Sister Leopolda is one of contemporary American literature's great opportunists of conscience, and she poses problems when it comes to conversion ... As the novel darts back and forth in time over the span of almost a century, Father Damien leads a 'huge life' at the settlement of Little No Horse, so different from the one he might have lived when we meet him, early in the novel, as 'a farm woman with a beautiful piano' ... Erdrich takes us farther back in time than she ever has, so far back that she comes, in a sense, to the edge of the reservation that has been her fictional world. What makes it possible is the Ojibwa language, which is both as fresh and as ancient as rain.
...somewhat loosely told but quite evocative and moving ... Yet while Father Damien's story is the thread that holds Erdrich's novel together, it is but one strand in its complex design. Erdrich also weaves in the colorful sagas of reservation characters ... These ancillary stories provide intriguing glimpses into the Ojibwe culture and constitute the novel's brightest and most touching patches ... Although the language in some sections is evocative and pure, other passages are clunky, overwrought and downright confusing. But while the threads of Erdrich's work seem to grow a bit tangled here and there, viewed from a bit of a distance and taken in as a whole, the novel's flaws become part of the intricate pattern.
...her most ambitious yet, bringing together a range of characters scattered throughout her fiction ... Throughout the narrative, and often on the same page, s/he is referred to by both names, not only underlining her dual identity, but also symbolising and dramatising the conflicts and ambiguities at the heart of the novel ... Erdrich's precise lyricism is rightly acclaimed, but she has an occasional tendency to overwrite and to launch into flights of surreal humour – suggesting a wry smile at the quirks of fate – that are weird to the point of jarring. Much more successful is her ability to encompass, in her encyclopaedic scope, a profound sense of the astonishing range of human yearning: the ways in which people and communities find the love, laughter and meanings they need to get through.
If you strip away the sugared hagiography from many traditional lives of the saints, however, there is a mixture of the mundane and magical reminiscent of that idiosyncratic blend of the real and the surreal in Ms. Erdrich's fiction ... Although some of the gaudier plot twists Ms. Erdrich contrives in this novel feel overly schematic, her portrait of Father Damien and his odd, picaresque life is so moving, so precisely observed that it redeems the clumsier aspects of the book ... Though the story of Agnes DeWitt a k a Father Damien is improbable, even ludicrous in outline, Ms. Erdrich uses her remarkable storytelling gifts to endow it with both emotional immediacy and the timeless power of fable ... The one character in this novel Ms. Erdrich fails to flesh out convincingly is Pauline Puyat ... By turns comical and elegiac, farcical and tragic, the stories span the history of this Ojibwe tribe and its members' wrestlings with time and change and loss.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse melds together a hundred years of history, which Erdich has chronicled in smaller measure in previous works ... This latest work reaches back into the tales of Pauline Puyat's mother and father, filling in yet more pieces of the immense puzzle that Erdich has devoted thirteen years and numerous novels to creating ... The unique storytelling ability of Erdrich is not lost in this most recent epic brilliantly depicting the world of the reservation. Erdich's lyrical descriptive power propels the reader into the world she creates, where skin has a smoky scent, love medicine works, and the mysterious connectedness of all the characters is written about so casually as to seem quotidian ... Erdich's spellbinding poetics, the richness of the Ojibwe tradition and the harsh, haunting landscape of the Dakotas make this another memorable addition to the author's already impressive body of work chronicling reservation life and history.
Last Report is meditative and almost dreamlike in its languorous, distant tone, which is all the more ironic since Erdrich’s story is about as over the top as they come ... Interwoven through the novel is an unsolved murder, but Erdrich’s gift lies in unraveling characters rather than mysteries, and in her stunning, off the cuff descriptions ... Because of its almost too respectful investigation of what drives the heart, we never quite get under the skin of the characters, a problem when the book’s central figure has made a stunning decision we never fully understand ... Still, Erdrich brings such glory and reverence to the stuff of everyday lives that we forgive much.
Erdrich's evocation of reservation life seems close to perfect. No other writer today visualizes the Indian experience more vibrantly than the author, whose own mixed blood gives her a place in two worlds ... Yet she is capable of embarrassingly bad writing ... Last Report consists of a series of self-contained stories involving her familiar characters that could be in any of Erdrich's five previous novels ... These entertaining, sometimes fanciful stories have little to do with the plot. But Erdrich's plots, complicated, messy things that jump back and forth, are the least important element in her writing ... The book is about too many things -- cross-dressing, murder, incest, forbidden passion, rape. Mostly, though, it's about love.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is the clearest demonstration yet that time has run out for the Kashpaws, Morrisseys, Lazarres, and Puyats, whose indifferently linked (and told) stories, stretching over nine decades, are meant to fill us with all the big novelistic emotions; but the only thing that’s likely to make you feel good is the promise implicit in the title ... Agnes/Damien’s secret identity and the ongoing moral crisis it creates is meant to provide The Last Report with a meaningful narrative frame, but it’s really just a gimmick ... I couldn’t help feeling that what really made Father Damien interesting to Erdrich was his/her immense longevity, which allows the author to cram a lot of stories in ... However original Erdrich’s treatment of Native American life may have been at the beginning, the flaccid prose, indifferent construction, and thematic exhaustion you sense in her latest report from the reservation suggest that perhaps it ought to be the last.
...a myth of Faulknerian proportions ... Erdrich takes huge risks in this boldly imagined novel's early pages, which are replete with complicated exposition, while slowly building narrative and thematic bridges linking the aforementioned characters with figures familiar from her earlier fiction ... A remarkably convincing portrayal of Native American life throughout this century—with the added dimension of an exactingly dramatized and deeply moving experience of spiritual conflict and crisis.
Erdrich seems to be inhabiting her characters, so intense and viscerally rendered are her portrayals ... This novel will be remembered for a cornucopia of set pieces, all bizarre and stunning ... Writing with subtle compassion and magical imagination, Erdrich has done justice to the complexities of existence in general and Native American life in particular.
