Product Description

In her boldest and most darkly humorous novel yet, award-winning, critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist Louise Erdrich tells the intimate and powerful stories of five Great Plains women whose lives are connected through one man.

Stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, Jack Mauser's former wives huddle for warmth and pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking and often times comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #620851 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-23
• Released on: 1997-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Some of the excitement that greeted Erdrich's first book, Love Medicine, will be rekindled with the publication of her captivating fifth novel. While building on the strengths for which she is noted (she again portrays several Native American families whose interconnected life stories coalesce into a unified narrative), Erdrich here broadens her range and ambitions. She constructs this book with a more conventional novelistic form and sets most of it outside the reservation. A robust richness of both plot and character, and an irresistible fusion of tension, mystery and dramatic momentum, add up to powerful, magical storytelling. Two epochal, whiteout North Dakota blizzards 23 years apart define the major events of Jack Mauser's life. During the first, in 1972, his young Chipewa wife, whom he has just married after a few hours acquaintance during a drunken binge, leave his car to perish in the cold (an event foreshadowed in The Bingo Palace). During the second, in 1995, Jack's succeeding wives, all four of them, are trapped overnight in Jack's van, having come together for his funeral. In this quartet of personalities, Erdrich creates a gallery of indelible portraits, each of them distinct, vivid and human in their frailties. What they have in common, their love for charming, preening, self-destructive Jack, is their means of survival through the frigid night. Each woman tells her tale-always full of passion, but often farcical, too-of how Jack wooed, wed, frustrated, drove to distraction, liberated and deserted her. These stories provide both catharsis and insight, allowing each to understand how she in turn contributed to Jack's destruction. And the dialogue, especially the bickering among claustrophobically confined women, is pungent and smart. Erdrich reveals here a new talent for unexpected plot twists and cliff-hanger chapter endings, some funny, some melodramatic. If there are a few too many coincidences (Jack, who is presumed dead but is not, reluctantly kidnaps his own infant son, who in turn is kidnapped by Jack's fifth wife's ex-husband, also presumed dead), it all seems quite plausible in the context of Erdrich's adroit manipulation of interlocking plot strands. Her eye for sensual detail is impeccable, whether it is the evocation of the landscape and weather of the North Dakota plains or the many erotic couplings that Jack's wives, and Jack himself, remember. Jack, too, is a triumph; he's a real scamp and philanderer with other deplorable character traits, but Erdrich limns him with tolerant humor and compassion. Erdrich has definitely gone commercial here, and some readers may miss the ethereal, mystical qualities of her early work. But like several characters who are psychologically or almost literally reborn, reinspired and reset on life's path, Erdrich has granted her literary reputation refreshing new potency. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour; first serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild alternate; dramatic rights: Charles Rembar.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Erdrich's rich, lapidary new novel opens with Jack Mauser drinking himself silly with a young pick-up, who subsequently freezes to death in her thin shoes in a North Dakota blizzard. Jack would certainly seem to be a loser, and someone any sane woman would stay away from, but this isn't a novel about him. It's a novel about his many wives, who come together at his funeral sometime later and get stuck in another blizzard, which gives them the opportunity to open up about their deepest secrets. Since this is Erdrich (The Beet Queen, LJ 8/86) writing, these women are predictably passionate, quirky, and, well, unpredictable, ranging from solid Dot (who married Jack on a dare and has another husband in jail), utterly seductive Eleanor, brisk Candace, and childlike Marlis. The plot may sound a bit formulaic, but the effect is anything but. Erdrich sometimes pushes her sensuous descriptions over the top, and the effect is near-parody. But the result will entertain readers everywhere. For most collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In the opening pages of Love Medicine (1984), Louise Erdrich's award-winning first novel, a young Chippewa woman, June Morrissey, leaves a stray man she has picked up in a bar and walks into the teeth of a North Dakota blizzard, eventually freezing to death. Erdrich's latest novel, certainly her most daring and perhaps her most compelling, returns to Morrissey's death, but this time focusing on the heretofore faceless man in the bar. Jack Mauser was a cocky construction worker in 1972 when he failed to follow Morrissey into the blizzard, and he has been reliving that incident and its ramifications through two decades and four wives. We pick up Mauser's story in 1994 with Jack married to Dot Nanapush (The Beet Queen, 1986) but obsessed with first-wife Eleanor, recently reappeared in his life: "Falling back in love with your first wife while married to your fifth was a sticky, stupid business." Yes, but sticky and stupid in that messy, painfully funny, real-life kind of way.

