Is it feasible to capture the entire course of a life, whether from an external vantage point or when recounted from within? What is immutable and what is ephemeral? These are inquiries that Carol Shields delves into in her 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning work.

It plays with perspective and forms of storytelling as it conveys the extraordinary life of Daisy Stone Goodwill Flett. With the family tree and section of black-and-white photographs, one might anticipate this to be a family saga.

And with the chronological chapters progressing from “Birth” in 1905 to “Death” in the 1990s, an objective faux-biography might seem likely. But The Stone Diaries is neither.

The facts are as follows. Daisy’s mother, Mercy, passes away while giving birth to her in rural Manitoba. Raised by a neighbor, Daisy later relocates to Indiana with her stonecutter father, Cuyler.

After a disastrously brief first marriage, she returns to Canada to marry Barker Flett. Their three children and Ottawa garden become her life.

She briefly finds purpose in her empty-nest years by penning a “Mrs. Green Thumb” column for a local newspaper, but her retirement in Florida is marred by illness and the sense that she has missed out on what truly matters.

What makes this astonishing life story so remarkable is its unravelling of (auto)biographical authenticity. Shields toggles between the first and third person, between Daisy’s perspective and a feigned omniscience.

Some sections spotlight others’ opinions: Chapter 6 consists entirely of letters Daisy receives, while Chapter 7 gathers short first-person narratives from her children and friends as they speculate on why she has fallen into a depression.

As in Shields’s Happenstance and Larry’s Party, I was struck by the role that chance plays in any life.

Talk of bias, gaps, and unreliability undermines the narrative. Daisy herself almost vanishes from the parts of the book where she is voiceless, consumed by her roles.

By the end, she is universally known as “Grandma Flett.” This meant that other characters stood out as more memorable to me.

As in Moon Tiger, one of my absolute favorites, the author explores how events and memories transform into artifacts.

The meta approach also, I suspect, pays homage to other works of Canadian literature. Experiencing the novel again after 14 years, I was impressed by the experimentation but ultimately somewhat detached from the story.

Buried in Print and I have reread six Shields novels together in 2020. I hope to find time to respond to the rest in the next few weeks.

It has been so rewarding to observe how her themes recur and interlock. How heartening to see that, 17 years after her death, Shields is still being read and remembered.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields is a remarkable work that has received numerous accolades. It was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is lauded for encompassing her entire life from birth to death. The book is divided into ten chapters, each representing a decade of Daisy's life, starting from her birth in 1905 in Manitoba, Canada, and ending with her death in the 1990s in Sarasota, Florida, thus covering the sweep of the twentieth century.

I had the opportunity to read the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, which was published to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary. This edition features a wonderful introduction by Penelope Lively, who points out that stone is the foundation of the narrative, specifically the dolomitic limestone quarries of Manitoba. Ms. Lively also notes that the best fiction surprises and withholds, and she herself sees the book differently each time she reads it.

However, my reaction to the book seems to be a bit of an outlier. While there are many glowing reviews about the beauty and allure of The Stone Diaries, my review is not among them. Although there were some parts that I found to be very rich in prose, for the most part, I struggled with the book. It may be that the book's style or subject matter did not resonate with me as strongly as it did with others.

Dezi suddenly comes into the world from her mother who has been unaware for so long that she is pregnant and thinks she has some illness. So Dezi will be born, but she will be taken care of by another woman, since her mother couldn't manage. The little Dezi will become the salvation of this woman who has long wanted to leave her husband and start a new life far away from him.

The stone diaries tell us the story of Dezi, a woman who from her birth it seemed that she would not have an easy life. A woman who received a lot of love, but also went through many difficulties, personal losses as well as professional ones. Through all of this she will fall, but she will rise again and her wounds will heal, making her even stronger.

I was drawn in by her writing, so realistic that upon finishing the book I felt moved and full. It is one of those books where not much needs to be written, you just need to read it.

I didn't like this book, and the main reason was that I couldn't stand the main character. She seemed to lack any real substance.

She never showed any joy, passion, or grief. There was a time when she seemed depressed, but even then, the emotions were not strong enough.

A person who has had as much life experience as she did - three children, two marriages, and two widows - should have felt some deep emotions. But her personality flaw made it hard for me to empathize with her.

