Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
List Price: $14.75
Pages: 367
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780072434194
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the laymen to handle. You don't just go out and get one without paying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.
--Lipsha Morrissey in Love Medicine
In this powerful first novel,
Louise Erdrich introduces several generations in the interrelated families
living in and around a Chippewa or Ojibwa reservation near the fictional
town of Argus, North Dakota. The lives of these characters will unfold further
in The Beet Queen,Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. Spanning
fifty years, from 1934 through 1984, the novel is told through the voices
of a series of vivid characters, mostly Chippewa men and women who are caught
up in the emotional tangle of their families' histories, but who struggle
to gain some control over their lives. Sometimes compared to Faulkner's
multinarrated family sagas, Love Medicine creates an intense vision
of a world that is at once violent and tender, ugly and lyrical, realistic
and gothic. At their best, the separate stories that make up the novel convey
the subtle pressures upon the souls of people who are culturally mixed--
of those whose lives are shaped by both Native American and non-Indian values,
habits, and customs. The novel begins at a family gathering following the
death of June Kashpaw, frozen to death in a snowstorm on Easter Sunday,
1981. Relatives exchange stories about June, piecing together the fragments
of memories that are the stuff of family histories. By storytelling and
recollection, Erdrich resurrects lives throughout the novel: the sensual
Lulu Lamartine, whose children have different fathers, but whose passionate
tie to her first love, Nector Kashpaw, intensifies over the years; Nector
Kashpaw, who recalls his first encounter with his future wife, Marie Lazarre,
and then unfolds the history of his obsession with Lulu. We also hear the
younger generation: the philosophical Lipsha Morrissey, June's abandoned
son, who makes a Chippewa love medicine to keep his grandparents together;
the Lamartine boys, the "lucky" one, Lyman, whose ambition is
to build a bingo palace, and the "unlucky" Henry, who returns
from three years in Vietnam a restless, tortured soul; and the ambitious
Albertine Johnson, studying Western medicine and living far away, off-reservation.
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1. The novel deals extensively with the love-hate relationships between family members. What are some of the different kinds of familial bonds, positive and negative? What themes are explored through these relationships? What does this novel suggest about the nature of families?
2. One theme of the novel is the unavoidable impact of the non-Indian world (for instance, Catholicism, alcohol, intermarriages, the Vietnam War, capitalism, the legal system) on the Chippewa. How does the interaction with outsiders affect specific characters? What does the novel suggest about the difficulties and consequences of dealing with a mixed world?
3. Why do you think Erdrich chose to write her novel in the way she did, using time leaps and a series of different narrators to recount their own tales? What do you think is gained by this form of narrative? How might the form's emphasis on individual storytelling relate to the novel's larger themes?
4. Why do you think the section "Love Medicine" was chosen as the title story of the novel? Would you have chosen another section on the basis of a strength or unifying theme?
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"Love Medicine is finally about the enduring verities of loving and surviving, and these truths are revealed in a narrative that is an invigorating mixture of the comic and the tragic.... Each word, each sentence seems perfectly placed to achieve her desired effect. "
—Marco Portales, The New York Times Book Review
