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    Shadow Tag: A Novel
    Shadow Tag: A Novel
    Shadow Tag: A Novel
    Audiobook5 hours

    Shadow Tag: A Novel

    Written by Louise Erdrich

    Narrated by Coleen Marlo

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Shadow Tag is a stunning tour-de-force from Louise Erdrich, the bestselling author of The Plague of Doves and National Book Award-winner The Round House. When Irene America discovers that her artist husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it—into a manipulative charade. As Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children, their home becomes a place of increasing violence and secrecy. And Irene drifts into alcoholism, moving ever closer to the ultimate destruction of a relationship filled with shadowy need and strange ironies.

    Alternating between Irene's twin journals and an unflinching third-person narrative, Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and the anatomy of one family's struggle for survival and redemption.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 2, 2010
    ISBN9780061953637
    Shadow Tag: A Novel
    Author

    Louise Erdrich

    Louise Erdrich (Little Falls, Minnesota, 1954) es novelista, poeta y escritora de libros para niños; desciende de emigrantes franceses y alemanes y de nativos americanos de la tribu ojibwe, y esta diversidad cultural heredada de sus antepasados se refleja vivamente en su creación literaria. Actualmente vive en Minneapolis, Minnesota, donde es propietaria de la librería independiente Birchbark Books. Su novela La casa redonda, ha sido galardonada con el premio más prestigioso de las letras estadounidenses, el National Book Award.

