The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

INTERVIEWER: And do you revise at that point?

  ERDRICH: I revise as I type, and I write a lot by hand on the printouts so they feel repossessed. I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in, and after a number of years I’ll get a handful of earth. I am working right now out of a notebook I used when I wrote The Blue Jay’s Dance.

  INTERVIEWER: A journalist once asked you what advice you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?

  ERDRICH: I think I meant that grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life.

  INTERVIEWER: How?

  ERDRICH: By transforming the madness I have in me.

  INTERVIEWER: Is writing a lonely life for you?

  ERDRICH: Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect.

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  About the book

  About the Revision

  THE ORIGINAL ANTELOPE WIFE was written in the 1990s; because I rarely read my books after they are published, I didn’t return to this one until three years ago. When I did read the original, I was astonished that I’d dropped the powerful characters from the first thirty pages. Having discovered their flawed depth, I wanted them back. Once I started thinking of them and sketching out their lives, a different, overwhelmingly insistent vision of the book took shape. The voices I’d abandoned, new sources of humor, characters I thought I had given up, soon gripped me.

  Revising this book was like repairing an old piece of beadwork. I stitched in new connections and added entirely new chapters. I dropped some chaos but kept some of the mistakes. Ojibwe floral beadwork usually employs one sinuous vine with marvelously inventive offshoots. That became my pattern for the book. The Antelope Woman’s narrative would be the vine, the chapters the flowers— some true to life, some wildly dreamlike, some a mixture of real and surreal.

  It has taken me twenty years to understand where I was going when I first started The Antelope Wife. I think this was how the book was supposed to be written all along. Still, I have tenderness for the old version. It seems to me that the characters were patiently waiting for me to return and continue with their stories.

  —Louise

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  More by Louise Erdrich

  ROUND HOUSE

  The revered author returns to the territory of her bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Plague of Doves, with this riveting, exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.

  THE PLAGUE OF DOVES

  The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation.

  Part Ojibwe, part white, Evelina Harp is an ambitious young girl prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all too intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

  SHADOW TAG

  When Irene America discovers that her artist husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it— into a manipulative charade. As Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children, their home becomes a place of increasing violence and secrecy. And Irene drifts into alcoholism, moving ever closer to the ultimate destruction of a relationship filled with shadowy need and strange ironies.

  Alternating between Irene’s twin journals and an unflinching third-person narrative, Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and the anatomy of one family’s struggle for survival and redemption.

  THE RED CONVERTIBLE

  This unique volume brings together, for the first time, three decades of stories by one of the most innovative and exciting writers of our day.

  Erdrich is a fearless and inventive writer. In her fictional world, the mystical can emerge from the everyday, the comic turn suddenly tragic, and violence and beauty inhabit a single emotional landscape. Each character in these stories is full of surprises, and the twists and leaps of Erdrich’s imagination are made all the more meaningful by the deeper truth of human feeling that underlies them.

  In “Saint Marie,” the ardent longing that propels a fourteen-year-old Indian girl up the hill to the Sacred Heart Convent and into a life-and-death struggle with the diabolical Sister Leopolda fuels a story of breathtaking power and originality. “Knives” features a homely butcher’s assistant, a devoted reader of love stories, who falls for a good-looking predator, a traveling salesman, with devastating consequences for each of them. “Le Mooz” evokes the stinging flames of passion in old age— “Margaret had exhausted three husbands, and Nanapush had outlived his six wives”—with unexpected humor that turns suddenly bittersweet at the story’s close. A passion for music in “Naked Woman Playing Chopin” proves more powerful than any experience of carnal or spiritual love; indeed, when Agnes DeWitt removes her clothing to enter the music of a particular composer, she sweeps all before her and transcends mortality and time itself.

  In The Red Convertible, readers can follow the evolution of narrative styles, the shifts and metamorphoses in Erdrich’s fiction, over the past thirty years. These stories, spellbinding in their boldness and beauty, are a stunning literary achievement.

