels, though, you'd find this in them as well, like Time of the Butterflies and The Group
Minerva, I feel is the tragic hero of all the sisters in the Time of the Butterflies because she is the most outspoken and is the connection between her father's other family and their family, among other connections.
Kay is who The Group begins and ends discussing. The web of communities can trace to her. It is also her death that brings everyone back together.
Furthermore, it is the tragic events in these two novels that either define the structure, characters, or communities, Love Medicine is definitely included in this. I think it would be an interesting paper topic, though you would probably want to just compare two novels.
It just kinda hit me as I was sitting here watching Sweeney Todd, ha! I guess Johnny Depp was inspiring...
I do feel like there is a community of women in the novel. They all seemed to be tied together by similar experiences and their culture of being on the Indian reservation. They have different points of view than what is typically represented in mainstream literature so this insight was very interesting. It was neat to see these women's views on religion and the roles of women. The characters in this novel seem to have been brought up with Christianity as a common practice, along with the spirituality and superstitious aspects reflected in love medicine that is traditional of their culture. They all seem to have a deep connection with family, more so than the "white normative" families by their identities being so largely defined by their relations.
I so enjoyed this book, and, like Lauren, now must read the other three when I get time (and reread this one). We read Erdrich’s short story “The Shawl” in Women Authors, and it’s wonderful, but I thought at the time that it was not-quite-right-seeming that a native American would be revealing so many “secrets” about her people. I’m really not sure why I feel this way; it may just be because I’ve read so little Native American literature that the content is unfamiliar in general. It’s also a little disturbing to “hear” the people in this book refer to themselves as “Indians”. I just really hate that term, but I suppose it’s a realistic usage. Not that “Native American” is much better, and I don’t hear many people using “First Nations” – but (as usual), I digress.
Lipsha’s my favorite in this book. I just love the way his mind works. Like when he’s thinking that God must have gone deaf because miracles like those in the Bible don’t happen anymore. Very good point. And his logic in figuring out the love medicine using the geese seems remarkably sound to me. I also love all the little word-play jokes Erdrich uses when she’s writing about him. My favorite was when he thinks about “Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it” (243 in ps ed.). That by itself would make the story worth reading. And he says that he “tried. . .to take it all in my grain of thought” (333). I noticed a lot of this type of thing throughout the book and I figure there are more that I missed, but next time I’ll know to be on the lookout. One bit in “The Tomahawk Factory” made me think Erdrich was referring to the community/defining absence idea: “I allowed myself to be led like a child. I breathed in the sweet, dry air of June. . .” (321). That was a great chapter – I imagined the chaos at the end, all these people fighting with cheap replicas of the weapons their ancestors used.
I like Howard, too, and when the book mentioned that he’d learned to read from Sesame Street, that brought back memories for me; I can distinctly remember the day I learned that t-i-o-n spells “shun”. I’m not sure if it was from SS or the Electric Company, but I can still hear the song. It’s also cool that he renames himself. I find that idea especially interesting – a person’s name is what s/he says it is.
So, I feel like there has to be a community of women in this novel, if for no other reason than that Dr. Cajka included it on the syllabus for this class. However, I think that this particular community has to be the least clearly defined of all those we've encountered so far. The others were easily recognizable. We've had sisters (the Bennetts, the Lorimers, the Mirabals), and in most of these novels we've also had mothers and daughters and aunts. In The Group, the community was defined by the common experience of attending school at Vassar. Plus, we've had communities of women of women in communities (by that, I mean the communities of women in Herland and Brewster Place were defined by the literal communities in which the women lived). But in Love Medicine, none of these things are constant. The community doesn't seemed to be defined by the reservation, as the women come and go (with significant portions of the story taking place elsewhere...which is different from Brewster Place, where the parts which have a different setting are all used as a way of explaining how the women ended up where they did). Additionally, though some of the women in the novel are related, they aren't all members of the same family. And, finally, they don't all seem to have one common unifying experience, except that of living on a reservation. I have a feeling I'd probably have some more things to say about this if I hadn't had to miss Phaedra's presentation on Thursday. But, because I did, I'll just give it a rest here.
See you all on Tuesday!
I could have sworn I already sent this post but aparently I typed it up in Word and forgot to post it to the site since it isn’t on here. Anyways, I really enjoyed reading Love Medicine. I think I actually enjoyed it more after our class discussion on Thursday. It’s weird but a lot of the symbolism and underlying meanings in the novels we read I don’t completely understand until we discuss them in class. I hear people make points about the novels and wonder how I never realized what they had.
It was interesting to consider all of the meanings of Love Medicine in the novel, and to discover the connection we made in class of how when Lipsha abondoned the traditional ingredients for the Love Medicine and bought some of them at the grocery store, he couldn’t save Grandpa and he lost his touch for a while. That was an interesting way to stress the importance of tradition in the Native American culture.
I think Lipsha was my favorite character. It was neat how he connected everyone together in the community and it was nice to have a male character that wasn’t a complete scumbag. It was kind of interesting about how we discussed him being portrayed more in relation to the women community in the novel than the community of men. This novel was really insightful into Native American culture and helped me to see it through a lens that is much more real than how the majority of Americans view it.
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