Rating: 4.0What it's about:
When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just desserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.My thoughts:
The Shipping News takes place on the unyielding yet beautiful Newfoundland coast. It is a story of the land, the sea and ultimately the heart. It is the story of Quoyle. Him and his two young daughters flee from the states to their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Quoyle lands a job at the local paper writing about car accidents and the shipping news. It doesn't matter that Quoyle's wife recently died in a car accident or that Quoyle knows nothing about boats or shipping. This book follows Quoyle and his struggle to find his place in the world and maybe a little bit of happiness. The Shipping News is full of quirky characters. The writing is delightfully original. Proulx is clearly an author worth checking out.
*The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994
2 comments:
This book won the Pulitzer. At first I couldn't figure out why, although I found the book deeply moving and profoundly insightful. Both times I read it I found myself lulled by the language, caught up in the jarred crumbles of sentences that seemed to wind themselves into fragmented picture and settle there for the reader to gawk at, both in understanding and in horror. For I found the book truly, once I fully understood it, horrifying. Once the reality of these characters' lives came full focus, or even partial focus, for to be fully focused was to acknowledge what was actually going on, the horror of the reality became clear. Sisters raped by brothers; children sexually and psychologically abused by family members; husbands and wives so distant and so vicious that only abuse, hatred, and fear could be the root of it.
yet the simplicity of Quoyle, and the language he learns, adopts, and feels inside his bones releases all of them. And here is where Proulx earns, so rightly, so gravely earns her Pulitzer: As Quoyle learns to communicate, so we learn to understand; as he uncovers, reveals, accepts, we the reader also do so. The jarring, fragmented, rhythmic language, which reminds one so much of tiny shutter clicks, of nothing more than blinks into a life are in themselves metaphors for the lives we observe as we read.
And since I'm pretty sure no one will read this blog, I'm stopping here. When I see another post, I'll finish up.
Grazie.
Grazie that was very insightful. Thank you! : )
Post a Comment