If Jack's slapsticky bumbling--winning and losing women and money with equal abandon--is the novel's fulcrum, his four wives are its heart. Always a master of the extended set-piece, Erdrich reaches new heights here, conjuring up another North Dakota blizzard to trap the four Mauser wives, who are driving home from Jack's funeral (it's not quite what you think). Huddled in a Ford Escort, they stay alive by fending off sleep with "Tales of Burning Love." Not only revealing the depths of their feelings for the hapless Jack, these four-gals-sitting-around-talking-to-keep-from-freezing also come to recognize the strength of their bonds with one another and the depths of their individual resilience. In Erdrich's world, both women and men freeze to death from lack of love--the June Morrissey paradigm--but they are also capable of bringing themselves back to life. The power of narrative and the salvation of love have always been Erdrich's quintessential themes, but here she expresses them with even greater force and clarity. A wise, wonderful, and wickedly funny novel. Bill Ott

Customer Reviews

a lot of psychology there - a very good read
"Tales of Burning Love": what a cunning, deceitful, yet revealing title... I was long waiting to lay my hand on something by Louise Erdrich and this is the first of her novels I have read. I figured out that this is not considered the best one of her works, but I actually liked it quite a lot.

The plot is set in or around Fargo, North Dakota (with occasional changes of setting) - this already made the novel interesting, as my mental image of Fargo is that from the Cohen brothers' "Fargo" (and Erdrich's descriptions fit very well what has already been in my head). The bracket character is Jack Mauser, a part-Native American man, as masculine as a man can be; and as fatally attractive to women. Married five times, Jack has a talent to get involved in risky or suspicious business schemes and when he dies because of one, his four former wives meet at his funeral. On the way back, they get caught in a snowstorm in one car (with the mysterious hitchhiker) and there lies the real essence of this novel, for the women take turns telling the stories of their lives and their relationships with Jack. As the stories unravel, the reader gets to know better all four: Eleanor (my favorite character - I could relate to her best), the meticulous and neurotic scientist, doing research at the nunnery, a daughter of a circus acrobat and of a funeral home owner; Candice, a perfectionist, a dentist, who has everything thought out, but surprises herself with unexpected love; Marlis, a would-be artist with no morals; and Dot, a solid, down-to earth accountant. They reveal a lot of tender feelings and intimate details, and each shows her unique personality. How the women so different can be infatuated with one man... It makes me wonder. From their stories, a complex portrait of Jack emerges.

The snowstorms clasp the whole novel, the first one in which Jack loses his first wife, and the one after the funeral. I liked this, as well as the role of the fire in the story. The novel is full of unexpected turns, and when it seems to slow down, something happens to wake the reader up - at the beginning I though I would not like it, but after the first chapter I really got into it. The spiritual aspect mixes with the physical, the feminine with the masculine, so that the whole range of human endeavors is explored. And be really aware, that the title, although it seems to promise a romance novel (as well as the strange, for me not very appealing, cover), is really tricky and can be understood only while reading.

A blizzard in all of us
Having read some of Erdrich's novels, including Love Medicine or The Beet Queen, I was expecting an 'Indianesque' novel again. However, the only thing that reminded me of the other novels was her way of emphasizing the importance of stories, that is 'Tales of Burning Love' for our lives. In this case it is the tales that literally help the women survive. Let me start at the beginning:
We get to know Jack Mauser who, yes, is a womanizer, but (we have to admit) a very fascinating and challenging persona. At least this comes to show why five women were once married to him. Now they get together at his burial (only to find out at the end that he isn't dead after all) and get stuck in a blizzard. Their only way of surving the snowstorm is by each of the respective women telling her story with Jack. What grabs the reader is that each of the women has an individual voice which shows in her way of telling the story. Although Jack is the centre of the stories, he's also at the margin, because the stories are about themselves, too. Somehow the telling revives and warms them and at the same time soothes the wounds Jack has caused. Finally they are rescued and resume their lives with renewed strength. Once again Erdrich succeeded in creating such an intense atmosphere that I had problems putting the book down. I hope she will forever go on telling us tales...

MAGNIFICENT UNIQUE JEWEL OF A STORY!
This is the first of Erdrich's books I've read and I'm hopelessly hooked. Pure prose. Her characters are burned into my mind and heart. The story, told from the perspective of Jack's four wives, was beautiful and riveting. I loved each of their tales. I got this book from the library but plan to buy it so I can read it over and over. Definitely a keeper!