The Master Butchers Singing Club

It may be hard to understand why I gave this book 5 stars when I explain that it firmly reinforces my suspicions that life is full of pain, and in the end, is inexorably futile. However, I give the stars for the wonderous telling of Erdrich's story, and I never could for a disingenuously cheerful message. Erdrich creates a wonderful cast of characters. Each is multi-dimensional and excruciatingly authentic. Similarly, she creates a world that is seamless and genuine. The thing that gives this book a rare "something extra," is the way that she captures the inner lives of the people. She turns them inside out and exposes their complex lives in an immediate way. We feel how their humanity, their struggle, and their foibles interplay to create intricate relationships and lead to unpredictable - often unwelcome - outcomes. This book can be described as a family saga, a character study, and a bit of a mystery. It also illuminates some European and American history from the end of WWI through the end of WWII. Most importantly, Erdrich beautifully spins a tale of real people that is overtly compelling and sublimely tender. This book has no flaws worth mentioning. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves excellent writing and great characters.

No Spoilers Present For those who haven't read the novel:Finished The Master Butchers Singing Club 5+ by Louise Erdrich and it bowled me over, promising to be my favorite selection for the year in any genre. Just such a fine reading experience! Once in a while, a book just commands one's attention and is completely gratifying.I read every word on each page very slowly to savor the language, characters and plot. Drawn in from the onset, the readers' involvement continues to increase at a breakneck pace, even though we slow down to enjoy the nearly perfect prose and comprehend the mental set and daily lives and tasks of our characters between the lines, and their places in the community. Although not 100 percent linear, and episodic in nature, there is no confusion at all for the reader, who is torn between knowing more 'later' or enjoying the 'now'.The novel is about a young German butcher, Fidelis, who emigrates to the USA after serving in WWI, carrying only a suitcase full of sausages and a perfect set of carving knives. He ends up in Argus, North Dakota, where he establishes his business. The dynamic of Argus itself becomes a character. The book covers only three decades, but feels like an awesomely enduring saga of the complexities of life, over time. In addition to Fidelis... Delphine (it remains her story), Cyprian, Clarissa, Roy, and especially Eva and her boys are characters who remain embedded in the on-deck circle, and each is integral to the fabric of the novel. The Master Butchers Singing Club also incorporates mayhem, madness, murder, and intrigue. I have few words to convey the depth of my experience while reading this novel, so what follows is an excerpt from the book jacket:>>TMBSC unfolds its themes of love and death, lightness and gravity...with the eloquent prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling that only a masterful writer can offer. Creating a fictional world filled with memorable characters who grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature is an impressive achievement, but doing so with the compassion and intelligence, lyrical style and wit, of Louise Erdrich is a gift to readers everywhere.<<<p>Oh yes, Oh yes!<p>Roe

As soon as I finished this book, I started over on the first page to scan through the story and stopped to re-read sections to fully savor the connections and events over again. Delphine is a character I will remember for a long time. She is a true survivor, "No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, she wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman, but not one who could not afford, say, a hat with a little green feather. A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who'd lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she's awfully quick, but she's solid and reliable."The account of Eva and Delphine in the night garden drinking beer while they set the beer out to catch slugs is tender and funny and so full of life and death that it alone makes the book a treasure to read.I checked this book out of the library but I am going to order it. I want to keep these characters around, not return them.

It's a complete cliche to say that a book sticks with you long after you've turned the last page, but that is precisely the impact that the The Master Butchers Singing Club has had upon me. Delphine and Fidelis (the singing butcher of the title) are two of the most idiosyncratic and memorable characters I've ever encountered in fiction. Louise Erdrich depicts the entire spectrum of emotion in two essentially stoic people and simply breaks your heart. In the hard scrabble life desribed in this novel, a man shoots a pack of wild dogs to show his love for his sons and grief for his dead wife. The town drunk shows a lethal pettiness and then pulls himself together to sing songs of comfort to a dying woman. It is the moral complexity of these people that sticks with you for days. Some reviewers have complained that characters come into the novel and then disappear, but that is part of the novel's point. The book is the story of Delphine's life. Just as in any life, people come into her world and then move on. Her life feels more real, and less like fiction, because some loose ends are left to dangle. Not every character has an ultimate resolution. I can't recommend this book highly enough.