2.13 The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

This novel is ridiculously gorgeous. The prose is so finely crafted, it made me stop and re-read a few passages. Such a pleasure to read. I was sad to finish it.

Master follows the story of two families, one made from German immigrants and the other a daughter, her alcoholic father and her pseudo-husband, all living in the same small town in North Dakota. Their relationships feel real, and had me sucking in my breath, trying to avoid tears more than once. I gobbled this one up, on the train, in my old bedroom, at the hospital. I wish that I could learn to savor my literature but I'm always going through it at a break-neck pace to find out what happens and then I'm disappointed when I get to the end. The last chapter felt like is was tacked on slightly, but at the same time it belonged, perhaps in a different form. Erdrich wrote about Argus in her novel Tracks, but she has a much tighter focus on it this time around. I wasn't too interested in Tracks when I first read it, but now I want to go through it again to see if I missed something. I seem to remember one of the characters in Master doing something pretty horrible to someone in Tracks. I actually want to read Erdrich's whole body of work now.

I keep meaning to say something brilliant in these posts and falling very short. This book is amazing, you should read it.