A review by arielamandah
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

5.0

Loving this book (p 169).

Erdich's prose is deft and careful - when trying to think of a way to describe her writing, a short passge from Erdrich's description of Sister Mary Anita comes to mind:

When she swept the air in a geature meant to include all of us in her opening remarks, her hands fixed our gazes. They were the opposite of her face. Her hands were beautiful, white as milk glass, th efingers straight and tapered. They were the hands in the hallway print, of Mary underneath the cross. They were the hands of the apostles, cast in plastic and lit at night on the tops of television sets. Praying hands.

Delicate. Sculpted.

This is the type of book I feel I should read more than once. It's cyclical. Referential. Just flipping back to find a passage or two, and reading what came before, makes me want to stop and start over. Dive back into what I didn't have context for then, and do now (169 pages later).

A passage from early on about salamanders:

The next morning, I got up before Joseph and found that th esalamander had revived and tried to crawl away, unraveling the piece of entrails that Joseph had pinned into the soft wood of the dresser. The trail of its insides stretched to the windowsill, where it had maanged to die with its nose pressed against the screen. That day, at the funeral, Joseph buried the dissection kit beside the salamander. He sigher a lot as we covered the plump little graying body, but he did not speak and neither did I. It was months before he dug up the dissection kid, and a year might have passed before he used it on something else.

Finished with the book.

Beautiful, stunning, complex, touching. Great contemporary literature.

Was surprised to realize, as I neared the end of the book that I recognized a chapter from a New Yorker story I'd read a few years back. It was almost a de ja vu experience, "I swear I've been here before..."