In the present, Damien converses with Father Jude, who has visited to consider Sister Leopolda for sainthood. The question of Sister Leopolda (a paragon of charity who may also have been a murderer) is posed unforgettably: 'What weighs more, the death or the wonder?' And the passion of Father Damien, which climaxes with a gravely beautiful pilgrimage, is, throughout the story, a wonder to behold. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Summary The novel moves between the present, set in the 1990s, when Father Damien is nearing death, and various points in the.

The result is 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 revisits and hovers over her people, recording their experiences and words and dreams, observing them from multiple perspectives and in various contexts. 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: stoical Fleur Pillager and her estranged, doomed children mischief-making Gerry Nanapush, comforted and tormented by his several wives (not to mention a terrified moose, in a hilarious tall tale that's in itself a minor classic) Father Damien's stolid housekeeper (and keeper of 'his' secret) Mary Kashpaw and a very many others. The novel employs an atypical narrative structure, alternating between scenes from 1996 and those spanning the years from 1910 - 1962.

The action covers a span of nearly 90 years, and focuses primarily on two dramatic figures: 'Sister Leopolda' Puyat, who has performed 'miracles' of service at the Little No Horse Ojibwa reservation and 'Father Damien' Modeste, the resident priest who is actually Agnes De Witt: common-law wife of a murdered German immigrant farmer, lover of Chopin, and 'Virgin of the Serpents,' among other manifestations. Louise Erdrich's novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is written from the third person omniscient point of view and in the past tense.

The last report on the miracles