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The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
by: Louise Erdrich

Used Price: $13.98
Collectible Price: $29.95
Third Party New Price: $368.27

Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 637
Publication Date: September 30, 2001
Sales Rank: 1672770

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Compelled to his task by a direct mystical experience, Father Damien has made enormous sacrifices, and experienced the joys of commitment as well as deep suffering. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. He imagines the undoing of all that he has accomplished -- sees unions unsundered, baptisms nullified, those who confessed to him once again unforgiven. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Sister Leopolda's piety, but these facts are bound up in his own secret. In relating his history and that of Leopolda, whose wonder working is documented but inspired, he believes, by a capacity for evil rather than the love of good, Father Damien is forced to choose: Should he reveal all he knows and risk everything? Or should he manufacture a protective history? In spinning out the tale of his life, Father Damien in fact does both. His story encompasses his life as a young woman, her passions, and the pestilence, tribal hatreds, and sorrows passed from generation to generation of Ojibwe. From the fantastic truth of Father Damien's origin as a woman to the hilarious account of the absurd demise of Nanapush, his best friend on the reservation, his story ranges over the span of the century. In a masterwork that both deepens and enlarges the world of her previousnovels set on the same reservation, Louise Erdrich captures the essence of a time and the spirit of a woman who felt compelled by her beliefs to serve her people as a priest. 'The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse' is a work of an avid heart, a writer's writer, and a storytelling genius.

Amazon.com Review:
Over the course of 13 years and five novels, Louise Erdrich has staked out a richly imagined corner of North Dakota soil--her own Yoknapatawpha, where every character is connected to every other and nothing can be said to happen for the first time. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is no exception. The report in question comes from Father Damien Modeste, who has served the Ojibwe through a century of famine, epidemics, murders, and feuds. But the good priest is not what he appears. The prologue ends with the curiously beautiful image of the old man slowly removing heavy robes, undergarments, and, at last, a bandage wound tightly around women's breasts: 'small, withered, modest as folded flowers.'

How--and why--could such a deception last so long? That's the first mystery. The second begins when Father Jude Miller (a name familiar to readers of The Beet Queen) arrives to investigate the life of Sister Leopolda (or Pauline Puyat, another familiar name). Was Leopolda a saint? Or its opposite, whatever that is? Miracles, after all, are a part of the reservation's everyday life; for every nun's stigmata there's a secular wonder like the death of Nanapush. Indeed, the chapter detailing this old trickster's demise is the kind of earthy, tragicomic fable Erdrich does to perfection, including as it does an extended trial by moose, death by flatulence, and not one but two lustful resurrections.

Erdrich's writing is at its best when she chronicles the bittersweet humor of reservation life. It's at its worst, sadly, when she cranks up the fog machine and goes for the violins. ('He had the odd sensation that petals drifted in the air between them, petals of a fragrant and papery citrus velvet,' she tells us, telegraphing Father Jude's attraction to a woman.) But at least the book's sins are sins of ambition--this is a novelist who revisits the same territory because the capaciousness of her vision demands it. Readers may forgive Erdrich's vagueness about Father Damien's religious calling, but they will never forget her images, as lovely and surprising as figures glimpsed in a dream: the devil in the shape of a black dog, his paw in a bowl of soup; freshly planted pansies, nodding at the priests' feet 'like the faces of spoiled babies'; a woman in a billowing white nightdress riding a grand piano through the 'gray soup' of a flood. Moments like these are small miracles of their own. --Mary Park

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A Perfect Book
Last Report falls in the category of books for me that I would term 'perfect.' The characters are richly drawn, the writing is deft and lyrical, and the storyline itself is an amazing journey. Erdrich has proven herself again and again as an accomplished writer. This is the book (imho) that puts her solidly in the 'literature' category. She explores many of her favorite issues of faith, spirituality, doubt, regret and redemption. This is a book that resonated deep in my mind (dare I say soul?) with scenes that have revisited me long after I finished reading it. Beautiful, disturbing, at times funny, haunting. In short, a perfect book.

Rating:

- A delicate situation
This is the most marvelous story of a woman who felt she was needed as a man rather than as a man, so she became a Roman Catholic priest and missionary to a group of Ojibwehs (Native Americans) in northern Minnesota and North Dakota and in southern Manitoba. Curiously enough, most of the people she served knew she was a female who had a secret and compelling reason be their priest, and she was accepted by them as the priest she thought she had become.
Louise Erdich created a most unusual life with this book, one I will want to read several times.

Rating:

- ho hum
Unbelievable story with very effective, if often disturbing, imagery. Very choppy. Quite dark.

I would only recommend this if you really had lots of time on your hands and nothing better to do.

Rating:

- One of the best books I have ever read
I just picked this book up recently and was instantly drawn into the storyline. I could not stop reading it. I will not go on and on, I just want to say that I think it would make a fantastic movie - I think Louise is an excellent author (never read anything of hers before) and I was sad to see the book come to an end! Great reading! :-)

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