The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Just finished it this morning. It was a difficult novel to read and understand, for various reasons (see the outline text below), but absolutely worth it.

1. The protagonist spends much of the book using an assumed name and a “borrowed” public persona. Louise Erdrich switches between the two names, sometimes in the same paragraph. The uses are very intentional, and the reasons become obvious fairly quickly, but it did confuse me at first.
2. A lot of Ojibwe (or, more precisely, Anishinaabemowin) words are used, and very few of them are translated. I caught on to some of them, but remained vague on others. I’m not sure how much this detracted from my understanding; I must have missed some references and connections, but I don’t think catastrophically so.
   1. Again, Erdrich had a good reason for this. Ojibwe and English do not translate especially well into one another. The protagonist —who is a priest, or a well-educated layperson pretending to be a priest— becomes interested in Ojibwe cosmology and spirituality, and Erdrich chose to keep the untranslatable words and let the reader get the meaning through context.
3. A little familiarity with liturgical Christianity (Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Orthodox) would be helpful, both for understanding the spiritual and cosmological influences and to have some clue about what exactly it is that priests do. Again, not necessary, but the comparing and contrasting of Ojibwe and Christian spiritualities is one of the novel's most interesting themes.
4. There are a ton of characters. There is a genealogical diagram at the end, but in my ebook it was compressed to the point of near-unreadability. The reader who doesn’t read everyday, or who doesn’t read for long gulps at a time, may want to jot down a few notes on who some of these people are.

All that said, this was one of the best books I have read all year, and probably the most thought-provoking novel. It covers almost a century, with chapters and subchapters skipping around between 1911 and 1999, with several points in between. (This device is not nearly as annoying in Erdrich’s usage as it usually is.)

I did learn that there is no “standard” Ojibwe language (though I did find an Ojibwe dictionary on line, because of course there's one online); the people live in a range from eastern Ontario to Manitoba and several midwestern American states, and though there is a shared identity, many of them live in smaller groups that may or may not have a lot in common with their more distant neighbors. Erdrich notes that she went out of her way to make the setting of this novel a composite that couldn’t be attributed to any particular locale.