Antelope Woman – Louise Erdrich

The Gravitron starts slowly with the purr of a giant motor and a lurch of gears. The deep bass throbs to life, heavy rock beat, a flame of guitars. Strapped in standing, hands at their sides, the riders are hugged by welded bars to the inside of a gigantic pie plate that starts turning now, turning against the night. Green lights in refracting bands. Rippling blue. Pink. A maddened cake stand that swivels on its base!

Tipping side to side, it spins faster, faster, gravity a hand flattening the faces of the screamers to one green dimension. . . . “Looks like fun,” says Cecille. “Yes!” says Rozin. The twins think they must be hearing things. Rozin says it again. Her tone so dry the twins think she must definitely be kidding, but she’s actually not. This is how on the next run the girls find themselves watching with Cecille, astounded at Frank and their mother.

They walk up the ride stairway and climb into the cages that close over them like alien claws. Again the Gravitron comes to life, now, Frank and their mother clinging to the bars and straps, blurring into one unit as the ride commences. The girls’ faces are serious with worry. Cecille tells them not to worry and she turns away for a moment.

Turning back the other way around, she casually catches the eye of the operator, or not his eye so much as the strange fixed grin that he is shooting right through her from the little cage he inhabits next to the gears and motors. He stares at Cecille and she stares back at him until she realizes he’s not seeing her. Staring through her as though he’s disordered, his whole body fixed and frozen, he’s a shirt-store dummy.

High, Cecille thinks in total understanding. “Hey you!”

A Note from Louise Erdrich OVER MANY YEARS, I traveled I-94 west to Wahpeton, my hometown in North Dakota. Each time my thoughts fly out where the sky opens. I’ve plotted out many books along this route. The Great Plains sky is a source of ideas for me, a touchstone of greatness and familiarity. The sky is a geographical family relative. Traveling along early in this millennium, I understood an entirely different book lay within The Antelope Wife, first published in 1998. The new book obsessed me, but also came to frustrate me because it was partly made out of the old book.

When I reach the final pages of a manuscript I never think the end, or write “The End,” or feel a settled satisfaction. I rarely sense completeness. After all, a book is a temporary fix on the world, a set of words, and words can change. The pleasure for me is in the writing of each character, each scene, in the invention of narrative. Publishing is a way of forcing myself to leave off.

I do, usually, know when a book is ready to hit the road. But with this one, I was surprised. In the early 1990s I brought my daughters to a powwow in Montana, where I imagined that I saw the antelope women. I also, in fact, bought a jade turtle from a man who became my narrator.

My fictional powwow trader kidnapped my antelope woman to Minneapolis. When I moved to Minnesota, I began to write the book. For the first time the setting was the city. Over half of Native Americans live in the city, but this was my first time writing an Urban Indian novel. Along the way, I got to use my own experience of traveling back and forth, reservation to city, home to home.

I wrote about places and settings I knew, and the book became utterly different. It needed a new title. My antelope woman never was a wife, never married her kidnapper, but changed everyone around her with her powerful longing. My editor and publisher graciously agreed to change the title for publication in this Harper Perennial edition. For the new cover, my daughter Aza painted the evocative and haunting face of Sweetheart Calico, my wise wildness, my antelope woman.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 9902c5b38fc92eb2
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,722,912 bytes (2.597 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 242
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 388.13 minutes
• Total Words: 77,627
• Total Characters: 434,452
• Average Words per Page: 320.77
• Average Characters per Page: 1795.26

Most Frequent Words

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