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    Reviews for Shadow Tag

    3.5/5

    338 ratings44 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It took a while to get into this novel and to start to care about its characters.
    • 3/5
      I had a love/hate relationship with this book, as I seem to have with the few other books by Erdrich I've read (or tried to read). Some of her dialogue struck me as unrealistic and pretentious; but some of her descriptions of the way people are (or are not) with one another are exquisite.
    • 4/5
      It pains me to write a less than enthusiastic review of the latest effort from one of my favorite authors. Erdrich abandons the Ojibwe reservation and writes about a modern family in Minneapolis. Her main characters are only part Native-American, but she still manages to weave in some native stories and beliefs that bolster this crushing drama of a family in distress.Erdrich has created an intimate and disturbing portrait of a stifling marriage. She portrays Gil in the most unflattering image of a controlling person who has humiliated his wife by painting her in very personal and even crude ways. Irene feels invaded, as if he were stealing away her very essence. In her heritage, a soul can be captured in a shadow -- and Gil has stepped on her shadow.My problem with this book is twofold. Personally, I don't want to read about women who allow themselves to be used in this manner. Even more distressing is the effect that marital warfare has on the children who should be able to depend on one of the parents to protect them. Gil manages to terrorize his three children by his increasingly erratic behavior. They do not know whether to duck or be ready to accept a lavish gift from him. This distate is my personal reaction. The book is well written and has an interesting correlation between Gil's erotic art and George Catlin, who was a renowned Indian artist with a cruel steak of his own. I just didn't care for the deviation from the stories of the mystical members of the Nanapush clan who inhabit Erdrich's more traditional works. I hope that Ms. Erdrich returns to this mythical world that made me a fan of hers.
    • 3/5
      good book. a little depressing and with a surprising ending.
    • 4/5
      “Shadow Tag” is an account of a failing marriage between two very flawed people. Gil is an artist who has been painting pictures of his wife Irene for years, many of them verging on pornographic. He has a fierce temper, and can be astonishingly cold and demanding with the very people he loves most. Irene is a failed academic who is never quite able to complete her dissertation, or who herself display a very nasty streak. At moments they love each other deeply and touchingly, but much more often they hate one another and behave in increasingly destructive ways, Irene in particular struggling to extricate herself from the marriage. When she discovers that Gil has been reading her journal, she moves it to a safe deposit box, writing in it only from the small room in the vault of the bank, while creating a sham journal in which she writes false accounts intended to manipulate Gil.While this is a novel about a marriage, it is also fundamentally a novel about the shattering impact that the failure of that marriage on the couple’s children. Much of what we learn about Irene and Gil we learn through their children’s eyes. Irene’s alcoholism, for instance, is revealed through this description of six-year-old Stoney: “He drew his mother almost every day, in beautiful dresses. He gave his mother stripes and polka dost and if he made a flowery dress he put a matching flower in her hair. In every picture, at the end of his mother’s hand, Stoney drew a stick with a little half-moon on the end of it.” When Irene asks him what that is, he tells her: “The wineglass.” The depth to which this is a story about “the children” does not become completely clear until the very last pages of the book, when facts about its narration are revealed, leading to a dramatic change in our understanding of the story.Lousie Erdrich, of course, was married to Michael Dorris. Both successful writers, many aspects of their marriage were quite public, including allegations that he sexually abused one of their daughters. Dorris committed suicide about a year after he and Erdrich separated. Clearly there are echoes of Erdrich’s experiences throughout this book. Like all of her novels, this one is haunting and beautifully written.
    • 4/5
      I've always had difficulty with her books. I found this one easier to read than the others I've tried. I read it for a book group so felt like I had to finish. It's a compelling, complicated story of some truly unlikable and dysfunctional people.
    • 4/5
      This is a powerful book. The main characters have a love/hate relationship and I found the abusive marriage hard to take. I also think that the kids could have been developed a bit more. I did enjoy how the sections of the book kept getting shorter and shorter, so I was expecting some kind of blow-out ending, but I didn't predict the one that happened. Interesting take on artist and their subjects and I really liked the title, [Shadow Tag], and the how references to shadows carried throughout the book: giving the feeling of depth in paintings, standing still at high noon and having no shadow, being caught in the shadows, or lost in the shadow of genius, etc.
    • 4/5
      A gripping story about the psychological games present in a codependent marriage. The story shifts between Irene and Gil, all the way up to the startling and unexpected conclusion.
    • 4/5
      I liked but didn't love this novel. The characterization felt incomplete given that it's more of a character study of a family than it is a plot driven novel. That said, I really liked Erdrich's writing and I would read more.
    • 4/5
      very disturbing, but really good!
    • 4/5
      I received this as a freebie from Goodreads and felt obliged to put it at the top of my to-be-read pile so I could read and review it quickly. I haven't read anything by Louise Erdich in a long time, not because I don't like her work, but because other things have had a strongerhold on my attention. From the first page of Shadow Tag I felt I was in the hands of a master story teller. For me to give a book 4 stars I usually need characters to feel very tangible, or find an elusive writing stlye that captures me. In this case, it was the sheer virtuosity of her storytelling that held me captive. There wasn't an extraneous scene,, or a passage that went on too long. The story unfolded like a flower. I have a few other Erdich books on my bookshelf, and on the basis of this read they will be moving up on my priority list!
