The Painted Drum: A Novel - Hardcover

Erdrich, Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060515104 ISBN 13: 9780060515102

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2005

Synopsis

“Haunted and haunting. . . . With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see—to the dead alive and busy, to the breath of trees and the souls of wolves—and inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well.”— Washington Post Book World

From the author of the National Book Award Winner The Round House, Louise Erdrich's breathtaking, lyrical novel of a priceless Ojibwe artifact and the effect it has had on those who have come into contact with it over the years.

While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.

Compelling and unforgettable, Louise Erdrich's Painted Drum explores the often-fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, the strength of family, and the intricate rhythms of grief with all the grace, wit, and startling beauty that characterizes this acclaimed author's finest work.

About this title

About the Author

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

From the Back Cover

When a woman named Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn't surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. After all, the family descends from an Indian agent who worked on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that is home to her mother's family. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds in the collection a rare drum -- a powerful yet delicate object, made from a massive moose skin stretched across a hollow of cedar, ornamented with symbols she doesn't recognize and dressed in red tassels and a beaded belt and skirt -- especially since, withouttouching the instrument, she hears it sound.

From Faye's discovery, we trace the drum's passage both backward and forward in time, from the reservation on the northern plains to New Hampshire and back. Through the voice of Bernard Shaawano, an Ojibwe, we hear how his grandfather fashioned the drum after years of mourning his young daughter's death, and how it changes the lives of those whose paths its crosses. And through Faye we hear of her anguished relationship with a local sculptor, who himself mourns the loss of a daughter, and of the life she has made alone with her mother, in the shadow of the death of Faye's sister.

Through these compelling voices, The Painted Drum explores the strange power that lost children exert on the memories of those theyleave behind, and as the novel unfolds, its elegantly crafted narrative comes to embody the intricate, transformative rhythms of human grief. One finds throughout the grace and wit, the captivating prose and surprising beauty, that characterize Louise Erdrich's finest work.

Reviews

Not her best, not her worst, say critics of Erdrich’s 10th novel. Yet though it’s leaner than works like The Master Butchers Singing Club and not as brilliant as others, it’s pure Erdrich, full of grace, legend, and mysticism. Here, she weaves together three stories, each about mother-child relationships, over time and place. Critics agree that Ojibwe elder Bernard Shaawano’s story is the strongest and most memorable; Erdrich renders reservation life impeccably. Faye’s story, by contrast, is a little too sentimental; as a character, she is more "dull-plumaged" than interesting (Houston Chronicle). Still, the novel possesses a charming, mystical power, and the story resounds. Despite the serious, ominous tone of the novel, it’s actually a tale of redemption—even joy.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Haunted and haunting, Louise Erdrich's 10th novel navigates smoothly back and forth across the border that separates the living from the dead. Beginning in 1984 with her first novel, Love Medicine, and continuing through many volumes that developed the histories and fates of recurring characters, she has frequently described the ghostly tug of the dead on the people they leave behind. But never more explicitly than in this new book has she made so fluid a connection between the two worlds.

Once again employing the technique of alternating voices that worked so successfully in her previous novels, Erdrich tells three intertwined stories in The Painted Drum from the perspectives of several characters. Faye Travers, the introductory narrator, lives with her mother in a small New Hampshire town where the two women have developed a successful business. Dealing unsentimentally in "the stuff of life, or more precisely, the afterlife of stuff," Faye and her mother organize and sell dead people's valuables, with a specialty in Native American artifacts. Like Erdrich's, Faye's ancestry is part European and part Ojibwe, or Chippewa, and when she inspects the estate of a recently deceased neighbor whose grandfather was an Indian agent at the reservation in North Dakota where Faye's own grandmother was born, she discovers an object that seems to throb with spiritual energy.

It's a painted drum, huge and lavishly embellished and so dazzling that Faye, despite being thoroughly assimilated and unemotional about her heritage, is compelled to steal it. Drums, she later learns, are considered by the Ojibwe to be living things, "made for serious reasons by people who dream the details of their construction." Drums have the power to cure or kill, and they speak to one another. They must be offered food and tobacco and should never be placed on the ground or left alone. The drum that Faye steals, moreover, is a conduit between the living and the spirit world -- particularly, for special reasons, the spirits of little girls.

One of those girls is Faye's younger sister, who died in childhood by stepping defiantly off the high branch of an apple tree. Faye had stopped dreaming of her sister years ago, but now, with the appearance of the drum, the dreams begin again: In nightly visions her sister appears in a parallel life, complete with piano lessons and a new husband, "a dark man walking at a distance." It is those visions, perhaps, that encourage Faye to return the drum to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation where its life began, and where the drum's history is related by the novel's second narrator, Bernard Shaawano, a technician at the reservation hospital.

