Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85042 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Released on: 2006-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From The Washington Post
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.

From Bookmarks Magazine
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.

Customer Reviews

Verbal artistry

The story of the painted drum is a tale that blends the pragmatism of the modern world with the unexplained mystical forces that inexplicably bind past and present together. When estate appraiser, Faye Travers discovers the drum found in the attic of a deceased client, she does something that she's never been tempted to do. She steals it and seeks out its rightful owner. When she finds the family of the man who initially crafted the drum, she hears the story of how it came into being. She comes to understand how the drum itself may have compelled her to act on its behalf.

Louise Erdrich is a verbal artist. Through her carefully crafted prose, I could smell the dust rising from the prairie, hear the wind rustling the grass and feel the texture of the drum. The Painted Drum gives us a snapshot into the lives of people who must reconcile tradition with reality.

This was the first novel I've read by this author. At times, the story came vividly into focus and was quite engrossing. At other times, I found it difficult to maintain a firm grasp on the story as it was told by the various characters. However, overall, it left a mark that won't soon be forgotten.

Wonderfully done!
"The Painted Drum" is a marvelously crafted novel that traces the history of a drum and the people whose lives it touches. Primarily set in New Hampshire, the story opens with a quiet introspective contemplation by one of the novel's narrators. ". . . 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." This opening paves the way for the unfolding of Faye's life in the small New England town where she has spent her entire existence. Faye and her mother, Elise, are proprietors of a business that specialized in estate liquidation. It is through this business that Faye finds the tribal drum that is at the novel's center. Upon first sight, Faye knows that the drum is powerful. Her attachment to it is immediate and indefinable. After a period, Faye decides that she will locate the drum's original owners and return it. In locating the owners, the novel shifts setting and an entirely new cast of characters populate the story. I found the story to be at it richest when telling about the making of the drum and the people involved with it.

Erdrich's story telling abilities are keen. I was easily wrapped up in each character's story. The relationships explored in the novel are subtly interrogated with lyrical language that's pregnant with meaning. The novel is set in three parts, each of which could be a short story; each connected by the tribal ancestors and stories that inhabit the drum. "The Painted Drum" is another superb novel by Erdrich. I read "Love Medicine" a few months back and it was familiar and pleasing to be reintroduced to the Pillagers clan in Erdrich's latest novel. Now I'm motivated to read more of her works just to see how many of her characters have lives that span multiple novels. This is a quality read; enjoy it!

"No two are alike, but every drum is related to every other drum."
(No spoilers here.) In the opening pages, Faye Travers, an estate agent in New Hampshire, inventories the home of John Jewett Tatro, whose grandfather was an Indian agent, and whose grandmother was an Ojibwe. When Faye opens an attic room, she finds a collection of enormous value, including an incredible drum, hollowed out from a single piece of cedar wood and covered by a moose hide.

The history of the "Little Girl" drum takes the reader from New Hampshire to an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. Bernard Shaawano, who is the grandson of the drum's maker, narrates this section, telling about the life of his grandfather, why he made the drum, who he was memorializing, and how this drum eventually came to New Hampshire. The fascinating process by which the drum was made, the ceremonies and traditional beliefs associated with it, and the traumatic lives and deaths of the Shaawano family over three generations connect the drum and its history with the essence of existence.

In the final section, Shawnee, a young girl living in a remote area of the reservation, has been babysitting for her younger brother and sister for several bitterly cold days, without enough fuel and no food. Their mother has been sidetracked, drinking in town. The depiction of the lives of these children is heart-rending, and their connection to the "Little Girl" drum adds another layer of mystery to the drum's "life."

Written with a homey intimacy and honesty, Erdrich deals with big themes of life and death and the beliefs associated with them. Nature is an intimate part of this process, and it is further emphasized through symbols and repeating motifs--a field of orb spiders, a dog which escapes its cruel confines, wolves and their mystical connection with mankind. Always, of course, Erdrich conveys Indian spiritual values, even as she depicts their often sad and limited lives.

The characters here have real faults and real conflicts, but Erdrich is generous with them, never making value judgments while showing the circumstances which have determined their behavior. With interconnected stories involving characters from three generations and three different families, The Painted Drum is a novel which taps into universal feelings and hopes, even as it depicts some of life's terrible realities. n Mary Whipple