    • 4/5
      A brilliant, gorgeous portrayal of a codependent marriage told from multiple perspectives. It would have been perfect if not for an epilogue that too neatly explains the author's technique.
    • 5/5
      I was blown away by this one. Such a powerful, disturbing story, written in a sharp, poignant manner that took my breath away. Not a story that I can easily recommend as it touches on some issues that some readers may not be comfortable reading, but that is exactly what made this such an amazing read for me. Erdrich gets under the skin of her characters and brings to the surface their troubling personality and control issues, depicting a manipulative relationship as the damaging and destructive force it can be for all caught within its vortex. I seem to appreciate disturbing, shattering reads like this one. Not sure what that says about me but I think it says a lot about Erdrich's ability as a writer to unflinchingly paint a picture, draw me in as a reader and keep my attention while the subject matter continues to disturb and then throw me over the precipice like she did with that ending. A brilliant portrayal, but as I mentioned, not a book that is easy to recommend to others.
    • 5/5
      This was a very impressive reading. It's a story about a couple who is hating each other as much as loving but it shows that this love-hate relationship is bond to a violent deep addiction to each other. The story is narrated by the daughter of this couple with the help of her mother's diaries and the experiences of her childhood.Erdrich's spelling style is very rich and detailed for human emotions and therefore the reading is very gripping.
    • 3/5
      Gil and Irene America are married with three children, living in Minneapolis. Gil is an artist, made famous and successful by painting a series of Irene which ran the gamut from sexual to lovely. Now, their marriage is falling apart: Irene starts a second, hidden diary and starts using the one at home to manipulate her husband, since she knows he's secretly reading it.This is one of those stories where the writing/themes takes center stage, the characters come next, and everything else is incidental. The dynamics of Gil and Irene's relationship are complex, and Erdrich uses them to explore this idea of a "shadow" and how the representation of a person may steal his/her soul. Irene, in a way, is also trying to get out of Gil's shadow and his image of her, and trying to keep a part of herself separate and private. I found it both compelling and painful reading, and I never really loved any individual part. It was like a train wreck, knowing everything was unraveling and being unable to walk away.
    • 3/5
      Interesting story of a dysfunctional relationship between two creative people
    • 2/5
      I love Louise Erdrich -- I think she is a wonderful writer -- but this was a sloppy, painful book -- a devastating plot combined with inconsistent writing. I don't recommend it.
    • 4/5
      This book tells the story of a marriage that is different from any other that I have read about. Gil is a painter and his wife, Irene, has been the subject of most of his paintings. They drink a lot and argue a lot, generally with Irene begging him to let her leave the marriage and Gil telling her that he is too in love with her to let that happen. Most marriages in fiction are extremes---either people are blissfully in love or they hate each other---but Gil and Irene's marriage feels different because they have the mixture of love, habit, aggravation, boredom and devotion that seems to exist in a lot of real life marriages.
      They have three children who circle around their arguing parents in the way the children of troubled marriages do, alternately trying to pacify them and hoping to push them apart. Gil and Irene are both part Native American and one of their children, Riel, fears at any moment that some calamity will occur and begins preparing for it by trying to imitate the old Indian ways she has heard about.
      There is an ending and some literary tricks that reminded me some of Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl". However, this book seemed to use those tools in a more measured and refined way.
      I really admired the way that the author wove the descriptions of the winter time Minnesota landscape around the story in a way that made the cold seem like another character.
    • 3/5
      For the writing it should be a 4, but I just struggle with the level of angst
    • 4/5
      What would you do if you caught someone reading your diary? If you caught your spouse snooping in your inner-most thoughts, how angry would you be? In Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, Irene America is a woman in an abusive marriage, who discovers that her husband has been reading her diary. Instead of lashing out, she takes advantage — she starts a secret journal and uses her diary to manipulate her violent husband, Gil.Gil is an artist and Irene is his muse. His iconic paintings of his wife have brought him tremendous success, but they have also pigeonholed him as a Native American artist:“Don’t paint Indians. The subject wins. You’ll never be an artist. You’ll be an American Indian artist…Still, Gil had no choice. He painted Indians when he painted his wife because he couldn’t help it — the ferocity between them, the need. Her blood ancestors came out in Gil’s paint as he worked.”There is certainly ferocity between them. There is evidence of great passion, but it is passion that has turned sour and gone wrong. Irene has fallen out of love with Gil and I am never really certain whether Gil adores Irene or despises her. He goes out of his way to antagonize her, buying her expensive gifts she doesn’t want and throwing parties that she will hate. He ridicules her in person and on canvas — he paints her nude, in demeaning positions — but she continues to model for him. They are locked in a sort of mortal combat; they hurt each other terribly but they just can’t break away.“Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.”I love the way that story is both subtle and jarring. There are hints of violence and unhappiness, then there is a sudden slap. Gil dotes on his children, praising their unique qualities, then he slams his son’s forehead into the table. The family orbits around Gil, pandering to his mercurial moods — especially the children — knowing when to pull away, when to hide. Even the dogs are sensitive to it, milling around and putting themselves physically between Gil and the children. The children seem too wise, too knowing, and then Erdrich sneaks up on you with something shocking.Read my full review at Alive on the Shelves.
    • 4/5
