The Master Butchers Singing Club, from bestselling author Louise Erdrich, a profound and enchanting…novel: a richly imagined world “where butchers sing like angels.”
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In This LitStack Rec of The Master Butchers Singing Club
Book Summary
Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher’s precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.
When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis’s life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine’s life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
When Louise Erdrich was awarded the distinguished achievement award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, she said that she does not consider herself a peaceful writer. “I am a troubled one, longing for peace,” she added. I believe many of us can identify with her sentiment. Many of us lately have found ourselves troubled, longing for peace. So with this thought in mind, I’d like to take the opportunity to recommend a book of Ms. Erdrich’s that I absolutely adore: “The Master Butchers Singing Club”.
Set in tiny Argus, North Dakota after WWI, the novel chronicles the life of Fidelis Waldvogel, a German soldier who immigrates to America after marrying Eva, the pregnant fiancée of his best friend who was killed in action. Fidelis, a devoted husband, father and son, is a master butcher with a “talent for stillness”, and a love of singing. The family sets down roots in this tiny, often languishing town.
Then Eva befriends mesmerizing Delphine Watzka, a member of a traveling vaudeville troop who has returned to Argus to care for her ailing alcoholic father, Roy. Their lives are complicated when Roy is caught up in a zealous investigation of a family who was found to have died in the basement of his dilapidated house. A frequent visitor to the butcher’s shop, Delphine finds herself attracted to Fidelis, but her love of Eva (as well as Fidelis’ devotion to his wife) keeps any declaration of passion muted, until circumstances change all their lives forever.
Drawing on her own paternal German ancestry (much of Fidelis’ background and stoic attributes hearken back to Ms. Erdrich’s own relatives), this is a very personal novel, full of the deft precision of her prose, the remarkable interplay of secondary characters and subplots, and the unflinching portrayal of a brooding yet beautiful Midwestern landscape that is a hallmark of Ms. Erdrich’s writing.
“The Master Butchers Singing Club” is a complicated love story that unfolds with its own unique sense of unflinching grace, and it’s a story that cannot escape the ravages of violence and death and tragedy. It’s a troubled story of ordinary people longing for peace – something that will resonate with many of us, here and now.
—Sharon Browning
About Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.
Other Books by Louise Erdrich
Other LitStack Resources
Be sure and look at our other LitStack Recs for our recommendations on books you should read, as well as these reviews by Lauren Alwan, and these reviews by Rylie Fong, Allie Coker, and Sharon Browning.
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