From Publishers Weekly
Fleur Pillager, one of Erdrich's most intriguing characters, embarks on a path of revenge in this continuation of the Ojibwe saga that began with Tracks. As a young woman, Fleur journeys from her native North Dakota to avenge the theft of her land. In Minneapolis, she locates the grand house of the thief: one John James Mauser, whom she plans to kill. But Fleur is patient and stealthy; she gets herself hired by Mauser's sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, as a laundress. Polly acts as the household manager, tending to the invalid Mauser as well as her sister, the flaky and frigid Placide. Fleur upends this domestic arrangement by ensnaring Mauser, who marries her in a desperate act of atonement. Revenge becomes complicated as Fleur herself suffers under its weight: she descends into alcoholism and gives birth to an autistic boy. In Erdrich's trademark style, chapters are narrated by alternating characters—in this case Polly Elizabeth, as well as Nanapush, the elderly man from Tracks, and his wife, Margaret. (Nanapush and Margaret's relationship, and the jealousies and revenge that ensue, play out as a parallel narrative.) More so than in other of Erdrich's books, this tale feels like an insider's experience: without the aid of jacket copy, new readers will have trouble feeling a sure sense of place and time. And Fleur herself—though fascinating—remains elusive. Nevertheless, the rich detail of Indian culture and community is engrossing, and Erdrich is deft (though never heavy-handed) in depicting the struggle to keep this culture alive in the face of North American "progress." The themes of fruitless revenge and redemption are strong here, especially when combined with the pull of her lyrical prose; Erdrich may not ensnare many new readers, but she will certainly satisfy her already significant audience. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For many readers -- as well as writers -- the end of a well-made novel can be a bittersweet moment. The pleasure of the book's conclusive, final chords is always weighed against the inevitable farewell one must say to the book's imaginary world and its inhabitants.Louise Erdrich's 1988 novel Tracks was just such a book, a rich fictional tapestry of Native American life at the turn of the century. Based on characters who first appeared in her National Book Critics Circle award-winning Love Medicine, it told the story of Fleur Pillager, a North Dakota Ojibwe woman who stands against the economic and cultural genocide of her people.It's easy to see why Erdrich would want to return to Fleur Pillager, and her new novel, Four Souls, picks up more or less where Tracks left off. The novel begins as Fleur is embarking on a mission of revenge, hunting down the man responsible for the theft and destruction of much of her tribal lands. She finds him in a grand house in Minneapolis, into which she quickly and expertly insinuates herself, taking a job as a laundress.But the owner, John Mauser, is no typecast villain; married to the imperiously frigid Placide, and bossed about by his spinster sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, who presides over the household, he cuts a pathetic figure. He also suffers from seizures, brought on, according to his doctor, by a lack of sexual congress with his wife. Disappointed that she can't "destroy him fresh," Fleur abandons her murderous designs and seduces him instead. Before long the marriage is over, Fleur assumes her station as head of the household, and she bears Mauser a son, an autistic savant.Like Tracks, Four Souls is told in part by Fleur's grandfather, Nanapush, who is speaking to the grown daughter Fleur abandoned in that novel. Though newcomers to Fleur's story may find the manner of Nanapush's narration confusing in spots, his voice is pleasingly authoritative and economical. He relates Fleur's journey of revenge with the compactness of a parable and balances moments of watery mysticism with a good streak of bawdy humor. Equally engaging is the voice of the novel's second major narrator, Polly Elizabeth, an avowed anti-Indian racist who is so child-hungry that Fleur's pregnancy arouses an instantaneous conversion to her cause: "[I] realize[d] that if I could lay aside my small contempt, I might cherish her," she says. "I might be able to help her grow the child, the babe whom I wanted to live with a longing quite beyond my own selfish habits." Erdrich's theme is less revenge than the unpredictable ways old wounds can heal. This affords the book a summing-up quality that may leave some readers feeling left out. Without the full weight of Tracks to push against, and the tragic history it relates, much of what transpires in Four Souls has the airiness of an extended epilogue. Who, for instance, is this daughter Fleur left behind? And what bearing does this have on her decision to have a child with Mauser?Erdrich straddles the fence a bit, providing readers who might not know Tracks with