The author's premise seems to be that the main character, Daisy, lacks strong emotions because she wasn't raised by her biological mother, who was an orphan.

They both lack passion and the ability to express it. Daisy never hears that she is loved, and she doesn't express love either. Her mother, Mercy, never said she loved anyone, even though she was loved deeply by Daisy's father.

What I did like about the book was the author's use of symbolism. Stones and flowers were used a lot, maybe too much at times.

There was the building of monuments by Daisy's father, his life as a quarryman, Daisy's gardens, her second husband's love and knowledge of plants, and the names of the characters.

If you like that sort of thing, you might love this book. But I thought it was really depressing.

There were a few funny passages, but I wouldn't call the whole book funny. I was also surprised that so many reviewers thought it was.

Finally, I thought it was strange that this was considered a fictional autobiography. Most of the time it was in third person, and there were times when Daisy referred to herself in the third person, which I found a bit disturbing.

It felt like the author was trying to distance the main character from herself. Maybe someone with a personality disorder like Daisy's would write a memoir like this and call it a diary.

The novel is well written, and the author achieved what she set out to do. But overall, it just wasn't for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed this remarkable book by Carol Shields, which delves into the life story of Daisy Goodwill.

What makes it rather unusual is the way it chronicles Daisy's journey as she endeavors to discover her place in the world.

Whether she ultimately succeeds or not, I'm not entirely certain. However, it was truly fascinating to accompany her through this exploration.

The aspect I liked the most was undoubtedly Shields' exquisite writing style. It was simply beautiful.

I was particularly enthralled by the first section, which vividly describes Daisy's birth.

The book is structured in "sections" that span Daisy's life from birth to death.

Some sections even take a step back in time to narrate the history of her father, mother, other family members, or friends.

One section is written entirely in the epistolary format, and that was one of my absolute favorite parts!

This book had been sitting on my shelf for quite some time, with me constantly procrastinating for various reasons.

But now, I'm truly glad that I finally picked it up and read it!

It has provided me with a captivating and thought-provoking reading experience.

"Χαλαρό 5αρακι. Τα υπόλοιπα στο ινσταγκραμι" can be rewritten and expanded as follows:

Relaxed 5αρακι. The rest is on Instagram. In today's digital age, social media has become an important part of our lives. Instagram, in particular, has gained huge popularity. People use it to share various aspects of their lives, from beautiful photos to personal thoughts and experiences. The phrase "Χαλαρό 5αρακι" might imply a sense of ease or relaxation. Maybe it refers to a particular moment or state of being that the person wants to convey. And by saying "Τα υπόλοιπα στο ινσταγκραμι", it suggests that there is more to discover or explore on their Instagram account. It could be a teaser for their followers to check out what else they have to offer. Overall, this simple statement gives a glimpse into the person's online presence and their way of sharing with the world.

Pulitzer 3 for the year.

The Stone Diaries had not been on my radar this year. When I decided to read only women authors, I had to consider my Pulitzer winners for the month and set aside the books written by men for another time. Although I have a preference for nonfiction, I have always relished a family saga or a series of books that unfold over a century or more. A high-quality saga or historical fiction of this kind can impart as much knowledge about the world to readers as nonfiction can.

When I saw the blurb about The Stone Diaries, I surmised that it was a book I would desire to read. The author, Carol Shields, hails from the Midwest and ascended to a position on the board of the University of Winnipeg. Her protagonist lives into her nineties and witnesses the transformation of the world throughout the twentieth century. Always in pursuit of books with strong female protagonists, I selected The Stone Diaries as one of my Pulitzer winners for this month.

Because I had no expectations going in, other than that the author is an academic originally from the Chicago suburbs, I was left astounded by the literary prose and the storyline that spanned four generations over the course of the 20th century.

Cuyler Goodwill, an only child, utilized his skill as a stone cutter to leave his parents' home in his early twenties. A fortuitous encounter while doing contract work at a local orphanage led him to meet his wife, Mercy Stone, thus giving rise to The Stone Diaries. Stones play a crucial role, both literally and figuratively, throughout the novel.

