• The Round House

  • A Novel
  • By: Louise Erdrich
  • Narrated by: Gary Farmer
  • Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (3,829 ratings)

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The Round House  By  cover art

The Round House

By: Louise Erdrich
Narrated by: Gary Farmer
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Publisher's summary

National Book Award, Fiction, 2012

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and 13-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

Written with undeniable urgency, and illuminating the harsh realities of contemporary life in a community where Ojibwe and white live uneasily together, The Round House is a brilliant and entertaining novel, a masterpiece of literary fiction. Louise Erdrich embraces tragedy, the comic, a spirit world very much present in the lives of her all-too-human characters, and a tale of injustice that is, unfortunately, an authentic reflection of what happens in our own world today.

©2012 Louise Erdrich (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishers

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What listeners say about The Round House

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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Worst Narration I've Heard

I've listened to hundreds of books and this is by far the worst narrated book yet. The story was good in a few parts; the parts that related to the mother and what happened to her. The rest is just garbage. Very disappointed in this one. Recommend you spend your money elsewhere.

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5 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great book

Would you consider the audio edition of The Round House to be better than the print version?

I am not sure if the audio version is better. It was nice hearing it read by a Native American, but I felt his inflection was off at times. I would still highly recommend it!

Who was your favorite character and why?

Definitely Joe. He provided great insight into the mind of a kid.

What does Gary Farmer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

It was a book about Native American culture, so it was nice hearing it with the correct narrative voice.

Who was the most memorable character of The Round House and why?

Geraldine... she was so sad.

Any additional comments?

I have seen this book all over the place and have had many people recommend it. I work with Native people in Oregon and I found the book to be both entertaining and educational.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

local Erdrich fan

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

yes, but only if you have read some other works by Louise Erdrich there are characters that pepper this novel from some of her earlier works that make it delightful to hear them mentioned again.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Linda - she just had a mystery about her.

What does Gary Farmer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

His voice but I felt his accent was spot on...and brought real life to the male characters especially.

If you could take any character from The Round House out to dinner, who would it be and why?

That's tough probably "ooops" I just loved him!

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TEDIOUS

What disappointed you about The Round House?

This book is tedious with a bunch of short stories patched together. The reader's voice is just odd. I quit about 1/4 of the way through it.

What was most disappointing about Louise Erdrich’s story?

I seemed very disjointed. I'm not sure the rape was the primary focus ... she seemed to lose track of what she was talking about.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Strange accent, strange cadence ...

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

“The sentence was to endure”

Louise Erdrich's The Round House is narrated by Joe (nicknamed Oops because he was his parents’ accident) Coutts, who many years later as a married lawyer (?) is recalling the summer of 1988 when he had just turned thirteen. Joe and his family were members of the Ojibwe (Anishinabe) tribe living then on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Joe’s father Bazil was a judge, his mother Geraldine a tribal enrollment specialist. The novel opens with Joe and father finding Geraldine covered in blood and vomit and smelling like gasoline. She has been raped and nearly immolated. But because she won’t reveal who did it or why, Joe takes it upon himself to find the perpetrator so as to bring him to justice of one kind or another. Joe has suspects, for instance a white man from a slimy family involved in one of his father’s court cases or the new white Catholic priest who’s a scarred veteran proficient at shooting gophers. Meanwhile, his mother becomes spider-like in her emaciation and isolates herself from her family.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the appalling nature of the brutal rape and its tragic effects on Joe’s mother and his family, the novel is often very funny, Erdrich writing comical and quirky scenes, details, and asides through Joe’s narratorial voice, giving him and the reader plenty of chuckling or smiling release valves to ease sympathy and outrage. There are eccentric characters, like Joe’s grandfather Mooshum and Linda Lark. There are things like the account of the Star Trek Next Generation characters liked (Worf, Data, Deanna Troi) and disliked (Riker, Wesley) by Joe and his friends; the time when a self-important medicine man in training unwittingly dumped a lot of hot pepper herbs on the heated stones in a sweat lodge; the description of his friends’ idiosyncratic bicycles; his thirteen-year-old crush on his ex-stripper aunt’s breasts. Lines like, “There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” Even when he and his friends are scouring the woods around the Round House (an abandoned symbolically female site for traditional rituals) for clues that his mother’s attacker might have left behind, an intensely serious activity, Joe makes us smile via a legion of hungry ticks and his friend’s comical story about being accidentally flea bombed inside his house when he was four.

There is a harrowing scene where Joe notices his mother’s vertebrae sticking out through her nightgown, her shoulder blades like knives, her complexion pasty, her eyes darkly circled, her hair lank and greasy, and her vitality dim, and then announces to her that he’ll find and burn her attacker, only to have her briefly assume her former mother persona’s authority to tell him that he will not cause her more fear, will not search for her attacker, and will not ask her questions, and then he tries to teach their wolf-dog Pearl how to fetch, only to have her intimidatingly refuse, closing her teeth on his wrist as if to snap his bones, leading Joe to say with humorous understatement, “So you don’t play fetch, I see that now.”

