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The Antelope Wife: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Louise Erdrich
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $12.99 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 419058
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0060930071
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060930073
ASIN: 0060930071
Publication Date: April 1, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Amazon.com Review
As Louise Erdrich's magical novel The Antelope Wife opens, a cavalry soldier pursues a dog with an Ojibwa baby strapped to its back. For days he follows them through "the vast carcass of the world west of the Otter Tail River" until finally the dog allows him to approach and handle the child--a girl, not yet weaned, who latches onto his nipples until, miraculously, they begin to give milk. In another kind of novel, this might be a metaphor. But this is the fictional world of Louise Erdrich, where myth is woven deeply into the fabric of everyday life. A famous cake tastes of grief, joy, and the secret ingredient: fear. The tie that binds the antelope wife to her husband is, literally, the strip of sweetheart calico he used to yoke her hand to his. Legendary characters sew beads into colorful patterns, and these patterns become the design of the novel itself. The Antelope Wife centers on the Roys and the Shawanos, two closely related Ojibwa families living in modern-day Gakahbekong, or Minneapolis. Urban Indians of mixed blood, they are "scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together in new patterns, new strings," and Erdrich follows them through two failed marriages, a "kamikaze" wedding, and several tragic deaths. But the plot also loops and circles back, drawing in a 100-year-old murder, a burned Ojibwa village, a lost baby, several dead twins, and another baby nursed on father's milk. The familiar Erdrich themes are all here--love, family, history, and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations, stitching them into patterns as complex as beadwork. At least initially, this swirl of characters, narratives, time lines, and connections can take a little getting used to; several of the story lines do not match up until the book's conclusion. But in the end, Erdrich's lovely, lyrical language prevails, and the reader succumbs to the book's own dreamlike logic. As The Antelope Wife closes, Erdrich steps back to address readers directly for the first time, and the moment expands the book's elaborate patterns well beyond the confines of its pages. "Who is beading us?" she asks. "Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of the earth?... We stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the edge, and only catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string, and the woman's hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon." -- Mary Park, editor
Product Description
The Antelope Wife extends the branches of the families who populate Louise Erdrich's earlier novels, and once again, her unsentimental, unsparing writing captures the Native American sense of despair, magic, and humor. Rooted in myth and set in contemporary Minneapolis, this poetic and haunting story spans a century, at the center of which is a mysterious and graceful woman known as the Antelope Wife. Elusive, silent, and bearing a mystical link to nature, she embodies a complicated quest for love and survival that impacts lives in unpredictable ways. Her tale is an unpredictable ways. Her tale is an unforgettable tapestry of ancestry, fate, harrowing tragedy, and redemption, that seems at once modern and eternal.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Not Good September 10, 2008
The tale was too esoteric. It was very difficult to follow. I could only last one chapter then I was off to sleep!
 wonderful craftsmanship July 8, 2008
I loved how the plot and characters in this book were so intricately woven together. The book left me totally full with imagery and language, and looking forward to reading more of Erdrich's fiction. (I also loved The Blue Jay's Dance - a non-ficiton work)
 Oh, Deer Me October 10, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have admired Erdrich's writing in the past---"Tracks" and "The Beet Queen"--so I was looking forward to reading another of her novels. I must say I was disappointed here. Though Erdrich, like N. Scott Momaday, has a highly poetical style and her pages are filled with beautiful images (which is certainly a positive characteristic), a novel after all needs to have a strong story line or a point. Beautiful sentences and poetic expressions do not make a story, even if spiced with magical realism, sex, recipes, and colorful beads. As a literary testimony to a section of Native American experience, THE ANTELOPE WIFE has great merit. But as a novel, in the company of all the novels of the world, I felt that in this case, Erdrich tried to stretch out her career and write the next book though her heart was not in it. Perhaps it was a bad time in her life. The novel felt to me as one written by a person "trying to be literary". She writes of the mixed and intertwined fates of all those people of the Anishinabe world---Indians, whites, men, women, strong and weak---like beads on a string. The Indians come out holding the short stick. Within this framework, individuals play out their fates, violence and love intermingling with mystery and mundane existence. The characters somehow do not rise above their initial characterizations. The women are stronger than the men for the most part: they endure while the men often fall into alcohol and despair. The author writes in graceful style, but not much depth. I felt---at the risk of sounding snotty---that THE ANTELOPE WIFE belongs more in the category of `chick-lit' than in `American literature'. I once read part of a novel by Amy Tan, but could not finish for similar reasons. I did read THE ANTELOPE WIFE in its entirety, because Erdrich's writing differs favorably from most other authors', but I grew tired of the soap opera quality of this story.
 Broken Whiteheart May 14, 2005
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is only the second book by Ms. Erdrich that I have read and the first was a collaberation with Michael Dorris. For me, this book came off as very bizarre (a man breastfeeding a baby) and depressing (betrayal, loneliness and death). But the thin line between love and hate running through the book is compelling. And I enjoy how Louise writes in the POV or about particular characters. She did it in Crown of Columbus and she does it here. I find myself "becoming" her characters as I read each chapter. And the use of the Okijbwa language peaks my curiosity into the culture and lifestyle of these people. I can't rave about the novel because it was so unsettling. But I did enjoy it. She is a talented writer and I can't wait to read her other books.
The power of love April 30, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Lousie Erdrich's writing wraps the reader in intricate strands of symbolism, characters and shifting time and place. Stories are woven, questions are raised and as time passes answered. The strands begin to straighten out and make sense. Re-reading the book to get it all straight is a treat and a gift. I will gladly settle into Erdrich's writing over authors who leave no question marks or connections to ponder any day.The power, danger and wonder of intense love is but one of the journeys the reader will take in this book.
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