      Erdrich is, without a doubt, a magical writer. She weaves words into images and emotions as exquisitely as her Native-American ancestors wove colourful tales into their blankets. Unfortunately, ‘Shadow Tag’ has a dark edge that’s not to my taste. When I think of ‘The Painted Drum’, ‘The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No-Horse’ or ‘The Master Butcher’s Singing Club’, I remember stories that wrung my emotions but left me with a sense of hope; a sliver of illumination that highlighted the essential strength and courage of her characters despite their very human flaws.In ‘Shadow Tag’, a story about a disintegrating marriage, the love/hate relationship between Gil (an artistic genius)and Irene (his wife and model) has too dark an edge. Irene has a spitefulness that I disliked, but Gil was by no means her innocent victim. Emotionally stunted, his art his only real passion, Gil was only slightly more sympathetic than Irene.I finished this book compulsively, as I do all Erdrich’s books, simply because her adroit use of words, her evocative imagery and the raw emotion of her characters makes for compulsive reading. But a melancholy has lingered in my heart, because ‘Shadow Tag’ is an unrelentingly grim story.
    • 3/5
      The book's title did not really coincide with the main theme of the book. This story was quite different and I couldn't believe that someone would go to such lengths to irritate someone else. I really loved "The Painted Drum" by this author but this book left me hoping her other books are better.
    • 5/5
      My first Louise Erdrich novel but definitely not my last. I had started another book but had to return it so I was happy to get my hands on this. I agree with many of the other reviewers. This is a painful book to read. For all of us in relationships, there is much to learn from this book. This book is why I love fiction. It give me another view(besides my own) on how human beings act. It allows me to benchmark my life. I did not like the characters but that is the true test of a good novel. Can I like a book with characters that I don't respect or like. Yes and this was one of those books. I am glad that I am not those people
    • 5/5
      This is certainly one of the quickest reads I had lately, but for two days I was literally page turning through this train wreck of a marriage. Irene America, ( great name) is not happy with her marriage and when she discovers that her husband, Gil, is sneaking into her diary, she decides to use it against him to plant the seeds that will get him to leave her. She is no angel, that’s for sure, but the husband’s violent tendencies have the three children flinching and huddling together in bed at night. Louise has had an affair but interestingly she feels that history requires two things- for the thing to happen and for the thing to be talked about. If it is never mentioned, then it is not history. She is also an alcoholic. Drinking is actually something she and her husband share. Also of particular interest is that her husband is an artist who is quite famous and has supported the family by painting all kinds of strange and often erotic pictures of his wife. She is his only model and the world has seen her naked in countless poses. In shadow tag a person steps on another’s shadow and that is integral here. By painting her he has stepped on her shadow, by deceiving him in her diary she is returning the favor. Though there are hints of the American Indian background of the characters ( both are mixed breed) there is certainly less than most of Erdrich’s novels. It is also interesting to speculate how this quite gifted author may have used this novel as a diary of her own, alluding to some personal similarities to her marriage to Michael Dorris. I have admired many of Erdrich’s works: The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, the Bingo Palace, Tracks, but it was interesting to see this variation in her usual style. I enjoyed this change.
    • 4/5
      “Shadow Tag” is an account of a failing marriage between two very flawed people. Gil is an artist who has been painting pictures of his wife Irene for years, many of them verging on pornographic. He has a fierce temper, and can be astonishingly cold and demanding with the very people he loves most. Irene is a failed academic who is never quite able to complete her dissertation, or who herself display a very nasty streak. At moments they love each other deeply and touchingly, but much more often they hate one another and behave in increasingly destructive ways, Irene in particular struggling to extricate herself from the marriage. When she discovers that Gil has been reading her journal, she moves it to a safe deposit box, writing in it only from the small room in the vault of the bank, while creating a sham journal in which she writes false accounts intended to manipulate Gil.While this is a novel about a marriage, it is also fundamentally a novel about the shattering impact that the failure of that marriage on the couple’s children. Much of what we learn about Irene and Gil we learn through their children’s eyes. Irene’s alcoholism, for instance, is revealed through this description of six-year-old Stoney: “He drew his mother almost every day, in beautiful dresses. He gave his mother stripes and polka dost and if he made a flowery dress he put a matching flower in her hair. In every picture, at the end of his mother’s hand, Stoney drew a stick with a little half-moon on the end of it.” When Irene asks him what that is, he tells her: “The wineglass.” The depth to which this is a story about “the children” does not become completely clear until the very last pages of the book, when facts about its narration are revealed, leading to a dramatic change in our understanding of the story.Lousie Erdrich, of course, was married to Michael Dorris. Both successful writers, many aspects of their marriage were quite public, including allegations that he sexually abused one of their daughters. Dorris committed suicide about a year after he and Erdrich separated. Clearly there are echoes of Erdrich’s experiences throughout this book. Like all of her novels, this one is haunting and beautifully written.
    • 3/5
      Just as her character, Gil, finds he is always "classified as an American Indian artist, or a Native American artist, or a tribal artist, I'm sure Erdrich has always been neatly categorized as an Indian writer. This book feels like a further exploration, begun in [The Painted Drum], of stretching those boundaries. There is even less reference to native history in Shadow Tag than in The Painted Drum Her main characters were both raised away from the reservation with little cultural influence. This novel about modern relationships (marriage on the rocks, children trying to avoid the fallout) is well-written, as usual for Erdrich. However I have read too many novels lately about women using alcohol to escape from their problems. For someone who sees nothing wrong with taking a drink now and then, this book would be worth checking into.
