Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by L. Erdrich

[iGuest 3]

"The latest in Louise Erdrich's chronicles of the Chippewa (Ojibwe) and Michif people of central North Dakota, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is a beautiful, brilliant book that recapitulates the story of the Kashpaws and Nanapushs, the Morrisseys and Lamartines, while moving to center stage a minor character who becomes, by the book's end, central to the history of the place and people. Focussing on religion and how it touches the lives of the town of Little No Horse, Erdrich weaves new patterns into the fabric of her wonderfully imagined, magic tapestry.

The focus of the story is the priest, Father Damien Modeste, a minor figure in earlier books. In the first few pages, Erdrich reveals that the priest is a woman: Agnes Vogel née DeWitt, former Sister Cecilia of a convent in Wisconsin, widow of Berndt Vogel, lover of Chopin.

With that admixture of humor, sex, and magic that is the special flavor of Erdrich's fiction, she tells the story of the young nun who discovered music and played the piano so beautifully, so sensually, that it became a sin. With her characteristic mixture of magic realism and cartoon slapstick, Erdrich describes Cecilia's poor fellow nuns overcome with passion when they hear her Chopin. The Mother Superior bans her piano playing. Forbidden her music, she leaves the convent, carrying with her a lifelong sin: her utterly sensual love of the Polish composer.

Through a sequence of events too bizarre to summarize, she ends up married to a farmer, widowed in a bank robbery, nearly drowned in a flood and, when she finds the body of the original Father Damien, who was drowned himself on his way to Little No Horse (the main settlement on Erdrich's fictionalized Turtle Mountain reservation), deciding to masquerade as a man and replace the dead priest. So begins nearly a century of stewardship, Agnes' life as the beloved eccentric celebrator and confessor to the Catholic Indians and Métis people in her charge. "
Mick McAllister
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