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Four Souls: A Novel (P.S.) | 
 enlarge | Author: Louise Erdrich
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $0.01
You Save: $13.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 405388
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0060935227
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060935221
ASIN: 0060935227
Publication Date: July 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
After taking her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength, the strange, compelling Fleur Pillager walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She seeks restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and her intentions are complicated by her dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 A Joke on itself May 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
At the end of Louise Erdrich's Tracks, the fearsome, fetching, dangerously divine Fleur Pillager--a Chippewa earth mother so idolized by the author as to seem a form of creative self-caricature--finally walks away from her beloved patch of Dakota forest, abandoning it to the whim and destruction of white loggers and tribal sellouts. Erdrich's latest finds the indomitable Fleur trudging all the way to Minneapolis, where she hires on as a laundress in the home of a wealthy timber baron simply in order to take his life in revenge. Fortunately or not, however, Erdrich doesn't like her dishes served cold, and soon a bedroom farce breaks out amid the tragedy. Thus Four Souls juxtaposes the silly and the somber, the ribald and the elegiac. Nuance heeds the DO NOT DISTURB sign and generally stays away.
 A Great Story Told Well February 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Louise Erdrich is among my favorite authors. She weaves moving, human plots together with the intricacy of a well-told poem. Her landscapes make one gasp and her characters make one believe. So it is through this biased lens that I picked up Four Souls, read it, and also loved it.
Fleur Pillager walks to Minneapolis to kill John James Mauser. That's the premise, but along the way she devises a punishment worse than death. See Mauser stole her family's land and clear cut the prized trees, leaving her family as poor as destitute as the rest of the Ojibwe in Northern Minnesota. What's her plan? Nurse Mauser back to health from his poison-gas induced illness and get him to fall in love with her.
It's such an accomplished story told beautifully that I really can't add to it in a longer review without giving away more of its magic. Please, read this one, and Tracks the novel about Fleur Pillager that precedes it.
- CV Rick, February 2008
 The changing world of American Indians and a good story March 26, 2005
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Through the years I've read several books by Louise Erdrich. She's a good writer although sometimes I find her narrative to be a bit confusing. This is the case in her 2004 "Four Souls" in which she uses a character she's used in books before, an American Indian woman named Fleur Pillager.
The book had a good beginning. It's set in the Midwest in the 1920s. Fleur is out for revenge against the wealthy white man who had stolen the Indian's land. Her plans are to make him suffer, but she soon discovers that he is very ill. She becomes a laundress in his household and manages to cure him with the intent of making him suffer later. Things don't work out exactly as she planned though and, as the story unfolds, she becomes hard to understand.
There are several narrators. One is Polly Gheen, the gently-raised spinster sister-in-law of the wealthy man. I loved her voice and the way she tells her story. Another narrator is Nanapush, an aging Indian man who is still on the reservation. I suspect he had appeared in other books about Fleur and one of the problems of "Four Souls" is that the back-story isn't clear. But Nanapush sure is clear. He's both comical and wise and managed to make me laugh out loud. He and his wife Margaret are always fighting but he loves her tremendously with a passion not usually aspired to elderly people. He commits some very foolhardy acts to show that love and this is where the book seems to turn into a farce. Margaret is a narrator too and it's nice to get her point of view as the story unfolds.
The book is short, a mere 201 pages and an easy read. I enjoyed being thrust into the contrasting worlds of the both the rich people and the American Indians. Some of the central characters needed more development though, especially Fleur. After the first chapter, she appears in the story but always through someone else's eyes. And, after I finished the book, I was left to wonder about some of the details. I suspect this is because this novel is actually a sequel. Therefore I always felt I was missing something.
In spite of its faults though, I did enjoy Four Souls. But I would suggest you read some of her earlier books in order to enjoy it more.
Yet another stellar novel from Louise Erdrich August 30, 2004
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
I've read most of the author's works and while I would not say this is my favorite, I have to say that she has matured so much as an author over the years that this is a must read book. I particularly like how she shares imagery and concepts in this book without feeling the need to explain them to the non-Anishinaabe audience, and potentially interrupting the poetry of the work itself. - It was amazing how she brought back to mind things I knew and had forgotten, simply through the force of her writing. The greatest impact for me was the effect the book had even 4 days later - the themes of this book are both universal and incredible. Thank you for such an outstanding book!
A Star Made From Love July 25, 2004
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
From Fleur's amazing journey into and out of the whiteman's world, to the creation of a dress solely from nature's materials contrasted with the building of a house with materials obtained through greed, destruction and death, to the quest to find a name for a son's spirit: this book is radiant.
It is a relatively short book, but it is full of the range of human emotions including the humor of love.
Nanapush, the tribal leader yet also foolish husband,carefully painstakingly carves a star out of an old bean can in an attempt to hide from his wife, Margaret, a trail of errors. He tells her the star fell from the skies, through the roof and floor.
"From outside, the sun, striking sudden from behind a cloud, then threw a fierce shaft of light in our direction. It slanted through the window and picked out the star in Margaret's hands. Marveling at it, she bent to examine it with a close eye. I smiled to see her, but the smile dropped off my face when with a huge gasp she squinted even closer and then slowly, slowly, with a dangerously changed expression held her miraculous find out to me.
"Put on your spectacles, old liar",she said in a sofly changed voice.
Immediately, I hooked them around my ears and in the burst of radiance I saw the raised letters I had missed in the tin, now the center of the star, which had marked the bottom of the can. Red Jacket Beans.............................
I saw something building in her, something gathering, a storm , and my heart sank down into my feet. But when it came, it was not the bitter scorching, not the fire I feared. It was not the horror of sarcasm. Not the scrape of reproach. Margaret did something she had never done before in response to one of my idiot transgressions. Margaret laughed."
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