Tales of Burning Love - Softcover

Louise Erdrich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006547915 ISBN 13: 9780006547914

Publisher: Flamingo, 1997

Synopsis

An epic study in the varieties of love from one of America's greatest story-weavers, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2012.`Falling back in love with your first wife while married to your fifth was a sticky, stupid business.'Jack Mause simply feels too much. A builder sparring with bankruptcy, he finds that the women in his life accuse him of being emotionally barren, too. Yet this is a man who makes love in a convent, frightens a nun right to death and lets the pretty young stranger he has just married walk off alone into a blizzard. Jack has a very rich history. And he has a secret: his marriages crack on what he conceals.His women swirl about in his wake, disoriented, stormy and changed. They are becalmed by the realization that they each married a different Jack Mauser, contrived a different history. Marooned, frozen, in a snow-bound car, and in order to survive, Jack's wifes find themselves telling each other a last of the secret history each shares with him - stories that revive, warming tales of burning love.

About this title

From the Publisher

In Tales of Burning Love, celebrated novelist Louise Erdrich extends the boundaries of her literary vision with an audacious and penetrating look at the interconnected lives and love of five memorable women. For the first time centering her fiction outside the perimeters of the North Dakota reservation she long ago claimed as her singular terrain, Erdrich here creates an entertaining, seductive novel that probes the volatile power of women's love in its many variations.

Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passion for women never survives the long haul. His first wife, June Kashpaw, dies in a snow bank just hours after their barroom wedding. The second, Eleanor, the clever, neurotic daughter of a circus acrobat and a funeral director, holds onto an unquenchable obsession for her erstwhile husband. Candice is a dentist whose tough business-like veneer hides her vulnerability and hate. The hardened, often unkind Marlis, a lounge singer, bears Jack's only child. And the current wife, Dot, guileless in her devotion, has married despite already having one husband in the state penitentiary.

These "tales of burning love," recounted with hindsight and irony, evince Jack's unconventional power to beguile and show how he was in many ways a different man with each wife. But even more, the women's narratives begin to reveal things about them that they have long kept private. As each opens her heart, she discovers and shares the secrets that sustain her love. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and at times often comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds the women together -- in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

From the Back Cover

Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passions never survive the long haul. Now, stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, they have come face-to-face—and each has an astonishing story to tell. Huddling for warmth, they pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry, and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and oftentimes comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together—in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

With her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, Louise Erdrich brings these women's unforgettable tales to life in a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0006547915
• ISBN 13: 9780006547914
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464