Tales of Burning Love, by Louise Erdrich
Oct. 7th, 2011 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aKimberly and I finished reading aloud Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich today. It's her fifth book, but oddly enough the first that both Kimberly and I read. Sources seem to differ about whether it was the last book she wrote with her husband or the first she wrote without.
After we finished reading, Kimberly and I talked about how Erdrich likes to bookend her novels, and I find this volume very interesting because it goes further, bookending her whole sequence of five books. It starts, just Love Medicine (#1) did, with June walking out into the snow to die. The protagonists of The Beet Queen (#2) are the parents of one of the major characters in this book (Dot) and Fleur, the star of Tracks (#3), is the parent of the other (Jack). Finally, the pivotal sequence of Tales of Burning Love all happens on the same night as the pivotal events of The Bingo Palace (#4) ... and in fact Tales of Burning Love resolves the (very) dangling plots from The Bingo Palace. (And it's the resolution of those plot elements simultaneous with the plot elements of this book that gives Tales of Burning Love much of its strength.)
Beyond all of that, it's nice to note that Tales of Burning Love was good where The Bingo Palace that preceded it often felt trite and unpleasant. I don't think that it held up as well to reading aloud as reading to oneself though. That's primarily because of a huge digression in the middle of the book where all of Jack's ex-wives talk about him. The stories are compelling, but the break in the forward narrative is much more obvious when it takes weeks to get past.
Overall, quite enjoyable, though I'm no longer certain I think it's Erdrich's best book. And, I'm looking forward to what comes next, as this is the last Erdrich book that I'd read before.
After we finished reading, Kimberly and I talked about how Erdrich likes to bookend her novels, and I find this volume very interesting because it goes further, bookending her whole sequence of five books. It starts, just Love Medicine (#1) did, with June walking out into the snow to die. The protagonists of The Beet Queen (#2) are the parents of one of the major characters in this book (Dot) and Fleur, the star of Tracks (#3), is the parent of the other (Jack). Finally, the pivotal sequence of Tales of Burning Love all happens on the same night as the pivotal events of The Bingo Palace (#4) ... and in fact Tales of Burning Love resolves the (very) dangling plots from The Bingo Palace. (And it's the resolution of those plot elements simultaneous with the plot elements of this book that gives Tales of Burning Love much of its strength.)
Beyond all of that, it's nice to note that Tales of Burning Love was good where The Bingo Palace that preceded it often felt trite and unpleasant. I don't think that it held up as well to reading aloud as reading to oneself though. That's primarily because of a huge digression in the middle of the book where all of Jack's ex-wives talk about him. The stories are compelling, but the break in the forward narrative is much more obvious when it takes weeks to get past.
Overall, quite enjoyable, though I'm no longer certain I think it's Erdrich's best book. And, I'm looking forward to what comes next, as this is the last Erdrich book that I'd read before.