With his own brand of religion, Father Damien melds the rigid dogma of Catholicism with the ancient mystical beliefs of the Obijwe. After a quixotic journey, marked by armed robbers and a terrible flood, Agnes assumes the identity of the real Father Damien, lost in the flood, and spends the next 84 years on the reservation as an integral part of the community. He reflects back on his extraordinary life, unfolding the details of how Agnes DeWitt, a nun with an almost erotic obsession with the piano music of Chopin, is transformed into Father Damien. The old priest writes to the Pope, the last of a lifetime of letters he has written to the Pontiff, to reveal the truth about the controversial Sister Leopolda.ĭamien has remained silent about the Puyat woman for decades, not only because of the sanctity of the confessional, but also because she knew his own secret. But Damien knows many dark truths about the deceased nun truths learned in the confessional and pieced together from fragments of history and conjecture. When the novel begins in 1996, movement is afoot to consider Sister Leopolda, the former Pauline Puyat, for canonization because of purported miracles associated with her.
In her masterful new novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Erdrich weaves a tale that spans nearly a century, the strange and compelling story of Father Damien Modeste, a beloved reservation priest who has hidden his true identity as a woman beneath his cassock. Beginning with her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning first novel Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich has spent nearly two decades carving her own fictional landscape from both the rough and mystical details of life on and around a North Dakota Indian reservation.
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