  “A wondrous short story writer . . . creating a keepsake of the American experience. . . . A master tuner of the taut emotions that keen between parent and child, man and woman, brother and sister, and man and beast.”

  —Liesl Schillinger,

  New York Times Book Review

  THE PAINTED DRUM

  While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.

  Louise Erdrich’s Painted Drum explores the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, the strength of family, and the intricate rhythms of grief with all the grace, wit, and startling beauty that characterizes this acclaimed author’s finest work.

  “With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see—to the dead alive and busy, to the breath of trees and the souls of wolves— and inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  FOUR SOULS

  Fleur Pillager takes her mother’s name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservati
on to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There she seeks restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple; her intentions are complicated by her dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her.

  “Full of satisfying yet unexpected twists. . . . Four Souls begins with clean, spare prose but finishes in gorgeous incantations and poetry.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB

  Fidelis Waldvogel leaves behind his small German village in the quiet aftermath of World War I; he sets out for America with his new wife, Eva—the widow of his best friend, killed in action. Finally settling in North Dakota, Fidelis works hard to build a business, a home for his family, and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. But his adventures in the New World truly begin when he encounters Delphine Watzka, a local woman whose origins are a mystery, even to herself. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted; she meets Fidelis and the ground trembles. . . .

  “An enrapturing plunge into the depths of the human heart.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “[A] masterpiece. . . . Erdrich never hits a false note.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  ORIGINAL FIRE: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS

  In this important new collection, her first in fourteen years, Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry (Jacklight and Baptism of Desire) and added new poems to create Original Fire.

  This profound and accessible collection anticipates and enlarges upon many of the themes, and even the characters, of Erdrich’s prose. A sequence of story poems called “The Potchikoo Stories” recounts the life and afterlife of the questing trickster Potchikoo; here, Erdrich echoes the wit and humanity of the inimitable Nanapush, who appears in several of her novels. Similarly, the group of poems called “The Butcher’s Wife” contains the germ of Erdrich’s novel The Master Butchers Singing Club.

  THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE

  A finalist for the National Book Award, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse tells the story of Father Damien Modeste, who for more than half a century has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Now, nearing the end of his life, he dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. To complicate his fears, Father Damien’s quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of a perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint, Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Sister Leopolda’s piety and is faced with the most difficult decision of his life: Should he reveal all that he knows and risk everything? Or should he manufacture a protective history though he believes Leopolda’s wonder-working is motivated by evil?

  “A deeply affecting narrative. . . . Ms. Erdrich uses her remarkable storytelling gifts to endow it with both emotional immediacy and the timeless power of fable. . . . By turns comical and tragic, the stories span the history of this Ojibwe tribe and its members’ wrestlings with time and change and loss.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  THE ANTELOPE WIFE

  When a powwow trader kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, connections to the past rear up to confront an urban community. Soon the patterns of people’s ancestors begin to repeat themselves with consequences both tragic and ridiculous.

  “Spiritual yet pragmatic, Erdrich’s deft lyricism affirms while it defies the usual lines separating the mythical from the daily. Erdrich leads every event in her book to its outer limits, so no detail is mundane. And each scene contains bits of hilarity, extravagance, and horror.”

  —Boston Globe Sunday Magazine

  TALES OF BURNING LOVE

  Jack Mauser has women problems; he’s been married five times and none of his wives really know him. This becomes strikingly apparent when all his wives, marooned in the same snowbound car, start to tell stories about their onetime husband. He’s a man with a talent for reinvention and a less than circumspect regard for the truth. But as the women talk, their stories begin to revive them; they start thinking about Jack in a whole new light.

  “Erdrich’s finest novel in years. . . . Shockingly beautiful prose.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  THE BLUE JAY’S DANCE: A BIRTH YEAR (nonfiction)

  The Blue Jay’s Dance is a poetic meditation on what it means to be a mother. Describing her pregnancy and the birth of her child, Erdrich charts the weather outside her window and the moods inside her heart. It is, she says, “a book of conflict, a book of babyhood, a book about luck, cats, a writing life, wild places in the world, and my husband’s cooking. It is a book about the vitality between mothers and infants, that passionate and artful bond into which we pour the direct expression of our being.”

