![]() ![]() In one novel, Tracks, one of these heroines survives a blizzard by strapping recently killed deer-meat to her body and hiking miles to safety. They vanish in snowdrifts, and emerge miraculously alive years later. They are shapeshifters, beguilers, occasionally warriors. As a sensualist and a romantic Erdrich gives history a grace note in her alternate universe. Men turn to women who turn to men who smash into each other with the force of battle and on it goes, endlessly. In her books, many set on the lip of an Ojibwe reservation on the North Dakota plains, men and women map the violence of this history onto one another’s bodies over and again, on down the line and across the races who settled the region: Germans, French, Norwegians, Swedes, Ojibwe. It resides in the mythic part of our bodies, too, if you believe such a place exists, which Louise Erdrich’s book The Round House clearly illustrates she does. Whites took the land from Indians by force, after all, and the memory of that theft lives on in more than stories. Love and violence have always been yoked together in Louise Erdrich’s novels, just as they are in North America. ![]()
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