FROM OUR EDITORS

The Antelope Wife reflects the irrevocable patterns set in motion by certain fateful acts. It is a story of connections in which history, lust, contemporary Native American life, hand-me-down names, and legends, as well as myth, combine. It extends the branches of the families who populate Louise Erdich's earlier, award-winning novels, and once again, her unsentimental, unsparing writing captures the Native American sense of despair, magic, and humor in an unforgettable story.

ANNOTATION

1999 World Fantasy Award winner.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Antelope Wife is a novel of connections in which history, lust, contemporary urban Native American life, hand-me-down names, and legends, as well as sacred myth, combine. Set in Minneapolis, originally an important trading center and hunting ground, still a magnet for many native people from nearby reservations, the story goes back in time. The novel begins with a soldier, who deserts the cavalry during a cruel raid on an Ojibwa village to chase a dog bearing on its back a baby on a cradle board strung with breathtaking blue beads. Generations later, a fast-talking trader kidnaps a silent and graceful woman from a powwow. In a haunting re-creation of a native tale, the woman is part antelope. Hunter and hunted change identities. The Antelope Wife changes people. Nothing is ever the same again for friends and family.

FROM THE CRITICS

Elizabeth Judd - Salon

Are our lives woven from old scores and past betrayals, or are we "working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern?" This philosophical chestnut is at the heart of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Antelope Wife, a sprawling tale of two Native American (Ojibwa) families, the Roys and Shawanos. Although Erdrich clearly wants to create an overarching picture spanning several generations, she devotes the lion's share of her attention to the story of Rozin Roy. Rozin falls hopelessly in love with baker Frank Shawano, and the affair has tragic consequences for her husband and twin daughters.

What surprises, again and again, is how dead on Erdrich is when she seizes upon the right metaphor. One of those inspired metaphors is blitzkuchen -- "the cake of all cakes," which Shawano's father first tasted and became enthralled with during World War II. Frank's life quest is to perfect his blitzkuchen recipe, but the cake never lives up to that initial rapturous encounter. When Frank serves the German cake at his wedding to Rozin, Rozin's former husband maliciously suggests the dessert was poisoned. "The crowd began to taste the cake, exclaiming as they did, nervously, in trepidation, but unable to resist the next bite after the first, the next and ext delicate-yet-dense bite of blitzkuchen. And so it was, so the secret was discovered. The final and the missing ingredient -- fear."

Not all of Erdrich's scenes are so successful. It's perhaps too easy to fault writers who have as distinctive a style as Erdrich's for sometimes sounding like lousy imitations of themselves. Then again, when Erdrich's trademark prose disappoints, she's embarrassing -- silly and trite. Some of her phrases are lyrical but meaningless, like "earthen earth" or "Unmasked, the woman's tage glance broke across Roy's brow like fire." Still others are precious and New Agey: "Her daughters danced out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair." And here's how Erdrich describes a pregnancy: "the tiny knock of new life began in the cradle of her hipbones." Oh, please.

Clunkers notwithstanding, The Antelope Wife is a satisfying whole, with plenty of blitzkuchen moments and an intriguing exploration of continuity vs. chaos. Her tightly constructed scenes reflect patterns repeated with each generation of Roy and Shawano, subtly suggesting a grand design. And Erdrich delivers 10 or 12 images so fitting that they transform her carefully woven prose into something as mysterious and sublime as sugar with a hint of fear.

New York Times

A fiercely imagined tale of love and loss, a story that manages to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival.

Los Angeles Times

Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich's writing has the luster and sheen of poetry, each sentence circling deeper into emotion, motivation, and rationale, until love touches not eternity but death, transforming The Antelope Wife into a story of longing and of longing assuaged.

People Magazine

A beguiling family saga...The Antelope Wife is a captivating jigsaw puzzle of longing and loss whose pieces form an unforgettable image of contemporary Native American life.

Los Angeles Times