  “The language in this book is stunning, elastic, often full of silence. . . . Erdrich is forthright and tough-minded in her intentions, generous in her speculations, and courageous in her vulnerability before her readers. The Blue Jay’s Dance is a book that breaks ground.”

  —Boston Globe

  THE BINGO PALACE

  Seeking direction and enlightenment, charismatic young drifter Lipsha Morrissey answers his grandmother’s summons to return to his birthplace. As he tries to settle into a challenging new job on the reservation, Lipsha falls passionately in love for the first time. But the object of his affection, the beautiful Shawnee Ray, is in the midst of deciding whether to marry Lipsha’s boss, Lyman Lamartine. Matters are further complicated when Lipsha discovers that Lyman, in league with an influential group of aggressive businessmen, has chosen to open a gambling complex on reservation land—a development that threatens to destroy the community’s fundamental links with the past.

  “Beautiful. . . . The Bingo Palace shows us a place where love, fate, and chance are woven together like a braid, a world where daily life is enriched by a powerful spiritual presence.”

  —New York Times

  THE CROWN OF COLUMBUS (cowritten with Michael Dorris)

  A gripping novel of history, suspense, recovery, and new beginnings, The Crown of Columbus chronicles the adventures of a pair of mismatched lovers—Vivian Twostar, a divorced, pregnant anthropologist, and Roger Williams, a consummate academic, epic poet, and bewildered father of Vivian’s baby—on their quest for the truth about Christopher Columbus and themselves. When Vivian uncovers what is presumed to be the lost diary of Christopher Columbus, she and Roger are drawn into a journey from icy New Hampshire to the idyllic Caribbean in search of “the greatest treasure of Europe.” Lured by the wild promise of redeeming the past, they are plunged into a harrowing race against time and death that threatens—and finally changes—their lives. A rollicking tale of adventure, The Crown of Columbus is also a contemporary love story and a tender examination of parenthood and passion.

  “The rare novel that is both literature and good fun.”

  —Barbara Kingsolver

  TRACKS

  “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” So begins Nanapush as he recalls the winter of 1912, when consumption wiped out whole families of Ojibwe. But the magnificent Fleur Pillager refuses to be done away with; she drowns twice in Lake Matchimanito but returns to life to bedevil her enemies using the strength of the black underwaters. This is a book about love, loss, endurance, and survival.

  “Erdrich captures the passions, fears, myths, and doom of a living people, and she does so with ease that leaves the reader breathless.”

  —The New Yorker

  THE BEET QUEEN

  Two children, Karl and Mary Adare, leap from a boxcar one chilly spring morning in 1932. Karl and Mary have been orphaned in a most peculiar way. The children have come to Argus, in the heart of rural North Dakota, to seek refuge with their aunt, who runs a butcher shop. So begins
this enthralling tale, spanning some forty years and brimming with unforgettable characters: ordinary Mary, who causes a miracle; seductive, restless Karl, who lacks his sister’s gift for survival; Sita, their lovely, ambitious, disturbed cousin; Celestine James, Mary’s lifelong friend; and Celestine’s fearless, wild daughter Dot—the Beet Queen.

  “[Erdrich] is a luminous writer and has produced a novel rich in movement, beauty, event. Her prose spins and sparkles.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  LOVE MEDICINE

  Winner of a 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, Louise Erdrich’s beloved first novel is now newly revised by the author—the Definitive Edition of the book that introduced one of contemporary literature’s most innovative voices. Set on and around a North Dakota reservation over fifty years, Love Medicine tells of the intertwined fates of two families, the Lamartines and the Kashpaws. Their world is harsh and hazardous, full of old grievances and bad decisions, but it is illuminated by the kind of love that can leave a person crazily empty or full to overflowing with its spellbinding magic.