Four Souls & Tracks

Two Novels

By: Louise Erdrich

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate on the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Louise Erdrich reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and these works are as beautiful and lyrical as anything she has written.

Tracks
Set in North Dakota, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of 10 crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance, yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The listener will experience shock and pleasure in encountering characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Four Souls
A strange and compelling woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her.

©1988, 2004 Louise Erdrich (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Read in the order published!

Would you listen to Four Souls & Tracks again? Why?

I listened to Tracks after reading Love Medicine for a class. Due to the surprises Erdrich lips in, I recommend reading the books in the order they were written, not in chronological order. The detail she puts into her characters and stories is amazing!

Who was your favorite character and why?

I love Fleur. She's mysterious, strong, independent, and mischievous.

The two unreliable narrators, the beautiful imagery, the sad reality of Native American people

Louise Erdrich has written a powerful story here. As you switch between the two narratives of a proud Native American and a turn-tail woman, you begin to get a feel for the hopeless nature of native magic.

Better than television

It was so well read I could see my own movie production in my head.

Magnificent! One of the great novels !

Magnificent one of the great American novels
I read this many years ago and wanted to hear it read out loud

Lovely language describing the ugliest truths and sorrows of this land !

good story

I really liked this book. The story gripped me from the beginning and was strong all tge way through but the ending was very lacking.

Companion stories for Little No Horse fans

Long live Nanapush! My favorite character in Erdrich’s Love Medicine books!

The narrator (who also reads The Last Report of Little No Horse) changes voices for characters, which was jarring at first but I got used to it. She captures the characters’ personalities well. And there are moments of hilarity that she reads in a perfect Nanapush deadpan.

I’m really glad I listened to the LNH twice before I listened to this. I recommend listening to LNH first or reviewing it on Wikipedia if it’s been awhile. The stories run parallel to LNH, share perspectives from characters who are only observed in LNH.

My only complaint is that it was very frustrating to realize that the way they are presented on this recording is backwards both in time and sequence of publication. And even more
frustrating! you can’t see in the chapter list where one book ends and the next begins!

It sort of worked for me though because Erdrich tells her tales in circles, spirals and parallels. If I had to read nothing but Erdrich for the rest of my life I would die satisfied!

filling out familiar characters

A deeper look at the lives, experiences, and motivations of characters we've come to love in other of her books.

Tracks and Four Souls

I cannot recommend these two linked short novels strongly enough. They have the power of lyric poetry, but there's also a strong narrative thread. They deal with broad issues of family and extended family, race, love, fear, revenge, and more specific issues of native land and its usurpation. The politics of gender, race, ecology are dealt with in ways that manage to be comic as well as tragic, and are never ever simplistic. Similarly, the conclusions are poignant and life-affirming. I am (forgive the pun) tracking down the rest of the novels. How come I had read so little of Erdrich's work in the past?

Very Good for the Genre

A good story. I found some sections heartwarming and funny while others less interesting to me because of the genre. I did not enjoy the performance (seemed to try too hard to be the voice of an older American Native). Probably would have rated higher if I had read rather than listened to the text.

BEWARE: THE 2 NOVELS ARE IN THE WRONG ORDER

I was wholeheartedly dismayed because on the Audio book download FOUR SOULS was the first story and TRACKS was second: Erdrich wrote the 2 intertwined novels TRACKS in 1988 and FOUR SOULS (basically the continuation of the TRACKS story) in 2004, so the books are out of order on the download! Why would Audible do this??? I realize I should have maybe done a little research first, but imagine my angst when I started listening to TRACKS after already listening to the great novel FOUR SOULS only to realize that the stories were out of order. It made me lose interest in the book because it wasn't working for me hearing this like a prequel.

Very disappointed in Audible because of this. Because of this I gave the "Performance" 1 star even though the reader was fine.