The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
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Book Reviews of The Shipping News
Book Review: Immense Insight and Rich Color
Summary: 5 Stars
First of all, I don't think that a review should "give" the book away. This review should just give you an idea of how good this story is.The Shipping News was recommended to me by a friend with a taste for the unusual. This was certainly fitting. This book is really well written as the story is immensely colorful and yet dreary at the same time. Through the use of picturesque metaphors Annie Proulx really draws up our imagination to help us see the world in Newfoundland through the eyes of a nieve 36 year old man growing up with his 2 young daughters.
Most of the world he sees is a grey, cold waterfront home to some strange and all-to-real characters. He watches them living their home-town lives from behind his desk and camera; and slowly finds himself brought into the picture.
The author desribes everything with such colorful detail that you can't help but picture the beauty of the writing in your mind...even when she is simply describing a red sweater.
One interesting aspect of the book is that each chapter begins with an insightful quote from The Ashley Book of Knots or the Mariner's Dictionary. I recommend you re-read this quote at the end of each chapter to see how foretelling they really are. This is just one part of the uniqueness of the story.
Overall, this is well thought-through and richly written book. The details are really what make this book so fascinating. You get a real sense of regular people bracing their homes and lives against the oncoming windy storms...as well as being able to taste homemade jelly drapped over burnt toast with a side of fried bologna.
Book Review: An Incredible Feat by a wondrous writer
Summary: 5 Stars
Some books, like valued friends, are a constant source of support. E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News" is such a book. A first reading introduces a magician of language, a unique style of communication, and an almost unbelievable mastery of descriptive information about a place little known to most readers (Newfoundland). Opening this book before it won almost all the prizes available to writers was a fresh introduction not unlike reading Melville or Conrad the first time. Proulx plunges us so convincingly into new territory that turning the pages is like walking in a foreign land, meeting compelling characters, discovering the raw life of the pioneer psyche. Writing in terse sentence fragments, spinning elegies when a character encounters the sea, the cold, the delicate hidden secrets of the past, describing the smells and tastes (like fried bologna and screech) and the manners of the bizarre townfolk of this strange place.......Proulx has few equals in the field today. The evidence of extensive research is everywhere and yet never flagrantly intrusive. Just comfortable.Re-reading, and YES I do encourage visiting this old friend again, only serves to enhance the impact of the first time 'round. How she is able to populate this story with the variety of people she does, making us want to penetrate the interstices of their lives beyond the hints given us, is a question that doesn't beg an answer: it is enough to just marvel.
Curl up, cup of hot tea at hand, and travel to the special place Proulx has created. A magnificent book with incredible staying power.
Book Review: Worthy of its Pulitzer
Summary: 5 Stars
It's hard to describe this novel. You can give a very vanilla summary on paper about a man named Quoyle who leaves his upstate New York life after his father's death, blah blah blah but that wouldn't take into account Proulx's very unique, at times perplexing, writing style (it's only perplexing until you receive little clues along the way that better explain the characters and situations), the odd names for the characters that are all nouns and adjectives, the cold locations and the fact that Proulx does nothing to make Newfoundland sound like a nice, cozy place when so many other writers, given the chance, may have tried to make it sound like Mayberry on the North Atlantic. You can take it or leave it, the island won't really miss you if you don't visit.
Those readers expecting a nice little travelogue about life in Newfoundland should look elsewhere: "The Shipping News" fully depicts the tough life that people experience on that great expanse of rock, not sparing us from tales of abuse and incest. But Proulx also shows how people in those same small communities do come together when needed and that the bonds of friendship are at times stronger than the bloodlines of family.
For those who only know Proulx from "Brokeback Mountain", this book will further acquaint them with her unique writing style and depictions of the "have nots" of society. Once you are deep enough into Quoyle's story, the pages fly by and I finished this book wishing it had been even longer. A one of a kind read.
Book Review: Returning to a simpler lifestyle for a happier existence
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the story of Quoyle, a total loser whose life has been so dysfunctional that he has come to expect nothing but ill treatment and ridicule. His father rejected him and preferred his brother, his career is a disaster and his wife flaunts her promiscuity in his face and eventually leaves him, taking the children so she can sell them. Following the deaths of his father and his wife, the loss of his job and facing a future as a single parent of two young daughters, Quoyle decides to return with his aunt to Newfoundland, where his paternal family had its roots. It is here in a small town that Quoyle at last finds a place for himself and discovers the true meaning of community.As well as being the story of a man's journey toward inner peace, "The Shipping News" is packed with sometimes really comic descriptions of small town life in more remote areas, tidbits of Newfoundland history, asides about seafaring and the demise of the fishing and sealing industries. The quick, short sentences in the first part of the book reflect Quoyle's crazed life, later as his life becomes more relaxed the story also flows more smoothly.
I did not see the movie, but the characters on the video box covers are way too good looking to have been characters from "The Shipping News", the novel. The main character, Quoyle is an obese man with red hair and an unusual chin that juts out like a shelf, his appearance is a part of this story.
Book Review: Beautifully crafted, stunningly good novel
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the very best novels I've had the chance to read. It's not just that the story is rich in and of itself - and it is - it's that the words themselves are so artfully assembed that they provide layers of undercurrents that add depth and emotion to the narrative. This book reads like a symphony, with many intertwined themes and narratives all woven together into a whole, unified picture.
Proulx writes in choppy short sentecnes. It's akward and clumsy language viewed against the littered murky landscape of personal failure and Mockingbird, NY, where the story starts. But when the story shifts location - in the first of several deeply satisfying views of fair-handed fate - the choppiness of the words begin to work in concert with the setting. Words that sounded unnatural and coarse describing suburban life are perfect when describing the Newfundland coast line and the direct, honest, self-possesed people who live there. As the characters grow and gain depth, the language fits them more and more clearly.
Proulx describes a world that could hardly be more concrete and weaves in thrilling bits of magic. She doesn't water down an incredibly hard life but weaves in the certainty that it's a also a good life. In the end, she's created a lovely, satisfying book without the slightest hint of syrup, contrivance or manipulation. Lovely, lovely, lovely. I hated to see it end.