Critical+Reception+&+Assessment

__ **Critical Reception** __ "A writer of truly extraordinary gifts--imaginative power, acute sensitivity, and unpretentious stylistic grace. At 34, she is completing a cycle of work already marked as a classic." --//San Francisco Chronicle//

"Fleur Pillager [is] one of the most haunting presences in contemporary American literature...//Tracks// may be the story of our time." --//The Guardian//

"It is difficult to pinpoint what is most compelling about Louise Erdrich's fiction--the elegance of the language, her art as a story teller or the authenticity of her Native American characters... A triumph on all counts, haunting and memorable." --//Phoenix Republic//

"Erdrich may soon come to be recognized as a writer possessed of greatness...[She] has invented in Nanapush a witness to the twentieth century whose authenticity seems unassailable. The tales he tells are like shadows of real stories which we can no longer hear. Simultaneously reticent and garrulous, stark and wry, boisterous and utterly sad, he is a creation of the hights imaginative caliber." --//Times Literary Supplement//

"The charm of Louise Erdrich's narrative lies in the mystery and exaggeration that imbue all legends and folk tales." --//Philadelphia Inquirer//

"Lapidary, poetic prose...dazzling storytelling powers...powerful scenes of dreamlike intensity." --//New York Times//

"//Tracks// is an austerely beautiful novel, another example of Erdrich's ability to evoke both the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of her Indian heritage." --//Cleveland Plain Dealer//

"Louise Erdrich's gift for vivid descriptive writing is everywhere in evidence, and many of the episodes are almost blinding in their hallucinatory brilliance." --//New York Review of Books//

"It is art of the highest order to recreate a world and its people with such fidelity and power that they become part of the common memory. That is the gift of this remarkable novel and of Louise Erdrich." --//Detroit Free Press//

__ **Critical Assessment** __ “Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich's //Tracks//” Jennifer Sergi //World Literature Today //Vol. 66, No. 2, From This World: Contemporary American Indian Literature (Spring, 1992), pp. 279-282 Published by: __ [|University of Oklahoma] __

“Without stories there is no articulation of experience: people would be unable to understand and celebrate the experiences of self, community, and world. And so cultures value the tellers of stories. The storyteller takes what he or she tells from experience—his or her own or that reported by others—and in turn makes it the experiences of those who are listening to the tale (WB, 87). The storyteller relies on memory (his or hers and his or her listener’s) and creates a chain of tradition that passes on a happening from generation to generation. Louise Erdrich is just such a storyteller.”

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks Nancy J. Peterson //PMLA //Vol. 109, No. 5 (Oct., 1994), pp. 982-994 Published by: [|Modern Language Association] Article Stable URL: []

“In a 1986 review of Louise Erdrich’s second novel, //The Beet Queen//, Leslie Marmon Silko argues that Erdrich is more interested in the dazzling language and self-referentiality associated with postmodernism than in representing Native American oral traditions, communal experiences, or history…Erdrich’s novel //Tracks,// published in 1988, almost seems to answer Silko’s criticisms of //The Beet Queen// by overtly engaging political and historical issues.”



Searching for Evidence of Colonialism at Work: A Reading of Louise Erdrich's "Tracks" Gloria Bird //Wicazo Sa Review //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Vol. 8, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 40-47 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Published by: [|University of Minnesota Press] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Article Stable URL: []

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">“In reading Native American literature in a so-called post-colonial context, I find it good for perspective to remember that I am working within a system of //relationships// between the colonizer and the colonized…In the novel Tracks by Louise Erdrich, the conflict of identity and Indian-white relations is manifested in the characters of her novel.”

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Catholic Nuns and Ojibwa Shamans: Pauline and Fleur in Louise Erdrich's "Tracks" <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Michelle R. Hessler //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Wicazo Sa Review //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 40-45 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Published by: [|University of Minnesota Press] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Article Stable URL: [] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">“One of the central themes in Louise Erdrich’s works is the role of religious and spiritual beliefs in shaping one’s identity…”

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Identity Politics, Syncretism, Catholicism, and Anishinabe Religion in Louise Erdrich's "Tracks" <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Susan Stanford Friedman //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Religion & Literature //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Vol. 26, No. 1, Dancing at the Altar: American Indian Literature and Spirituality (Spring, 1994), pp. 107-133 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Published by: [|The University of Notre Dame] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Article Stable URL: []

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">“Highlighting the importance of spirituality in many Native American cultures and literatures, Tracks can be read as a religious parable open to two seemingly contradictory readings: first, as a promotions of Anishinabe spirituality; and second, as an exploration of religious syncretism.”

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 * Tracks Main Page**