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From beginning to end, it's a book you won't be able to put down. Anybody who enjoys a book, needs to read this novel. It's the best you'll ever come across, believe me.
The novel centers around the two poles of the Kapshaws and the Larmartines, two families who live on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. As readers, we are aware that we are privy to only moments in a larger story that takes place off screen. In the chapter "The Island" narrated by Lulu Nanapush, Lulu leaves her home to live in a cave on an island with Moses Pillager, perhaps a more surrealist chapter than the rest of the novel. Love Medicine tells a multigenerational story that spans many decades, lives, marriages, loves, and deaths. Upon consummating her romance with Moses, Lulu, who would go on to father many children with many fathers, informs the reader: "I want to grind men's bones to drink in my night tea.I want to be their food, their harmful drink, to taste men like stilled jam at the back of my tongue." These moments of surrealism are equally matched by a prose that seems permeable and effervescent, as if the words can barely capture the events before us.Erdrich is responsible for populating her novel with a myriad of characters whose lives bend and bounce off one another, and while we may not condone the actions of every one of them, there is a clear understanding that their actions rise from a shared pain. The technique, if a bit less experimental even if simultaneously more grand, is similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.By revisiting events, and even placing some events in non-chronological order, Erdrich's stories accumulate momentum and power as the novel progresses. Because these characters are connected through a webwork of relations, their loneliness seems that much tragic.
However, what separates Love Medicine from other novels who have taken the same approach is the way Erdrich utilizes the shifting point of view to provide a multifaceted view of characters and events. However, Erdrich's writing is often imbued with an effervescent mysticism. Her writing is just this side of magical realism, and while certain characters may believe in magic, Lipsha Morrissey believes he has a healing touch, because these very same characters are telling the story we are welcomed to doubt their powers. Most chapters are written from the first person and provide an opportunity for Erdrich to play with tone and voice that depends on the character. We recognize the whole from the aggregate because of our familiarity with both, and in the case of Love Medicine the whole is life from family.Perhaps the single most impressive aspect of Love Medicine is Erdrich's prose.
It is an ambitious novel that both attempts to provide a widescreen view of life as it interconnects across blood and generations while simultaneously reserving the right to zoom into quiet moments that, while they may seem insignificant at the time, blossom in import as author Louise Erdrich scales back her view to reveal the intricate nature of her story. In ways Love Medicine is like a collection of close photographs of a single skyscraper - a bird's nest on a ledge, an American flag, the sun reflecting off a window - without ever revealing the whole object. The death of a veteran returning from Vietnam is treated as an accident or a suicide depending on the author. These families are not made up of traditional nuclear units, and Erdrich must provide an intricate and looping family tree just so the reader understands who is related to whom.Each chapter of Love Medicine presents itself as a short story, a common technique for a first novel. For example, Lipsha Morrissey, a teenager growing up in the eighties, utilizes videogames for metaphors.
At first I thought it was a bit strange, but I ended up enjoying it. This was one of the most relatable books that I have ever read. It's amazing how people involved in the same event can remember something so differently. The short stories of each person relate to each other and tell a bigger story. It has lots of crazy family issues. Each chapter was told from a different person's perspective.
This is my first attempt to read this author's work: I would be hesitant to try any of her other novels. Too disjoint for me, and some of the characters were too bizarre for me. This will go in the "donate" pile for my local used book store. After about 75 pages into this book, I was done. I've decided I'm not a fan of lyrical writing or short stories with no clear connection or flow between the chapters.
The sun falls down the side of the world and the hill goes dark. I truly love this book and highly recommend it. I first read this book my junior year in high school and was completely captivated by the imagery. Her hand grows thick and fevered, heavy in my own, and I don't want her, but I want her, and I cannot let go." Years later, I have just finished rereading this book for the fifth time and I still love it: it still sucks me in and I'm swept away into Erdrich's world, her flawed characters move me, each person has a story that is unique and contributes in some way to the whole. On the short list of one of my all-time favorites. I found myself thinking about it long after I had turned the last page. One of my favorite portions of the book reads, "We sit alone.
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