just enough backstory to wish they did. But the better solution she employs is a resonating amplification of her theme via an adjacent subplot. For all Fleur's magnetism as a character, her story is upstaged in the book's second half by Nanapush himself and his own tale of vengeance gone comically wrong.The object of his murderous rage is his "life's enemy," an Indian named Shesheeb who married and subsequently cannibalized Nanapush's sister during the "winter of our last starvation." Returned to the reservation after a lengthy absence, Shesheeb has settled down the road from Nanapush and his wife, Margaret -- "a splinter in my foot," says Nanapush, "that pierced me when I stepped down hard." The stage is set for confrontation when Margaret impulsively sells a portion of their land to predatory white developers in order to buy a linoleum floor for their cabin. This transaction is vintage Erdrich: It manages to be both a comically awful marital spat, something purely personal, and a crucible containing all the elements of the venality and recklessness of the Indian cultural genocide. When Margaret adds sexual jealousy to the mix, claiming a flirtation with Shesheeb, Nanapush embarks on a murderous mission that, despite its seriousness, possesses all the exuberant lapses of logic and risqué set pieces of Shakespearean comedy, including everything from cross dressing and heroic drunkenness to an amorous dog.The novel could run the risk at this point of being simply overwhelmed by its subplots, but Erdrich elegantly weaves her threads together in the book's last movement, when Fleur, her husband's fortune in ruins, returns with her son to the reservation and undertakes the final reclamation of her ancestral lands. How she accomplishes this is a secret no reviewer should reveal, and I won't. Suffice to say it adds a lovely coda to a book that, sequel or not, possesses many of the signature charms of its author's most accomplished work.Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Erdrich has been universally hailed as one of the most talented writers of her generation, one who has captured the social, cultural, spiritual, and magical nature of the Ojibwe people and the rural landscape of North Dakota. Most critics agree that in the tragicomic Four Souls, narrated by three people, Erdrich is in top form, her magical realism and lyrical storytelling as vibrant and powerful as they were in the first books in this series, Love Medicine and Tracks. Only The New York Times takes Erdrich to task—not for her writing, but for the story itself, which seems “predictable and trite.” Other critics overlooked these faults in favor of Erdrich’s masterful descriptions, characterizations, and lyricism.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From AudioFile
Life is simple, life is complex--sometimes at the same time. These novels are set in the early twentieth century, a time of important transition for the members of the Ojibwe tribe as more tribal lands are lost and additional assimilation into white culture occurs. Many of the same characters appear in both works. In TRACKS the setting is the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota; in FOUR SOULS the setting is Minneapolis/Saint Paul, where the characters seek to avenge those who have cheated them out of land and timber. Anna Fields narrates both books with sensitivity. She distinguishes clearly between the various narrative voices and is comfortable with the Ojibwe words sprinkled throughout. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* This small but incredibly rich chapter in Erdrich's ongoing Native American saga is a continuation of the story of the enigmatic Fleur Pillager, begun in Tracks (1988). Such are Erdrich's storytelling skills that even readers unfamiliar with that book will immediately be drawn into this novel. The decimation of Ojibwe land continues unabated, but the implacable Fleur has decided to exact revenge on one John James Mauser, who has built his wealth by acquiring Ojibwe land through underhanded tactics. She is hired on at his mansion as a laundress, but her plan suffers a setback when she learns that he is ill with a severe muscle disorder; she sets about curing him so that she can wreck him while he is in good condition, but in a bizarre twist, her relationship with Mauser takes a very different turn. Narrated in alternating chapters by aged and comical wise man Nanapush; his visionary, stubborn wife, Margaret; and Mauser's spinster sister-in-law, the novel holds as its central theme the process of transformation, as each character is drawn toward healing and love in the most astonishing fashion. Effortlessly moving between the sacred and the profane, between grotesquerie and transcendence, Erdrich continues to spin her unique and compelling fiction. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Library Journal
"Fleur’s story, along with comic subplots involving the narrators, is marked by imagery both poetic and moving."