At first, it seems that the stone quarry outside Winnipeg provides the characters with their income, but stone and flora become as integral to the narrative as the personas themselves. Mercy Stone was a large woman who had no understanding of how her body functioned and, as an orphan, had little ability to love, with a heart of stone. Less than two years into her marriage, she goes into labor without realizing she is pregnant, and Cuyler feels deceived by his wife.

It is 1905, and a single man was not considered capable of raising a child, especially a girl. The real-life comparison I can make is when Theodore Roosevelt left his daughter Alice with his sister to raise after the death of his wife. Single men did not raise children at the dawn of the 20th century. The baby, Daisy, would be raised by her neighbor Clarentine Flett and her son Barker, a teacher in the nascent town of Winnipeg.

Daisy, precocious and fond of the outdoors, had no memories of her parents, only her "Aunt" Clarentine and Barker, a man who loved Daisy from the moment he saw her.

Years pass. Clarentine is killed. In the meantime, Cuyler Goodwill erects a stone monument in memory of his wife. He is sought after for his work as a stone cutter and accepts a position in Bloomington, Indiana, deciding that Daisy will have a better future there than in Winnipeg. Barker Flett, over time, becomes a renowned botanist and leaves his family behind, accepting a position in Ottawa.

Although separated from Daisy, his memories and love for her are firmly entrenched in his heart. I thought of the relationship between Ralph and Meggie in The Thorn Birds and couldn't help but smile. Cuyler progresses from a stone cutter to a businessman. His company supplies limestone to companies constructing skyscrapers, solidifying the United States' position as a world power, including for the Empire State Building.

Barker collects lady slippers and also rises in his profession, becoming a pillar of Ottawa's society. Every two months, he writes a letter to Daisy, and she responds. In the meantime, Daisy earns a degree at Long College for Women during an era when few women attended college. Had she been born in a different era, she could have been an academic, and one could argue that if that were the case, she would be Shields' alter ego.

After graduation, women were expected to earn their "Mrs" degree or become secretaries. Daisy falls for Harold Hoad, the son of a respectable Bloomington family. The marriage does not last long due to a tragic accident. For various reasons, Daisy's marriage begins to harden the hearts of Daisy, Cuyler, and Barker.

A twenty-three-year-old widow, Daisy is desirable but uninterested in any of Bloomington's bachelors. To get ahead in life, she, like the author, would eventually leave the Midwest for Canada.

Daisy's life path leads her to marry Barker Flett, with him being more excited about the prospect than she is. By age thirty-two, Daisy's heart is hardened. It is either an easy marriage to a man twenty years her senior or a life as a spinster in her newly married father's house. Despite their advancing age, the couple manages to have three children: Alice, Warren, and Joanie.

It appears that the novel is the three of them looking back at their mother's life at her funeral, but much of the novel is told from Daisy's perspective, with insights provided by those closest to her. Her husband and father pass away in the same year, and Daisy spends the rest of her life concealing her grief.

It is the 1950s. Women are housewives and do not work much outside the home. Daisy's one love is gardening, which is symbolic of her name, and she turns this into a job as a columnist with the pseudonym Mrs Green Thumb. Gardening and writing about it seem to be the one love of Daisy's life.

Yes, she remained "happily" married for twenty years, but she carried baggage from not having biological parents or even in-laws. The Stone Diaries are appropriately named to chronicle the family history but also to track how all the stones reduce their capacity to love over time. While none of the family seems particularly happy, I continued reading to see if Daisy would achieve happiness in a long life that outwardly appeared well-lived.

The one family member Daisy doted on is her great-niece Victoria. Victoria loves her Aunt Daisy like a real grandmother and visits her multiple times a year in Florida after Daisy moves there in her later years. At this point, Daisy's own children witness a bitter woman who is difficult to live with and move as far away from her as possible.

Alice is the one readers hear the most from because she takes the time to correspond with her mother; however, she lives in England, is a professor of Russian literature, and visiting her mother is challenging. Joanie makes her home in the Pacific Northwest and moves around the west, essentially a hippie. Warren has the hardest heart of the three because he appears self-centered as an adult and hardly communicates with his mother at all.

This leaves Daisy with Victoria, and she brags to everyone about how Victoria is studying to earn a PhD in paleobotany. Victoria seems to be the only member of the family at peace with her situation, in contrast to Daisy, who still has issues with her early childhood in her older age.

