After being washed away from Berndt's farm in a flood of biblical proportions, she comes across the body of the Rev. The secret is a startling one: he is really a woman named Agnes DeWitt, a former nun, who has led at least three very different existences in the course of her long life.Īs a young woman she left the convent because her passion for music rivaled her passion for God, and upon leaving she fell in love with a farmer named Berndt Vogel, ''a good man who had a singular gift for everyday affection as well as the deepest tones of human love.'' Their happiness was abruptly shattered by a bank robber, who killed Berndt and wounded Agnes, stealing portions of her memory and propelling her into yet another series of adventures. 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.įather Damien, we learn near the start of ''No Horse,'' has a secret he has kept from his beloved congregation for eight decades. Erdrich's fiction, as well as a litany of sufferings and gory ordeals, reminiscent of the travails and bizarre twists of fate sustained by her characters.Īlthough some of the gaudier plot twists Ms. 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 novels, and to compare and contrast the lives of two prospective saints: Father Damien, a priest who has devoted his life to caring for his flock with quiet devotion and grace, and Sister Leopolda, an overzealous nun who is said to have effected numerous miracles and cures.

In summary, the story line of ''The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse'' might seem an incongruous undertaking for Louise Erdrich, the author of elliptical, dreamlike novels like ''The Beet Queen'' and ''The Antelope Wife.'' We are asked in these pages to accompany an envoy from the Vatican to the North Dakota Ojibwe Indian reservation, which has served as the backdrop for so many of Ms. THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE

The last report on the miracles