THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB

 

By

 

Louise Erdrich

 

HarperCollins

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

 

Cloth, ISBN 0-06-620977-3

388 pages, $25.95

 

Previously published in Bloomsbury Review

 

 

 

Louise Erdrich s novels do not normally tell a linear tale. Instead the different threads of story move forward and backward in varied parts, more a mosaic than a traditional plot. In several novels, she has successfully mined her Native American heritage, and now, in The Master Butchers Singing Club, she brings us her German-side. In truth, her grandfather fought in the German trenches in World War I, then came to America as a butcher, and his sons served on the American side in World War II. In this work of fiction, Fidelis Waldvogel survives the German trenches of the Great War as a sniper and returns home at the end of the war to marry the young woman who is carrying the child of his best friend, a Jewish soldier killed as the last battle wound down. Once home, he discovers it is only a few centimeters away from becoming French on Clemenceau and Wilsons redrawn map, a fact that mattered nothing compared to what there might be to eat. And this innate sense of survival, what sustains him for the rest of his life, how he manages against odds to endure, and the final slow spiral of life into death is an underlying theme of the entire book.

Take, for instance, Fidelis decision to leave Germany for America, and his suitcase of sausages that he, a master butcher with secret recipes, sells to gain trainfare across the country. He stands for hours on end, holding his suitcase open in his arms, the sausages exposed for inspection by passersby to purchase, all of whom wondered at his endurance. But the fare he earns won t take him across the country. It leaves him in Argus, North Dakota, halfway toward his goal.

From there the story shifts, told more from the view of Delphine Watzka, a woman who never knew her mother; whose father is such a drunken lout he fails to hear the cries of a family locked in his cellar and who die of starvation while he carries on a month-long binge; whose first love, Cyprian, cannot truly love her because he loves other men. But she quietly suffers her father s failures, and forms the base, like a human table, for Cyprian s balancing act, though she questions what it s like to fall. When you fall, Cyprian says, you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless.

But Delphine does not know how to fall. Nor can she let the men in her life fall. Like the human table for Cyprian s balancing act, she is the base on which the men balance their lives, and just as Fidelis took in the pregnant fiance of his dead friend, so too does Delphine, by bits and pieces, take in Fidelis and his boys when his wife passes away following a long and excruciating illness.

Much like the protagonist in Kent Haruf s The Tie That Binds, Delphine finds herself trapped and drawn at the same time to a duty she has difficulty defining. It s not that she can t tell men no, as she does that plain enough rejecting Cyprian s proposal because she can t love a man who can t physically love her, and rejecting Fidelis until he meets her terms but that men strange, flawed artifacts that they are, seem to both fulfill and tear her apart at the same time.

She became the human table. Only in her mind, instead of chairs one by one men came out and balanced on her flint hard stomach. A stack of boys and men. Cyprian and Fidelis. The twins, Emil and Erich. Then Franz, and Markus, at last her father. All were precariously balanced on her phenomenally tough midsection. And she was down there, thinking what thoughts, feeling what feelings? One word and they all might topple. One word could throw them off. So she didn t say anything, but her arms and legs started to shake.

 

Like the men who need and rely on her, Delphine s strength is not without weakness. As a soothsayer asks her, You re tired of holding them all up, aren t you? When Fidelis tyrannical sister casts her withering gaze, Delphine imagines the woman s thoughts:

Who are you, Delphine Watzka, you drunkard s child and fairy s whore, you vagabond, you motherless creature with a belly of steel and a lusting heart? Who are you, what are you, born a dirty pole in a polack s dirt? You with a household full of human rot and a man in your tent who has done the unimaginable to other men? Who are you, with a father seen sucking his bottle like a baby in its own shit? Who are you and what makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother, Fidelis, who is the master of all he does?

 

This is a book to take time with, rewards revealed as you find them. Its manner is plainer than Erdrich s early work, with far less stylism. But as before, loose ends remain, no pat conclusions are offered, no easy answers for lives lived hard. The hope it offers is in something of the moment, never lasting, and quite simple, as when Fidelis takes Delphine s hand:

Gouged, ripped, healed, their hands fit together like pieces of old pottery. They held hands as they walked down the hallway into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.

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