It is Victoria who encourages Daisy to come out of her shell and travel to Europe with her. Although it occurs to Victoria that Aunt Daisy would have been happier staying home, the trip brings discovery, and Daisy, towards the end of her life, achieves some happiness in seeing Victoria at peace with her own life choices, a much more peaceful soul than other members of the Flett family who, generations earlier, lost the capacity to love.

Carol Shields, according to reviewers, is a writer's writer. She wrote over twenty books, all filled with high-quality literary prose. They also note that she must be a reader's writer because The Stone Diaries won both the Canadian General's Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the same year.

The edition I read included an introduction by Penelope Lively, a wonderful author in her own right and a huge fan of Shields' work. She has read The Stone Diaries multiple times and declared it to be Shields' opus. Shields continued to write even after becoming a respected academic.

In the Goodwill/Stone/Flett family, she created a saga that explores a family lacking in love over the course of a century. The inclusion of actual historical events, from the Lindbergh voyage to the Dionne quintuplets, elevates this novel to another level.

I have read a number of Pulitzers at some point and have found some better than others. Like any reader, I have my favorites. The Stone Diaries was not on my reading radar, so I had few expectations going in. I finished with a sense of a woman who did her best to achieve happiness in her life, with readers witnessing how life changes over time.

From having zero expectations going in, I ended with The Stone Diaries catapulting into my top five Pulitzers read. I am honored to have read Shields during this women's history month.

4.5 stars

My next read, going backwards through the Pulitzer winners, is "The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields. This remarkable book not only won Canada's top book award in its year but was also a National Book Award finalist. All the accolades and praise it received were truly well-deserved. It tells a captivating story of a woman's life, from birth to death.

Daisy Goodwill is born at the turn of the century. Her mother passes away during childbirth, and her father is an accomplished stonemason in rural Canada. The themes of life and death, along with the metaphor of stone, are present throughout the entire book, starting with the title itself. We follow Daisy as she writes her journal, with decade breaks between the chapters, mostly in the third person. We sense her feeling of dislocation in her own life. Her birth was also her mother's death, and this event emphasizes the life/death motif and distorts her concept of time.

Baby Daisy is helpless and is taken care of by her neighbor, Mrs. Flett, who takes the baby to live with her and her son Barker Flett in Ottawa. Daisy won't see her father again until the death of her "aunt" eleven years later. Each chapter focuses on a period of her life and a key defining event, with many interesting diversions along the way.

Another theme in the book is sex and how different characters experience it. Her mother's death during childbirth marks sex as something potentially dangerous. Her father is distant from everyone but his precious rocks, yet he has a special and eternal fascination for his dead first wife.

Throughout the narrative, presented in the form of a diary, we also get a peek into the minds of many people Daisy knows during her long life. As she says, "Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses."

Her caretaker in Ottawa, Professor Barker Flett, is obsessed with flowers rather than stone. The motifs of pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle become a pendant for the motif of stone. Stone symbolizes male permanence and the gravestone, while flowers represent a more effeminate side and evoke life.

Some of the most evocative images in the book are the tower Cuyler Goodwill builds for his dead wife in Canada and the pyramid he starts as a time machine in Indianapolis. Despite his gift for oratory, he is never able to fully connect with his daughter.

Daisy inherits her father's inability to connect with her own feelings. She marries an alcoholic by default and never consummates the marriage. Later, she finds love with Flett's son and has three children. Her daughter Alice is the closest to her, and we get her perspective more often.

Unable to find a sexual outlet, Daisy turns to gardening. After the premature death of her husband, she takes over his gardening column in the newspaper and has some individual success. However, she loses the column due to an affair with the newspaper editor and falls into a deep depression.

She later moves to Florida with her friends and lives the rest of her life at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club. In her twilight years, she realizes that so much of life is spent being old. Her attachments to the earth remain superficial.

The book contains many profound quotes, such as "And it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves." Daisy's reinvention is a necessary but painful process.

After a visit to her grandfather in Scotland, her health deteriorates, and she has a massive heart attack. Her daughter Alice comes to her during this final phase. As Daisy passes away, she realizes that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive.

