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| The Plague of Doves: A Novel | 
 enlarge | List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $12.79
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 32 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2719
Category: Book
Author: Louise Erdrich
Publisher: Harper
Studio: Harper
Manufacturer: Harper
Label: Harper
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060515120
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060515126
ASIN: 0060515120
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
A Satisfying Read August 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am a big fan of Louise Erdrich and have read most of her books. 'Plague of Doves' may not quite be her best, which I still think is 'Love Medecine' (which I totally recommend) but it's a very satisfying read if you like big novels with interlocking stories. 'Plague of Doves' is almost like 'The Hours' in the way that it interweaves plots from various timeframes and draws parallels between past and present events-although Erdrich's book has the advantage of also being a pretty good, suspenseful murder mystery. I found Erdrich's evocation of the historical setting of the Dakota Territory circa 1910 to be totally convincing and could easily picture this book as a TV mini-series. The best sections, though, are the ones that deal with everyday reservation life in the 1970s, which seemed to me completely convincing. There are lots of good, well-drawn characters here that you can identify with, especially Evelina, who narrates long portions of the book. In the end, I found the resolution of the murder slightly anti-climactic and really enjoyed the book most for its compelling sense of place and for all the small narratives interspersed throughout. All in all, a really good book to pack in your carry-on bag during a long vacation-which is how I read it!
 Disappointing August 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was the first book I read of this author, and although I persevered through it, when I reached the end, I decided it was rather a waste of time. I couldn't remember who was related to whom, and why I should care. True, some of the writing was quite lyrical--maybe that's why I finished the book--but when I got to the end, I had to go back and figure out why the murder had been committed in the first place. I really couldn't relate to any of the characters, particularly, although I was moved by the tragedy of the lynching. Otherwise, Erdich's violin and all the music around it fell into a black hole for me. I wouldn't recommend this book.
 I can still do it July 30, 2008
Read a book in one sitting and tell about it.
I did wait to have a friend loan me this book because I think
25.95 USA is too expensive. My friend did not like PLAGUE OF DOVES.
Howsomever, this author has done it again. There seems to be a whole
new cast of characters and I could not reconize any (but will read it again and see) as it made me laugh and cry as I did with her first book LOVE MEDICINE.
Her manner of drawing one in with chapter titles such as "a little nip"
wherein not only do the old men sit around nipping on good whiskey, the pinto horse takes a nip out of nosy priest's arm and is just one of the many reasons this is a page turner.
I do wonder why she writes much about Dakota when the action is mostly in Minnesota and Montana. I think I know a man who has family who had connection to "MUSTACHE MAUDE" but will be surprised at love affair with Chief Gall. But was there really a Louis Riel?
A multi-layered tour-de-force July 11, 2008
Louise Erdrich's latest novel A Plague of Doves might be the best book I've read this year. I kept turning the pages as the drama that affected an entire town unravels showing the degree to which the traumatic murder of a family and subsequent lynching of innocent parties binds the townspeople together in a fascinating web of history.
A Plague of Doves is often compared to Faulkner. Erdrich's use of multiple narrators as well as the imagery, symbolism, and characters of her novel certainly evoke Faulkner, but readers daunted by Faulkner's style need not be afraid. A Plague of Doves contains no page-length sentences or stream-of-consciousness meanderings that make it difficult to follow. This story is told from the viewpoint of four different narrators who are all connected to the town's tragic past in various ways. One of the narrators, Evelina Harp, attempts to parse the connections upon first hearing about the story of the lynching:
"The story Mooshum told us had its repercussions -- the first being that I could not look at anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage. As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum's story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew -- parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper." (86)
I drew my own family tree chart in the back of my book and added to it as I read and discovered new connections. After finishing the book, I wish I had thought to make index note cards, as one reviewer did, because the web of relations is so complicated. For all its complexity the story is that much richer and more real.
