Erdrich has an extraordinary ability to grant her characters parole-allowing them to move from one novel to the next-without ever seeming repetitive or calculating. “Tales of Burning Love” is Erdrich’s sixth novel, not counting “The Crown of Columbus,” which was written with her husband, Michael Dorris. There is about each of them something exemplary, in the cautioning sense of that word. If Erdrich were writing for a different time, her novels would be about saints’ lives-narratives in which pain is also joy and death is transfiguration. The life she sets loose in her novels is so incendiary that it can only be contained, so it seems, within a shape that is nearly symbolic in purpose. Her characters seem to burn with consciousness and desire in a difficult landscape, a place where isolation and hard weather and poverty clarify the nature of longing. There has always been something fervent about Louise Erdrich’s fiction.
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