This was a beautiful and thought-provoking book. It is likely that I will seek out other works by this author, as I try to live a more conscious life and take to heart the lessons about living and aging that this book imparts.

How a simple idea, such as recording the life of an ordinary woman born in 1905, can become such a rich text... Shields' writing is unique.

The details of the descriptions, the original narration, and the entire approach to the subject make this book both so easy to read and deeply moving.

You close it, but you continue to carry it. Wonderful!!!

Shields manages to bring the life of this woman to the forefront in a way that is both engaging and thought-provoking.

Her writing style allows the reader to truly immerse themselves in the story and understand the experiences and emotions of the protagonist.

It is a testament to her talent as a writer that she can take a seemingly ordinary life and turn it into a work of art.

This book is not only a great read but also a valuable piece of literature that will stay with you long after you have finished it.

I left the book half-read.

This simple sentence holds a certain significance. Maybe I was interrupted by something urgent, or perhaps I lost interest in the story for a moment.

But whatever the reason, leaving the book unfinished gives me a sense of incompleteness.

I know that I should go back and pick up where I left off, but sometimes it's not that easy.

Life gets in the way, and other things demand my attention.

However, I also believe that every book has a story to tell, and it's my responsibility as a reader to hear it through to the end.

So, even though I left the book half-read, I'm determined to finish it one day and discover the secrets and lessons it holds.

Have you ever gazed at a picture, admired a great building, or read a paragraph in a book and experienced the world suddenly expanding and, in that very same instant, contracting and hardening into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you understand what I mean? Everything suddenly falls into place, everything is precisely where it should be.

Why, yes, Ms. Shields. In your beautiful book, it happened far too many times to count. If only I had read this on my Kindle, I could have highlighted the numerous perfectly written simple truths within The Stone Diaries. I'm not typically one to take the time to write down passages, but I did grab a sticky note pad to mark them for when I wrote a review. The problem is, there are far too many to choose from! Thankfully, after my sticky notes are reluctantly removed and the book is begrudgingly returned to the library, many of the passages can live on via Goodreads under the "Quotes from..." section. Although this section is sometimes lacking, in this case, it contains most of the ones I marked.

In her work that is part autobiography, part biography, complete with a family tree and pictures, Shields memorializes a fictional everywoman born in 1905 who passed away sometime after 1985 (the actual date purposely undisclosed). Our everywoman has her own set of unique circumstances, many of which are tragic. Every life has its own tragedies, and Shields makes you feel that hers are similar to yours or like those of someone you know.

A special treat for me was how, even though the story takes place mostly in Canada, there's a midwestern feel since part of it occurs in Indiana and she mentions the central IL town of Ottowa, which is in the same county where I have relatives. At one point, she visits the Morton Arboretum where my Mom's ashes are spread. I figured she must have been from around here and looked it up. She was born in Oak Park IL and moved to Canada in her early 20's when she got married.

I had a difficult time putting this book down because the captivating prose managed to make not only this ordinary life extraordinary but every life extraordinary. I'll be reading more of Carol Shields's books. I'm so grateful for my Pulitzer reading challenge because without it, I probably never would have read this one, which most definitely deserved its Pulitzer.

Written in 1993, THE STONE DIARIES was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1995. This captivating novel is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill, a seemingly ordinary woman born in Canada and who spent her life between Canada and the United States, living from 1905 to the 1990s.

Daisy, the half-orphaned daughter of an orphan, spends her entire life grappling with her identity. On the surface, multiple characters appear to be telling the story, but in reality, as the author has emphasized in several interviews, all the voices, whether in the first or third person, are those of Daisy. Penelope Fitzgerald has accurately regarded Daisy as a "closet post-modernist" who reports on her life as if she were an independent observer, standing apart from it.

Daisy Goodwill lived through many years, enduring several blows and disappointments. However, the overarching despairing thought throughout the novel is that she never truly came to terms with herself. Despite the humor and quiet optimism in the book, there is a sadness that pervades it. In the end, the reader is left wondering if Daisy was truly as unremarkable as she seemed.

THE STONE DIARIES is a lyrically written experimental novel that blurs the boundaries between biography, autobiography, and fiction. Shields was a highly accomplished writer with a keen eye for detail, capable of giving her characters a sympathetic portrayal. It is a highly recommended book.