Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club is a powerfully told story of love, death, redemption, and resurrection. After German soldier Fidelis Waldvogel returns home from World War I to marry his best friend's pregnant widow, he packs up his father's butcher knives and sets sail for America. He settles in Argus, North Dakota, where he sets up a meat shop with his wife Eva, who quickly befriends the struggling yet resourceful Delphine Watzka. Delphine, who runs a vaudeville show with her balancing partner Cyprian Lazarre, has returned home to Argus to care for her alcoholic father. While most of this emotionally rich novel focuses on the changing landscape of small-town life as seen through Delphine and Fidelis's eyes, Erdrich does a masterful job of illuminating hidden dramas through her secondary characters. Erdrich's portrayal of these various townsfolk, including members of the Master Butchers Singing Club, truly shows off her storytelling talent. Her ability to infuse each character with a distinct and multifaceted personality makes this novel an intimate and thought-provoking adventure. --Gisele Toueg


From Publishers Weekly
Erdrich's quiet, gentle voice is so soft, it's as if she's carefully reading a bedtime story. Yet this novel would not put anyone to sleep. Woven with intrigue, romance, death, sex and humor, it's an emotionally complex tale of European immigrants who have settled in the fictional town of Erdrich's previous novels, Argus, N.Dak. Bordering on magical realism, this marvelous yarn introduces a world of rich, expansive imagery and an abundance of memorably compelling characters. There's Delphine, who acts as a human table for her lover, Cyprian, an Ojibwa balancing artist. Delphine cares for her father, Roy, an alcoholic accused of neglectfully murdering an entire family. And then there's Fidelis, a former sniper for the German army who is now the singing butcher of the title. Although some breaks in cadence occur throughout the reading-it seems almost as if Erdrich is seeing the material for the first time-her soft style gradually blends with the story and, rather than seeming inappropriate, becomes invisible.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A German soldier straggles home from World War I, marries his best friend's pregnant widow, then picks up a set of butcher knives and heads for North Dakota, where he founds a singing club and encounters the passionate Delphine Watzka. If anyone can make a butcher sing, it's Erdrich. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's Ojibwa-German heritage lends an autobiographical flavor to the post-WWI saga of Fidelis Waldvogel (faithful forest bird). Fidelis, patterned after her grandfather, is a butcher with a beautiful singing voice. Erdrich narrates with expressive intimacy, bringing authenticity to the exceptional people who populate Argus, North Dakota. After Fidelis, with wife Eva, sets up a butcher shop and founds his cherished singing club, Eva meets and befriends Delphine Watzka. Delphine has returned to Argus to nurse her ailing alcoholic father. She had left years before and became a "human table" for a circus balancing act. It is Delphine and Eva's friendship that forms the beating heart of the novel. A master storyteller, Erdrich creates charismatic characters, and her reading makes each distinctly memorable. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Although death looms large in Erdrich's emotionally powerful, richly detailed new novel, it does so in a "world where butchers sing like angels." The indomitable Fidelis Waldvogel walks home from World War I and marries Eva, the pregnant widow of his best friend, who was killed in combat. Carrying a suitcase full of butcher knives, he immigrates to America and settles in Argus, North Dakota (a fictional town familiar from Erdrich's previous novels). Endlessly resourceful Delphine Watzka has attempted to put Argus and her childhood (devoted to ministering to her father, Roy, a hopeless alcoholic) behind her by joining the circus as a human table for a balancing act. Although she deeply loves her balancing partner, Cyprian, she senses a barrier between them that prevents them from truly connecting. Returning to Argus, she takes a job at Fidelis' butcher shop, where she makes a friend for life in the hardworking Eva, eventually nursing her through a death by cancer and finally finding the love of her life in Fidelis. Erdrich gives us one of her finest characters in the radiant Delphine, who is possessed of an immense generosity of spirit, while also creating a host of truly remarkable secondary characters: loyal Cyprian, mournful Roy, the eccentric ragpicker Step-and-a-Half. In mesmerizing prose, Erdrich meticulously re-creates the brutal work of the slaughterhouse and the lithe grace of the circus troupe and then counterpoints this physical world with transcendent moments of human connection. It's clear that Erdrich, one of our finest writers, is working at the very peak of her considerable powers. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"What happens when a trained killer discovers, in the aftermath of war, that his true vocation is love? Having survived the killing fields of World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns home to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend who was killed in action." "With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as Argus, North Dakota, where he settles. Over the years he works hard, building a business, a home for his family - which now includes Eva and four sons - and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. The group embraces everyone, from the local banker to the town drunk, the sheriff, the other butcher in Argus, and an elusive drifter, part Ojibwe, part French, whose balancing act is a wonder to behold." What happens when the Old World meets the New - in the person of Delphine Watzka, a daughter of Argus whose origins are a mystery even to her - turns out to be one of the great adventures of Fidelis's life. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted; she meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life, and the trajectory of this novel by Louise Erdrich.

SYNOPSIS

What happens when a trained killer discovers, in the aftermath of war, that his true vocation is love? From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Love Medicine comes an enchanting, richly imagined world "where butchers sing like angels."

