Author: Michael Chabon
Reader: Peter Riegert

Extra features: The audiobook includes an interview with Michael Chabon about his inspiration for the book, his favorite books and genres, and his writing process.

Short Review: Chabon’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning alternate history of a world without Israel but with a temporary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. Hard-boiled detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a junkie chess-player with his partner and cousin Berko Shemets, a half-Tlingit, half-Jewish cop who is a good father, a good Jew, and a good partner trying to save Landsman from himself. As the case progresses, more and more connections to organized crime, shady US government machinations, separatist Orthodox communities, and zealotry reveal themselves. Riegert is an ideal reader, comfortable with accents, Yiddish, noir, and sadness.

Long Review: I love this book. I read it on paper first, and was anxious to hear how well Reigert would handle Landsman’s voice. He does a masterful job. The book is written in the third person, but Landsman is on just about every page, so we hear his speech over and over. Reigert is careful to give Lansman, Berko Shemetz, and the other major characters distinct voices and rhythms, and he does a very good job of it. Like all of the best audiobook readers I’ve heard, Riegert balances acting with diction; maintaining a good rhythm and drawing a complete character while also keeping his accented speech easy to understand.

The novel is set in Sitka, Alaska in an alternate history. In the world of the novel, Israel fell to Arab attack in 1948, and the US agreed to make a temporary semi-autonomous federal district in Sitka for Jewish refugees. Sitka’s term of independence is ending, and all of the Jewish refugees there must prepare to leave for new homes elsewhere. As the local police are wrapping up their case files to hand over to the Americans, a junkie is murdered in the hotel where Landsman lives and Landsman takes the case. He should file the case away as quickly as possible but can’t let it go. The deeper Landsman investigates the victim and his connections, the more entangled he becomes.

Chabon writes wonderful characters, in this and all of his novels. Landsman, his ex-wife and boss Bina, Berko Shemetz, and the rest of the characters in the novel are engaging and deep and fascinating. You root for Landsman, but you also want to strangle him. Riegert’s narration intensifies that connection to Landsman and the rest. I found myself worrying about them all while listening to the novel, even though I already knew what was coming next.

Chabon does amazing things with language and speech in this novel. I’m no expert on Yiddish, of course, but I love the way Chabon intertwines Yiddish with noir phrasing and settings. It flips the whole hard-boiled detective genre–in a good way. I doubt there will ever be a sequel, but I would absolutely love the chance to follow Landsman and Shemetz on another case.

All in all, this is a fascinating, entertaining, beautifulky-read audiobook and one I know I’ll return to.

 Four Souls

 Author: Louise Erdrich

 Reader: Anna Fields

 Short Review: Four Souls is a belated sequel to Tracks, and thus the continuation of the story of Fleur Pillager—one of the recurrent characters in Erdrich’s series of novels that follow an Ojibwe tribe. Read starkly and beautifully by Anna Fields, the plot is intricate and engrossing, the characters clear and interesting, and Erdrich’s writing is precise and energized. The story follows Fleur Pillager as she seeks revenge against a man who stole and then destroyed her land.

Long Review: This book centers around a character who never speaks her own story to us. Instead, several characters describe Fleur’s actions and possible motivations to us. We have their guesses about her decisions and feelings. “Four Souls” was Fleur’s mother’s name, and it’s the name Fleur takes for herself at the outset of the story. The name allows her to be ruthless when she needs, loving when she needs, and to somehow retain some kernel of her self throughout.

Fields must speak in the voices of multiple narrators throughout her reading of this work, and she does a beautiful job. Nanapush, who opens the novel, is a tribal elder and Fleur’s grandfather. John James Mauser is the developer and real estate magnate Fleur seeks to destroy. Polly Elizabeth is Mauser’s sister-in-law and Fleur’s employer. Margaret Kashpaw is Nanapush’s sharp-tongued wife. Nanapush and Polly Elizabeth do most of the speaking in the novel, and Fields switches deftly between their voices. I was very happy with Fields’ narration, but I can imagine that some people would be annoyed by her reading of Nanapush. Her natural speaking voice isn’t particularly deep, so her timbre doesn’t sound naturally male when she voices him. To my ear, Field’s performance as Margaret erases any qualms I might have about her voicing Nanapush.

I think Erdrich’s work translates particularly well to audio format because she is so interested in story-telling itself. Nanapush returns to novel after novel to play the roll of chief storyteller. He is Erdrich’s recurrent personification of the oral tradition, and he serves her well. In one of his most important lines, Nanapush asserts their tribal need to maintain Ojibwe land:

“When I look at the scope and drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This left over. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.”

It’s the need to maintain that scrap of land that sets Fleur on her initial quest, and that dedication to conservation is one of the things that draws readers to Erdrich and to Native American fiction in general. Erdrich refuses to fall back on stereotypes about Native connections to the Earth, though, and emphasizes real, practical reasons Nanapush and the other residents of Little No Horse want to retain their land and language. Fleur fights for herself and for her people, and also seems to fight against wanton development in general. For tree-hugging dirt-worshippers like me, that’s quite a compelling story in and of itself. Intertwining it with stories of love and betrayal and self-sacrifice just makes it richer and more sustaining.

Short Review: A beautifully-read version of a book I don’t actually like very much.

Long Review: Robertson Dean has a fantastic voice, and he portrays the different characters distinctly. I’d rather listen to the book than read it on paper. Having listened to the book, I’ll go out of my way to find more books narrated by Dean.

There are certainly some things about the story I like, but I’ve always found Cooper tiresome. I would strangle Natty Bumppo if I had to travel with him. Prattle prattle condescend prattle. Uncas, Chingachgook, and Cora strike me as the real heroes of the story. Cooper rambles far too much. He needed an editor. It could have been a great book had he had a good editor.

Go ahead, stone me to death.

Author: Louise Erdrich

Read by: Louise Erdrich

Short review: A beautifully written historical novel set in Germany and North Dakota between the two World Wars.

Long review: I’ve been an unabashed fan of Erdrich’s since I read her phenomenal first novel Love Medicine: A Novel. Most of her books are set in and among an Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota. This time around, however, she follows the life of Fidelis Waldvogel, a German butcher, singer, and veteran who immigrates to the US to build a life for his family. Delphine Watzka, daughter of the town drunk, becomes enmeshed in the Waldvogel family while trying to sort out her complex relationships with her sodden father and her perplexing Ojibwe partner Cyprian Lazarre. The book explores questions of love, sexual identity, parenthood, duty, loyalty, genealogy, war, friendship, forgiveness . . . all concepts that resurface in Erdrich’s books.

I was particularly intrigued to hear Erdrich read her own work, since I’ve never had the chance to go to one of her live readings. She has a gorgeous sense of language, and her work as a poet has definitely spilled into her novels. I found her narration clear and evocative, but not overly emotional or dramatic. There were a few pauses here and there that were a tad jarring, but overall I was surprised by how well she read. I will gladly listen to more self-narrator works by Erdrich.