Erdrich has an eye and an ear for how adolescent boys talk, act, feel, think: the teasing, boasting, joking, supporting, and rough housing; the randy bawdy hungry reckless behavior. It all feels real and adds layers of comedy and pathos to the story. Joe and his buddies (Cappy, Angus, and Zach) speculate on whether it’s better to have a penis looking like Darth Vader or the evil hooded Emperor, get side-tracked when looking for evidence by the lucky find of a couple of cold sixpacks, make Indian jokes, tease each other, sneak cigarettes, are embarrassed by lewd remarks from grandmothers, and enjoy each other’s company. When Joe gets his friends to help him try to find and nail his mother’s attacker, the book almost gets a Stand by Me vibe (though less sentimental).

Throughout, Erdrich writes plenty of reservation life details about politics, policing, law, health care, enrollment, adoption, food, families, groceries, parties, powwows, sweat lodges, Catholicism, history, pronunciation of d instead of th, and more, as well as plenty of references to things like “the gut-kick of our history” experienced by all Native Americans by which, for instance, the USA (from the founding fathers and early Supreme Court on) eagerly took their land by any means devisable, or by which their people were lynched, or by which the federal government enacted outrageous laws interfering with their own legal systems and so on. Indeed, much of the book centers on the question of tribal autonomy (or lack thereof) when it comes to legal matters and criminal cases. “They’d built that place [The Round House] to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.”

In addition to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Erdrich also writes in plenty of vintage popular culture references to the likes of Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars, Alien, and TV action games.

She does much vivid and witty writing, like “Sour turnips and tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad, the concoction gave off a penetrating reek,” or like he “labored with incremental ferocity. . . ant-like.”

The novel becomes bleak towards the end, shedding humor in favor of tragedy and loss and sudden aging, and I have to think more about what I think of the abrupt conclusion: is it perversely unfulfilling or bracingly honest? It is like the cold breath of a windigo winter wind: “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.” I am glad to have read the novel and do recommend it as a necessary book for anyone interested in historical and contemporary Native American life, but. . . I prefer Erdrich’s Love Medicine or Birchbark House books.

The audiobook reader Gary Farmer is just right.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Depends on your style

This is not a bad book and it is very interesting in terms of learning about the culture of one of the Native groups (Chippewa, I believe). The narrator is a young teenager who reacts to the rape and almost murder of his mother. The writing is very good, but I was not too interested in the story and also have a hard time with stories that I perceive as showing a stereotyped view of women (as weak, serving roles in stories primarily as victims). There are some interesting minor female characters, but the primary roles of women in this story is to have something terrible happen to them and then the male figures have to react. Unfortunately, this view has become so dominant in our literature that even highly rated female authors fall for it. In contrast, the women that I see in every day life are brave and struggle with many issues of meaning, spirituality, goals, etc.

I also had difficulty with the narrator's style but listened to this right after listening to "Sense of the Ending" which has one of the best narrators ever. After a while, either I got used to it or he got into the flow better.

Many people love this book and my tastes are different than many, so see what I like or don't to see if this review applies to you.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Suspenseful, funny, and haunting

One of my favorites for the year. It's an amazing coming of age story, a good mystery, and an interesting and deep portrait of reservation life with elements of magical realism. What more could you ask for in a novel? She deserved the National Book Award.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

great storytelling

Would you consider the audio edition of The Round House to be better than the print version?

Yes, Gary Farmer was wonderful. Perfect voice.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Round House?

The elders telling stories.

What does Gary Farmer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He has a great voice, a great rhythm and a sense of the stories.

If you could take any character from The Round House out to dinner, who would it be and why?

the father

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Too much life of a teenage boy

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

More adult perspective about life on a reservation. I didn't learn much about Native American culture. What I did learn I found very interesting.

Was The Round House worth the listening time?

No

Any additional comments?

The story revolves around the detailed inner life (and some outer) of a teenage boy. It just didn't hold my interest for an entire book. Positives: some interesting insights into Native American life. But it was limited. There were a lot of telling of Native American spiritual/traditional stories- again in limited amounts interesting but they didn't capture my interest enough for the amount that was there. Positive: some really great writing. I really felt the boys' experiences, their sweat, their hunger, the woods, etc. Nice to read but lost its power as I got bored with the underlying story.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Not your usual intense mystery

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Round House?

The teenage boys watching a video they liked by peering through the priest's window into his home.

Any additional comments?

I listened to the audio version of this book. It was an OK story that was well told but just not my usual intense mystery/thriller. This was a slight mystery/drama set in the late 80's on an Indian reservation and told from a 13 year old boy's perspective. I will say there are some very funny moments with the 13 year old boy and his buddies.

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