FROM THE CRITICS

Thomas Curwen

Poignant in the mysteries it evokes and patient with the questions it leaves unanswered, The Master Butchers Singing Club is a resonant work in which songs -- yes, songs, for early on Fidelis forms among the men of Argus the book's eponymous singing club -- become a bridge, a benediction, to the other side. "How close the dead are," Step-and-a-Half reflects. "One song away from the living." It is a sentiment that haunts these pages.—The Los Angeles Times

Book Magazine - Beth Kephart

Fourteen years ago, pregnant with my only child, I sat on a couch in a quiet room and fell under the spell of Louise Erdrich. Fell under the spell of Love Medicine and The Beet Queen, under the spell of stories that firmly and credibly established characters and voices that I had never encountered before. Here was a dirty, fictional place, located somewhere along the Minnesota￯﾿ﾽNorth Dakota border. Here was a town full of harsh wind and the smell of raw meat, full of the high drama—and sometimes the preposterous but always delightful melodrama—of her noisy cast of characters. I didn't want to be anywhere but the made-up Erdrich world that spanned so many generations. It was more alive than the lackluster town that lay beyond my window. Great books cast spells. Great books surge and dance and suggest their own inevitability. Erdrich has written many great books while living her famously complicated life, and lately she's been writing ever faster, producing a string of adult and young-adult novels at a blinding pace. Her latest, The Master Butchers Singing Club, returns her once more to the now familiar question of just what happens when Native-American and European cultures share the same desolate, desperate place. The book's heroes, as always, are burdened with secrets. They are blackened with disappointments and regrets. Joy is the scarcest commodity, the macabre is ever present and dreams are often not even worth dreaming. There is a corresponding weight to these pages, a heaviness that only rarely dissipates, giving the book, in places, an airless quality, a sense that this particular cast of characters may finally be too trapped inside their own overly damaged psyches. That is not to suggest that things don't happen in The Master Butchers Singing Club, because many things do. At the heart of the story lies Fidelis Waldvogel, a trained German sniper who, upon returning from World War I, finds and marries the pregnant lover of his best friend, who was killed in action. Seeking to make a good life for Eva and her son, Fidelis journeys to the United States, takes a train across the country and settles down in Argus, North Dakota, to the hard life of a butcher. Eventually Eva and her son, Franz, join him there, overwhelming Fidelis with a feeling he finds impossible to express: "Fidelis felt the emotion of love move through his body like a great, rough, startling beast.... When a man of such strength lets himself be overcome the earth of his being shudders. He is immensely alone. Eva might have understood Fidelis then, if he'd had the courage to elaborate, but since he didn't she merely smiled into his face, kissed him and decided with a certain bravado that although there was not a damn thing of interest or value in sight, there would be." It is as Fidelis' helpmate in the meat shop that Eva encounters Delphine Watzka, the daughter of a slovenly drunk who recently has been touring the country as a member of a two-person performance act. Argus is Delphine's home, and despite the shame that comes with being Roy Watzka's daughter, Delphine has a sturdy determinedness about her, a practical economy that invites Eva's interest and eventually binds the two women in a truly beautiful—and beautifully rendered—friendship. Soon Delphine and Eva are working side by side in Fidelis' shop, overseeing the meats and the customers and keeping watch over the four sons who eventually comprise Eva and Fidelis' family. These passages contain some gorgeous writing, some truly resonant scenes. The numerous subplots involve Delphine's gay companion, the town's female undertaker, the lusting sheriff, Roy's sordid past, Fidelis' old-maid sister, a terrible murder, a singing club, the escapades of children, World War II and a traveling woman named Step-and-a-Half. If that sounds like too much, it probably is—especially toward the end, when one senses that Erdrich is working very hard to tie up so many loose ends, to somehow jolt her readers with surprising revelations. The various subplots also interfere with the emotional development of the story; as potentially fabulous as some of these characters are, only three—Eva, Delphine and the second son, Markus—ultimately rise above the stuff of caricature in a lasting, meaningful way. In The Master Butchers Singing Club, Erdrich is at her finest when painting the domestic scenes between Eva and Delphine, when depicting the soul of a heartbroken boy. She is at her best when she makes her language sing, when she makes the snow fall like this: "Snow is a blessing when it softens the edges of the world, when it falls like a blanket trapping warm pockets of air. This snow was the opposite—it outlined the edges of things and made the town look meaner, bereft, merely tedious, like a mistake set down upon the earth and only half erased." Erdrich is a genuinely talented writer; she has changed the landscape of fiction forever. This novel, however, sometimes sags beneath its own weight, making this reader long for sunnier days in Argus.

Publishers Weekly

Erdrich's quiet, gentle voice is so soft, it's as if she's carefully reading a bedtime story. Yet this novel would not put anyone to sleep. Woven with intrigue, romance, death, sex and humor, it's an emotionally complex tale of European immigrants who have settled in the fictional town of Erdrich's previous novels, Argus, N.Dak. Bordering on magical realism, this marvelous yarn introduces a world of rich, expansive imagery and an abundance of memorably compelling characters. There's Delphine, who acts as a human table for her lover, Cyprian, a lesbian Ojibwa balancing artist. Delphine cares for her father, Roy, an alcoholic accused of neglectfully murdering an entire family. And then there's Fidelis, a former sniper for the German army who is now the singing butcher of the title. Although some breaks in cadence occur throughout the reading-it seems almost as if Erdrich is seeing the material for the first time-her soft style gradually blends with the story and, rather than seeming inappropriate, becomes invisible. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 23, 2002). (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In a richly constructed and descriptive narrative, World War I veteran Fidelis Waldvogel moves from Germany with a suitcase full of sausages and a set of butcher's knives to Argus, ND, after marrying the widow of his best friend. Combining mystery, romance, and social commentary, Erdrich's novel traces Fidelis's life with Eva and their four sons as it entangles with that of Delphine Watzka in an exploration of love, loss, sacrifice, and strength. The novel starts slowly, but the author, reading her own work, eventually creates a full cast of major and minor characters who are charmingly flawed and ultimately unforgettable. Highly recommended.-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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