Entertainment Weekly
"Great originality and charm."


Atlantic Monthly
"FOUR SOULS juxtaposes … the ribald and the elegiac."


San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"Stunning flights of lyricism."


Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Powerful and haunting."


Book Description

A strange and compelling unkillable woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her.

The two narrators of Four Souls are from utterly different worlds. Nanapush, a "smart man and a fool," is both Fleur's savior and her conscience. He tells Fleur's story and tells his own. He would like a calm and discriminating love with his sweetheart, Margaret. He is old and would like to face death with his love beside him. Instead the two find themselves battling out their last years. When the childhood nemesis of Nanapush appears and casts his eye toward Margaret, Nanapush acts out an absurd revenge of his own and nearly ends up destroying everything. The other narrator, Polly Elizabeth Gheen, is a pretentious and vulnerable upper-crust fringe element, a hanger-on in a wealthy Minneapolis family, a woman aware of her precarious hold on those around her. To her own great surprise the entrance of Fleur Pillager into her household and her life effects a transformation she could never have predicted.

In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Four Souls reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and is as beautiful and lyrical as anything Louise Erdrich has written.


About the Author
Louise Erdrich is the author of ten novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A strange and compelling unkillable woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her." The two narrators of Four Souls are from utterly different worlds. Nanapush, a "smart man and a fool," is both Fleur's savior and her conscience. He tells Fleur's story and tells his own. He would like a calm and discriminating love with his sweetheart, Margaret. He is old and would like to face death with his love beside him. Instead the two find themselves battling out their last years. When the childhood nemesis of Nanapush appears and casts his eye toward Margaret, Nanapush acts out an absurd revenge of his own and nearly ends up destroying everything. The other narrator, Polly Elizabeth Gheen, is a pretentious and vulnerable upper-crust fringe element, a hanger-on in a wealthy Minneapolis family, a woman aware of her precarious hold on those around her. To her own great surprise the entrance of Fleur Pillager into her household and her life effects a transformation she could never have predicted.

FROM THE CRITICS

Karen Joy Fowler - The New York Times

This shifting of voices and stories, ranging back and forth in time and place, may sound dauntingly complicated; luckily, it doesn't read that way. In fact, the progression of events feels natural and unforced, full of satisfying yet unexpected twists. The book begins with clean, spare prose, but finishes in gorgeous incantation and poetry.

Justin Cronin - The Washington Post

The novel could run the risk at this point of being simply overwhelmed by its subplots, but Erdrich elegantly weaves her threads together in the book's last movement, when Fleur, her husband's fortune in ruins, returns with her son to the reservation and undertakes the final reclamation of her ancestral lands. How she accomplishes this is a secret no reviewer should reveal, and I won't. Suffice to say it adds a lovely coda to a book that, sequel or not, possesses many of the signature charms of its author's most accomplished work.

Publishers Weekly

Fleur Pillager, one of Erdrich's most intriguing characters, embarks on a path of revenge in this continuation of the Ojibwe saga that began with Tracks. As a young woman, Fleur journeys from her native North Dakota to avenge the theft of her land. In Minneapolis, she locates the grand house of the thief: one John James Mauser, whom she plans to kill. But Fleur is patient and stealthy; she gets herself hired by Mauser's sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, as a laundress. Polly acts as the household manager, tending to the invalid Mauser as well as her sister, the flaky and frigid Placide. Fleur upends this domestic arrangement by ensnaring Mauser, who marries her in a desperate act of atonement. Revenge becomes complicated as Fleur herself suffers under its weight: she descends into alcoholism and gives birth to an autistic boy. In Erdrich's trademark style, chapters are narrated by alternating characters-in this case Polly Elizabeth, as well as Nanapush, the elderly man from Tracks, and his wife, Margaret. (Nanapush and Margaret's relationship, and the jealousies and revenge that ensue, play out as a parallel narrative.) More so than in other of Erdrich's books, this tale feels like an insider's experience: without the aid of jacket copy, new readers will have trouble feeling a sure sense of place and time. And Fleur herself-though fascinating-remains elusive. Nevertheless, the rich detail of Indian culture and community is engrossing, and Erdrich is deft (though never heavy-handed) in depicting the struggle to keep this culture alive in the face of North American "progress." The themes of fruitless revenge and redemption are strong here, especially when combined with the pull of her lyrical prose; Erdrich may not ensnare many new readers, but she will certainly satisfy her already significant audience. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (July 2) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Erdrich here returns to her fictional chronicle of modern Native American culture, as exemplified by generations of interrelated North Dakotans, picking up where she ended in Tracks (1988). Although it contains crossover characters and allusions to past events, this work may be read without consulting the earlier work. Taking place several years after World War I and narrated principally by tribal leader Nanapush and Polly Elizabeth, a white woman from the city, the plot focuses on beautiful Ojibwe mystic Fleur Pillager. Adopting the powerful secret name Four Souls, Fleur travels to the urban mansion of her people's great enemy, John Mauser, and plans his execution (first miraculously curing him of a wasting illness). But Fleur's control slips: her peculiar marriage to Mauser and a crippling addiction to alcohol put her on the road again, with a severely damaged son and just two possessions: a luxurious automobile and an exquisite suit. However, once she returns to Matchimanito's lakeshore, these are sufficient means for achieving a kind of triumph. Fleur's story, along with comic subplots involving the narrators, is marked by imagery both poetic and moving, if at times overwrought. Yet the beauty of Erdrich's writing compensates more than adequately for that minor flaw. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/04.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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