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There is no revenge like success, as the saying goes, and Fleur Pillager is out
for both. She adopts her mother's name, Four Souls, and sets foot on a mission
to seek restitution from the robber baron who has stripped bare the Minnesota
forests her Ojibwe ancestors called home.
As the scheme to avenge her family unfolds, Fleur proves to be no ordinary
woman. She is so complex, in fact, that it takes several narrators to tell her
story, a device that makes FOUR SOULS a fascinating and enigmatic tale of the
myths, sorrows and passions of a vanishing civilization.
There is old Nanapush, tribal elder, who observes as Fleur launches her private
incursion against the ailing World War I veteran, John James Mauser, lumber baron
and social scion of Minneapolis society. Polly Elizabeth, Mr. Mauser's sister-in-law,
who runs the household, hires Fleur as a housemaid and laundress. She seems efficient
and is seemingly everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Little does Polly Elizabeth
know how Fleur will change the lives of all within the walls of the Mauser mansion.
Fleur discovers that her nemesis is far too ill to thoroughly appreciate his
demise at her hand, so she sets out to cure him of odd maladies from World War
I wounds. Her tender mercies lead instead to marriage to Mauser, and as Polly
Elizabeth says, "Nothing in the look of her and the ignorant silence told me she
could possibly end up connected to me." Nor could Polly Elizabeth or John James
Mauser ever imagine where that connection would lead.
FOUR SOULS evolves slowly and as magically as the mists on a summer morning
pond. Louise Erdrich, who wrote the bestseller TRACKS, which is a precursor to
FOUR SOULS, seems to know the minds, voices and ways of the Ojibwe Indians. The
shift in narrative voice is sometimes confusing as the transitions are not always
obvious, but clarity is restored as you fall into the cadence of the various characters.
All are well defined and drawn, and FOUR SOULS haunts you with its aura of irony
and fulfillment --- fulfillment that doesn't always come in the manner in which
it is sought.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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