Erdrich shifts the narrative backward in time, exchanging Faye's pragmatic, contemporary voice for the elliptical legend-spinning that distinguishes her best fiction. Bernard's story of his grandparents contains some familiar Erdrich themes (infidelity, revenge, guilt) and characters, most notably Fleur Pillager, who has been a major presence in no fewer than four of Erdrich's previous novels. Here, Bernard's grandmother Anaquot cheats on her husband with another man, bears his baby -- Fleur -- and takes off with Fleur and an older daughter to live with her new love. Along the way, when starving wolves threaten to overtake Anaquot's wagon, her older daughter is pushed -- or quite possibly throws herself -- into the mob of ravening animals. Later, the girl's bones are found by Anaquot's grieving husband, whose name is Old Shaawano. He uses his daughter's bones to make the painted drum, following the instructions of the wolf girl, who visits him while he's sleeping.

Two generations later, as chronicled in the novel's hair-raising final section, three young children left alone in a freezing house outside the reservation hear the drum's music as they struggle to save themselves from starvation and hypothermia.

Resourceful and assiduous, Erdrich's dead are above all caretakers. Among the loveliest images in the book are those of apparitions who appear in dreams, always to guide and instruct, never to torment. During the period when Old Shaawano is building the drum, at night on the borderland between consciousness and sleep, he senses his ancestors around him, hears "murmuring and low arguments, tinkling bells and footsteps . . . . He felt secure as a child snuggled up in the corner of the cabin while the grown-ups talk low and laugh around the stove."

If the dead are instrumental in nurturing the living, the natural world is immersed in its own cycle of ruin and repair. "What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath," observes Faye in the woods near her house. "A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it." In the same way, she learns, the howl of the wolf "is the music of all the broken and hunted creatures who survive and persist and will not be eliminated. For there they are, along with the ravens, destroyed and returned." With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see -- to the dead alive and busy, to the breath of trees and the souls of wolves -- and inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. Though Erdrich's latest lyrical novel returns to Ojibwe territory (Four Souls; Love Medicine, etc.), it departs from the concentrated vigor of her best work in its breadth of storytelling. Erdrich essays the grief that comes when the sins of parents become mortal for their children. Native American antiquities specialist Faye Travers, bereaved of her sister and father, ambivalently in love with a sculptor who has lost his wife and loses his daughter, stumbles onto a ceremonial drum when she handles the estate of John Jewett Tatro, whose grandfather was an agent at the Ojibwe reservation. Under its spell, she secrets it away and eventually repatriates it to that reservation on the northern plains—the home of her grandmother. The drum is revived, as are those around it. Gracefully weaving many threads, Erdrich details the multigenerational history surrounding the drum. Despite her elegant story and luminous prose, many of the characters feel sketchy compared to Erdrich's previous titans, and several redemptions seem too pat. But even at low voltage, Erdrich crafts a provocative read elevated by beautiful imagery, as when children near death fly off like skeletal ravens. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Erdrich's nine-volume cycle of novels revolving around an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota has always carried within it a deep faith in the sacredness of the world and of the stories we tell one another. Her fiction looks fearlessly at the harshest experiences and finds within them both mystery and meaning. In her latest, former drug addict Faye Travers is an estate appraiser living in a small New Hampshire town. Faye, a thoroughly modern woman, has always regarded the Native American part of her background with a certain wariness. But her reserve crumbles when, upon being called to sell the possessions of the descendants of an Indian reservation agent, she finds a rare and valuable drum. She impulsively takes it home, where it wakes her at night with its haunting sounds. She tracks it back to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, discovering how it was bartered away for alcohol. The drum was originally made by a grieving father in tribute to his young daughter, who was eaten by wolves. Once the drum is given back to its rightful owner, it plays a crucial role in guiding three young children, left alone in a freezing house with no food, to safety. It also serves to connect Faye to her heritage and to her deepest emotions. All of the voices that weave in and out of this narrative are, by turns, mournful and funny, rueful and proud, and always, even within the bleakest of circumstances, full of hope. If, for Erdrich, the reservation is the place of original sin, it is also the place of final redemption. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Painted Drum

A NovelBy Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright ©2005 Louise Erdrich
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060515104

