Four Souls/Tracks CD

by Louise Erdrich, Anna Fields (Narrator)

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

Tracks

Set in North Dakota, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance -- yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The listener will experience shock and pleasure in encountering characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Four Souls

A strange and compelling 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.

Performed by Anna Fields.

Genres: Fiction

Audio CD

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-e...

From a book description:

Author Biography:

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991).

The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.

She is the author of four previous bestselling andaward-winning novels, including Love Medicine; The Beet Queen; Tracks; and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay's Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

These books were written before (Tracks) and after (Four Souls) The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse but they run parallel to LNH. Anna Fields, the narrator, reads all three of the aforementioned books beautifully although her use of a lower register for Nanapush is a tiny bit grating but I adjusted. I recommend listening/reading either in order of publication or read LNH first. The stories get you deeper into a couple of the storylines in LNH.

Audible has them on one recording but backwards and you cannot tell by looking at the Audible chapter listings where FS ends and Tracks begins which was frustrating especially when I realized they were out of sequence. But it didn’t keep me from thoroughly enjoying the books especially the rich mix of tragedy and hilarity of Nanapush’s yarns. He is my favorite of all her characters. Tracks is a bit slower than Four Souls and I really wish they’d been presented in order.

Regardless, they are such complex, twisty, beautifully told stories with so many characters. And since I didn’t start reading her books in order I have gotten used to the circles and spirals she tells them in without much care for whether a character has died or not since they often revisit.

[Rita_book · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked it, especially towards the end. Erdrich uses dark humor and imagery to tell the story of Fleur Pillager, the strong-willed Anishinabe woman who goes to the "big city" to track down and destroy the man who stole her land.

Reading this book inspired me to get the book A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich which, among other helpful things, features family trees of all of the different characters in all of her books. Since they are all inter-related and she tells different parts of the same stories, from multiple viewpoints, in different books, the genealogies are extremely helpful.

I listened to this novel on CD, and the reader was excellent--quite adept at creating distinct voices of various characters who narrated the story.

Again, I thought this book was very good. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone just starting to read Erdrich's novels--I would read The Beet Queen or even Love Medicine first. But Four Souls is a great addition to her canon and I encourage almost everyone to at least try her work. It's quirky, but worth it!

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four Souls was first, then Tracks. I was engaged with the first book but sort of lost interest during the second, although it was the backstory to the first book, it didn't really matter. I wonder why they put these two books together like this?

[Jan Even · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Four Souls" was a bit of a disappointment, only because I hold Erdrich in such high regard and have really loved some of her other novels. "The Round House," for example, is one of the best books I've read this year.

[Lanea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Go to http://booksforears.com/ for my review.