    • 5/5
      Gil and Irene are married with three children: thirteen year old Florian (a math genius who learns from his mother to calm his anger with alcohol and drugs), eleven year old Riel (who plots elaborate survival plans to save her family in the event of disaster), and five year old Stoney (who clutches his stuffed animals in order to feel safe in a home which is becoming increasingly unpredictable). Gil is a successful artist who paints only portraits of Irene – portraits which are often humiliating and verge on the pornographic. Irene longs to leave her marriage to a man who is emotionally abusive to her and has begun to strike out at his children. But, their shared history, complicated by a love that requires Irene to submit and Gil to control, holds Irene in the marriage. When she discovers that Gil has been reading her diary, she decides to use this as a means to manipulate him, a way to force him to leave her.Shadow Tag is a dark, disturbing, and psychologically thrilling novel about the unraveling of a marriage and the consequences for children living in a dysfunctional family. Gil is a highly intellectual man who is obsessively attached to his wife. He believes she is unfaithful to him, and is even jealous of Irene’s love for his children.He was taciturn, depressed, sarcastic, charming. He’d grin when Irene though he was going to yell, turn fond on a dime. And he hadn’t always been so angry. The truth was, he needed Irene’s full attention. He’d had it before the children came. They took it away and he was jealous from the beginning. – from Shadow Tag, page 56 -Irene lacks the strength to walk away from Gil – his control over her is nearly complete – so she becomes pathologically passive-aggressive, leaving tantalizing untruths in the diary she knows that Gil is reading. Their relationship becomes a game – like the title of the book, they take turns baiting each other, and all I could think about was the childhood game of tag, where one runs up and slaps another, turns and sprints away yelling “Tag, you’re it!”Gil had a wall. Irene had a wall. Between the two walls there was a neutral, untouched area, a wilderness of all they did not know and could not imagine about the other person. - from Shadow Tag, page 151 -Louise Erdrich’s prose is mesmerizing. She builds the tension between Gil and Irene beautifully. There can be no happy end, and yet the reader continues to read, anxious to see what will happen next, afraid to look away even though tragedy is just around the corner. Woven through the novel are references to Native American lore. Riel, the only daughter in the family, clings to her heritage for the power it represents. Irene examines and seeks understanding in the stories of her tribe and even names her daughter after an Indian poet.A sure sign of a great book is the number of stickies that cling to its pages when I am finished reading. Shadow Tag had dozens of them. Erdrich’s writing has a poetic, yet stark quality to it. Her characters come alive on the page. She deftly controls the plot, teasing out tantalizing morsels of information that keep the reader turning the pages. Shadow Tag is not an enjoyable read – it made my mouth grow dry and made my heart ache. There is an element of inevitability which informs the story. How can things possibly be fixed between these two characters? How can the children ultimately be saved from the wreck of their family?As I turned the final page, I found myself emotionally spent. But, even though I cannot say I enjoyed the novel, I was blown away by it. Louise Erdrich is the consummate story teller. Once the reader is in her capable hands, there is nothing to do but allow her to carry them to the end.Readers who love literary fiction, psychological thrillers, and beautifully told stories with magnificent language, will want to read this book.Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      Shadow Tag By Louise Erdrich Irene and Gil are married and have three beautiful intelligent children. Gil is a famous renowned painter and Irene is his wife, his model and his muse and always has been. Irene keeps two diaries, one is her truth, it is locked away in a bank vault and the second is her manipulative imagination because she knows Gil is secretly reading her diary and she intends to punish him. They are both descendants of American Indian tribes and the author works very hard, not always successfully, to bring this thread of Native American history and culture into the story. The novel depicts a violent relationship, both emotionally and physically, and its effects on their children. There is not a single character that is likable and it is hard to become emotionally attached to the any of them. The writing is excellent but at times the story is hard to follow and there is just something missing.
    • 4/5
      I've been putting off reviewing this book because it is hard to know what to make of it. On the plus side it kept me reading. On the negative, the deeply-flawed characters are rather frustrating in their lack of insight into their dysfunctional behavior.It's not quite a roman a clef, but I don't doubt that there are true statements about Louise Erdrich's and Michael Dorris's marriage in it (especially the dialog Irene and Gil have about their relationship as "kitsch". How many people have occasion to refer to their marriage in that way?).The characters' names are interesting, and I haven't seen anyone else comment on them. Are we supposed to believe that anyone would name a boy Florian America and saddle their daughter with the name Riel(presumably pronounced "Real")America? Real America? Really?Also the best-friend/sister character is Louise, just like the author. I don't know what to make of that.
    • 5/5
      A portrait of the deeply dysfunctional relationship between Irene, an intellectually inclined Native American woman and her volatile, often abusive artist husband, with their three gifted children caught in the middle.I didn't think at first that I was going to like this book, as I had difficulty relating to the characters' marital problems and found their little cruelties towards each other off-putting. But the writing was so good -- full of depth, subtlety and insight, written in a sparse, effective style -- that I quickly found myself swept up and drawn into these peoples' lives, almost against my will. I simply couldn't stop turning pages until I'd finished.