The Master Butchers Singing Club

Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's Ojibwa-German heritage lends an autobiographical flavor to the post-WWI saga of Fidelis Waldvogel (faithful forest bird). Fidelis, patterned after her grandfather, is a butcher with a beautiful singing voice. Erdrich narrates with expressive intimacy, bringing authenticity to the exceptional people who populate Argus, North Dakota. After Fidelis, with wife Eva, sets up a butcher shop and founds his cherished singing club, Eva meets and befriends Delphine Watzka. Delphine has returned to Argus to nurse her ailing alcoholic father. She had left years before and became a "human table" for a circus balancing act. It is Delphine and Eva's friendship that forms the beating heart of the novel. A master storyteller, Erdrich creates charismatic characters, and her reading makes each distinctly memorable. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

February 1, 2003
Erdrich's quiet, gentle voice is so soft, it's as if she's carefully reading a bedtime story. Yet this novel would not put anyone to sleep. Woven with intrigue, romance, death, sex and humor, it's an emotionally complex tale of European immigrants who have settled in the fictional town of Erdrich's previous novels, Argus, N.Dak. Bordering on magical realism, this marvelous yarn introduces a world of rich, expansive imagery and an abundance of memorably compelling characters. There's Delphine, who acts as a human table for her lover, Cyprian, a lesbian Ojibwa balancing artist. Delphine cares for her father, Roy, an alcoholic accused of neglectfully murdering an entire family. And then there's Fidelis, a former sniper for the German army who is now the singing butcher of the title. Although some breaks in cadence occur throughout the reading-it seems almost as if Erdrich is seeing the material for the first time-her soft style gradually blends with the story and, rather than seeming inappropriate, becomes invisible. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 23, 2002).

October 15, 2002
A German soldier straggles home from World War I, marries his best friend's pregnant widow, then picks up a set of butcher knives and heads for North Dakota, where he founds a singing club and encounters the passionate Delphine Watzka. If anyone can make a butcher sing, it's Erdrich.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.