Chapter One

Revival Road

Faye Travers

Leaving the child cemetery with its plain hand-lettered sign and stones carved into the weathered shapes of lambs and angels, I am lost in my thoughts and pause too long where the cemetery road meets the two-lane highway. This distraction seems partly age, but there is more too, I think. These days I consider and reconsider the slightest of choices, as if one might bring me happiness and the other despair. There is no right way. No true path. The more familiar the road, the easier I'm lost. Left and the highway snakes north, to our famous college town; but I turn right and am bound toward the poor and historical New England village of Stiles and Stokes with its great tender maples, its old radiating roads, a stern white belfry and utilitarian gas pump/grocery. Soon after the highway divides off. Uphill and left, a broad and well-kept piece of paving leads, as the trunk of a tree splits and diminishes, to ever narrower outgrowths of Revival Road. This is where we live, my mother and I, just where the road begins to tangle.

From the air, our road must look like a ball of rope flung down haphazardly, a thing of inscrutable loops and half-finished question marks. But there is order in it to reward the patient watcher. In the beginning, the road is paved, although the material is of a grade inferior to the main highway's asphalt. When the town votes swing toward committing more money to road upkeep, it is coated with light gravel. Over the course of a summer's heat, the bits of stone are pressed into the softened tar, making a smooth surface for the cars to pick up speed. By midwinter, the frost creeps beneath the road and flexes, creating heaves that force the cars to slow again. I'm glad when that happens, for children walk this road to the bus stop below. They walk past with their dogs, wearing puffy jackets of saturated brilliance -- hot pink, hot yellow, hot blue. They change shape and grow before my eyes, becoming the young drivers of fast cars who barely miss the smaller children, who, in their turn, grow up and drive away from here.

As I say, there is order, but the pattern is continually complicated by the wilds of occurrence. The story surfaces here, snarls there, as people live their disorder to its completion. My mother, Elsie, and I try to tack life down with observation. But if it takes a lifetime to see things clearly, and a lifetime beyond, even, perhaps only the religious dead have a true picture of our road. It is, after all, named for the flat field at its southern end that once hosted a yearly revival meeting. Those sweeping conversions resulted in the establishment of at least one or two churches that now seem before their time in charismatic zeal. Over the years they merged with newer denominations, but left their dead sharing earth with Universalists and Quakers and even utter nonbelievers. As for the living, we're trapped in scene after scene. We haven't the overview that the dead have attained. Still, I try to at least record connections. I try to find my way through our daily quarrels, surprises, and small events here on this road.

We were home doing pleasant domestic chores on a frozen Sunday in the dead of winter when there was a frantic beating at our door. In alarm, Elsie called me. I came rushing from the basement laundry to see a young man standing behind the glass of the back storm door, jacketless and shivering. I saw that he'd lost a finger from the hand he raised, and knew him as the Eyke boy, now grown, years past fooling with his father's chain saw. But not his father's new credit-bought car. Davan Eyke had sneaked his father's new automobile out for an illicit spin and lost control coming down off the hill beside our house. The car slid toward a steep gully lined with birch. By lucky chance, it came to rest pinned precisely between two trunks. The white birch trees now held the expensive and unpaid-for white car in a perfect vise. Not one dent. Not one silvery scratch. Not yet. It was Davan's hope that if I hooked a chain to my Subaru and backed up the hill I would be able to pull his car gently free.

My chain snapped, and the efforts of others only made things worse over the course of the afternoon. At the bottom of the road a collection of cars, trucks, equipment, and people gathered. As the car was unwedged, as it was rocked, yanked, pushed, and let go, as different ideas were tried and discarded, as the newness of the machine wore off, Davan saw his plan was lost and he began to despair. With empty eyes, he watched a dump truck winch his father's vehicle half free, then slam it flat on its side and drag it shrieking up a lick of gravel that the town road agent had laid down for traction. Over the years our town, famous for the softness and drama of its natural light, has drawn to itself artists from the large cities of the eastern seaboard. They have usually had some success in the marketplace, and can now afford the luxury of becoming reclusive. Since New Hampshire does not tax income, preferring a thousand other less effective ways to raise revenue, wealthy artists find themselves wealthier, albeit slightly bored. Depending on their surroundings for at least some company, they are forced to rely on those such as myself -- a former user of street drugs cured by hepatitis, a clothing store manager fired for lack of interest in clothes, a semi-educated art lover, writer of endless journals and tentative poetry, and, lastly, a partner in the estates business my mother started more than fifty years ago.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Painted Drumby Louise Erdrich Copyright ©2005 by Louise Erdrich. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060515104
• ISBN 13: 9780060515102
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288