The Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's writing since college when I picked up Love Medicine. Mom and Dad gave me The Master Butchers Singing Club for Christmas when it came out in 2003, but for some reason I never got around to reading it. Even though in the time since I've read many of her other novels and all of her most recent ones. When Jen and I were in Minneapolis last September I saw that they were going to make a play of the novel and perform it at the Guthrie. I thought it would be fun to read it finally and then go and see the adaptation for stage. I've spent the last couple weeks reading it while sitting in the window seat our new place with the autumn light falling across the pages. So nice. Beautiful writing as always--the characters and descriptions... Some of my thoughts as I read: First, How could they possibly make a Louise Erdrich book into a play? How can you stage the beautiful small moments she captures in her descriptions? And secondly, I wish it was possible to have a butcher shop in town like the butcher shops of the past, where they slaughter out back, and there is an art and craft to the whole process, but current regulations prevent this. I understand why regulations have come into existance, a guarentee, a safety net, but I think something is lost. In response, we learn to raise and butcher our own meat, but even this isn't the same. I'm notaligic for the small community in which each person is so specifically trained and experienced in a single craft. We have aspects of it up here: master coffee roasters, master mead makers, master blueberry farmers :) ... but right now I'm missing my master butcher. I also missed seeing the play at the Guthrie as I wasn't able to make it back down to the cities during the run, but I'm glad it least it promted me to read... The books always better anyway, right?

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I just finished Erdrich's novel, Shadow Tag. Hard to read at times with a central relationship that is painfully complicated, but also just so well written. It was easy to imagine the characters expensive Minneapolis home on an unnamed lake after walking the perimeter of Lake of the Isles on our last trip down to the cities a few weeks ago (and even easier to imagine the vacation home on Madeline Island where the story ends). I couldn't help but wonder how much Erdrich drew on her marriage to Michael Dorris while writing this novel, but I also liked what this Washington Post reviewer had to say: "Erdrich has done what so many writers can't or won't do in this age of self-exposure: transform her own wrenching experience into a captivating work of fiction that says far more about the universal tragedy of spoiled love than it reveals about her private life."