Several sections of Erdrich's novel could stand alone as short stories, and indeed, parts of it have been published as short fiction, as I learned on reading Erdrich's acknowledgments at the end of the book. If parts of the novel feel somewhat digressive as a result, I think Erdrich can be forgiven, for when the reader reaches the last few pages, all the digressions are shown to be pieces of a complex puzzle -- the reader doesn't know what the picture is until the last piece is put in place.
In addition to being a fairly good murder mystery, the novel is rich in imagery, symbolism, and well-drawn characters, and by the end of the novel, I felt like a resident of Pluto, North Dakota and felt sure that I had truly known all of these people and uncovered their bloody history myself. And that, after all, is what a good book should do for us. Go right out and get this book now! It's amazing!
Small Town Prairie Life Presented in a Slowly Assembled Puzzle July 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A violin that seemingly causes the inadvertent death of one brother in the Peace family at the hands of another magically calls out to its next owner, an Ojibwe Indian named Shamengwa, after drifting about a lake in an empty canoe for twenty years, only to return to the modern-day Peace family via theft. A man quietly evolves his stamp collecting to include "disaster stamps," that is, stamps on letters associated with tragedies such as the Titanic. A locust-like invasion of white doves in 1896 accidentally brings together Seraph Milk, known now as Mooshum, with his life's love, Junesse, to form the family line of the young Evelina Harp, part white and part Ojibwe. A violin recording that reaches a "strange sweetness" lulls a crying infant to sleep and perhaps saves her life amidst a horrific family slaughter. Many years later, a violin once again exacts a form of revenge on that infant's family's murderer.
Louise Erdrich brings together the great silent expanses of the northern plains, the uneasy truce between White and Native Americans, and a touch of pantheistic, tribal mysticism to tell the story of three generations' residents in the unlikely town of Pluto, North Dakota. Ostensibly named before the planet Pluto was discovered, this Pluto nevertheless contains elements of both the mythological Greek underworld and the end of the solar system. If the end of the world (North Dakota) can have its own, slowly dying end of the world, Pluto is it.
The 1911 tragedy that left behind the surviving infant involved a brutal family slaying of a farm family - parents, a teenage girl, and her two younger brothers. In a racially-charged act of vigilante justice, three Indian men and a young boy who happened upon the murder scene several days later are hanged by a gang of white men. Miraculously, the boy survives the hanging. These twin acts of violence, set against the arbitrariness of Pluto's founding and the harshness of prairie life at a reservation's edge, create the stage upon which the town's Twentieth Century lives are played out in a context surpassingly unaffected by the rest of Twentieth Century history.
The balance of Erdrich's story chronicles the circuitous and complex interplay of white and Indian lives in the generations since those early days. Even as the vitality of their town fades away, the residents of Pluto live out their lives beneath the unsettling racist overhang of those unresolved murders and the subsequent "rough justice" meted out by whites to an innocent group of Ojibwes. Despite these faint currents of unease, family lines cross, races intermarry, and the descendants of victims intermingle with the descendants of victimizers.
Erdrich tells her story through multiple voices, predominantly those of the modern-day adolescent Evelina Harp and her uncle by marriage, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts. Their stories are interrupted by that of Marn Wolde, whose bizarre marriage to the cult-like Billy Peace forms one of the novel's strangest and most disassociated interludes, As each voice is heard and then heard again, the lives of Pluto's residents, past and present, slowly take form and cohere into relationships, patterns, and even repetitions. Judge Coutts, for example, reluctantly sells his house to the developer husband of his long-term paramour only to have the developer experience an echo of the dove plague when he sets out to demolish the structure. In the book's final pages a new, fourth voice appears, that of Doctor Cordelia Lochren, and it is through her workmanlike testimonial that many of Pluto's most enduring mysteries are finally resolved.
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES is a story of ancestral legacies passed down through and between families and races, tracing the manner in which those legacies affect the lives of descendants. Some are mystical and some are explicitly acknowledged, while others are ever present but never mentioned. Through it all, however, we are in Ms. Erdrich's view products both of our own making as well as all that came before us.
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