Last report on the miracles at little5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() Father Damien was a peripheral character in past books, such as Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks. ![]() Many of Erdrich's characters develop over time in her Argus novels, with intricate histories and relationships. Father Damien takes great pleasure in forgiveness, in absolving all of people's sins at confession. Through his eighty years there on the reservation (he is at least 100 years old now), he has integrated the spiritual faiths into a potent hybrid, a mystic fusion that also informs the book's imagery, without a shred of proselytizing. ![]() The central figure, Father Damien Modeste, is a Catholic missionary priest who, since coming to the Little No Horse reservation in 1912, has fluidly blended the customs of the Ojibwe people with the Holy Trinity. She interweaves a traditional pagan mysticism with Catholic catechism, the animate with the anthropomorphic. If you yoked Faulkner with Garcia-Marquez, and anointed them with the comic hijinx of John Irving, you would experience a sense of Louise Erdrich's poetic, visually imaginative power. ![]()
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