Erdrich, Louise - Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 16 June 1996)
Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 16 June 1996)
SOURCE: "A Gulliver Shipwrecked on a Coast of Women," in Los Angeles Time Book Review, June 16, 1996, pp. 3, 13.
[In the following review, Klinkenborg praises Tales of Burning Love and conjectures that the book signals a fundamental change in Erdrich's writing.]
There has always been something fervent about Louise Erdrich's fiction. Her characters seem to burn with consciousness and desire in a difficult landscape, a place where isolation and hard weather and poverty clarify the nature of longing. The life she sets loose in her novels is so incendiary that it can only be contained, so it seems, within a shape that is nearly symbolic in purpose. If Erdrich were writing for a different time, her novels would be about saints' lives—narratives in which pain is also joy and death is transfiguration. There is about each of them something exemplary, in the cautioning sense of that word.
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