The Master Butcher's Singing Club ***1/2

By Louise Erdrich.
Published by Harper Perennial.
Originally published in Hardcover  in 2003 by Harper Collins Publishers.
This edition published 2005.
388 pages.

This is one of those books that are very popular with book clubs.  I usually try to stay away from those books, but I had to read this for a book club.  It's not that the typical book read for book clubs is bad.  Usually they are quite good. To have a good book discussion, a book that has some depth is necessary. And this is certainly an example of a typical book club book.  It is very good with lots of things to discuss.  It's just that when I talk to people about books, the same books keep coming up in conversation.  It seems to me that people don't take chances or look for anything different that might be out there, so I avoid those books.  Probably because of my desire to be cooler than thou. I want to be able to say, "Oh yeah, Everyone has read that! I haven't, but  you should really check out this alternative and different book instead."  (I don't mean alternative in the most recent sense of the word (ie. alternative music).  So sure, perhaps I am arrogant and elitist, but I also have the soul of a teacher and I want people to wake up and realize there are options out there.  That you don't have to read what everyone else reads.

Luckily, I am forced to read certain books that I would not necessarily read on my own through the book clubs.  And many book club selections are excellent, so I am able to keep relatively current with what's popular.  And this is one of those excellent books.

In fact it's a near masterpiece.  The characters are well developed, the narrative is excellent and organized in an interesting manner (It keeps shifting from one character to another right when the reader is eager to find out what will happened next). The prose is poetic and descriptive and beautiful.

Perhaps there are personal reasons that I liked it so much too, or better said, perhaps my personal tastes have a lot to do with why I liked is so much.  It's dark!  Very, very dark!  Yet there is always hope.  The characters seem almost superhuman in their ability to survive their hard scrabbled lives. They are heroic and inspiring.   It is set in the time period between the two great wars, so that makes this book historical fiction - one of my favorite genres.  It takes place in small town North Dakota.  A place that has unbearable heat in the summer and vicious cold in the winter with nothing to protect the citizen because of the flat treeless land.  So it's a gritty book, another characteristic that appeals to me.

I have some issues with this book but I am not necessarily sure that they are really issues or if they add actually add to the feel and tone of the book.   At almost 400 pages, it seemed at time that the plot moved a bit on the slow side.  Masterful as the authors descriptions were, I  at times had the feeling of wanting to get on with it.  And I am a patient reader.  It took forever for the butchers wife to die, for the butcher to finally declare his intentions for the heroin, fir the characters to clean out the filthy house that the town drunk lived in etc.  But this might be appropriate since small town living in the first half of the 20th century must have been very slow paced.  And it's our fast paced lives that make us impatient.

Also, I felt that Erdrich developed the woman characters better than the men characters.  It's not surprising seeing as Erdrich is a woman author and knows more about women which would make her more invested in the woman characters. The men are outside drinking beer or participating in the singing club,.  The women are inside cleaning and caring and taking care of the house.  The butcher is dark, silent and kind of mysterious.   The main character, Delphine becomes close friends with the wife.  We seem to learn much more about the female characters - even the minor ones. It's a pattern I see in much historical fiction.  In many cultures and in the past, women and men led very separate lives.  The men were outside and the woman remained inside.  Modern times have changed this dynamic quite a bit (for the better I believe).  So maybe these less developed characters are appropriate for the time and place considering the story is mostly from the point of view of a female.

I usually get to the plot way before now.  The two main characters, the butcher, Fidelis, and the traveling vaudeville girl, Delphine, start out in separate places.  Fidelis is from Germany and immigrates to the U.S. after the 1st Great War with nothing more than his butchering tools and a case full of German sausages which he sells to make money to cross the country until he arrives in Argus, North Dakota.  Meanwhile, Delphine is out traveling doing a Vaudeville show with a sexually confused acrobat who loves her, but more like a sister.  They come back to Delphine's hometown where they meet her drunken father, who lives in a filthy house and may have accidentally left a family in the cellar to die while he was out on a drunken binge.  Delphine gets a job with the butcher and meets and befriends his wife.  The rest of the story is pretty much the story of the two families and all that has happened to them up to and after the Second World War.e money

The author happens to be part native American, French and German.  She apparently writes quite frequently about Native American, particularly the Ojibwa tribe, which is where her roots are from.  I had always been on the look out for writers that write about the Native American Experience.  I think I might have found one and I hope to pursue more of his books.