Tales of Burning Love - Hardcover

Erdrich, Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060176059 ISBN 13: 9780060176051

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1996

Synopsis

Stranded together by snow just outside of Fargo, North Dakota, five women--all former wives of Jack Mauser--relate the stories of their lives, their dreams, their vulnerabilities, their passions, and their feelings for Jack and for one another

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: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0060176059
• ISBN 13: 9780060176051
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464