This was a review in progress, as I waded through the bog of this book;

1. (October 28) A deeply uninteresting, unlikeable boy grows up to be a deeply uninteresting, unlikable man. He marries a nasty piece of work (who is also deeply unlikable) and spits out two children that are exactly the children one goes out of one’s way to avoid at shopping centres.

Parents die, wife dies, aunt shows up out of nowhere and whisks the whole aimless uninteresting lot of them off to a dreary remote end-of-nowhere town in Newfoundland.

That is the plot as it stands so far. This book won awards. Why is it that some committees feel that if it makes you miserable it must be good prose?

Well, to be honest it is - good prose that is - the English is well constructed and the descriptive powers of the Author are formidable. Unfortunately this formidable prose is completely lacking in any mitigating humour that would save it from being heavy, dull and dreary to read.

It might be that some shade of humour and likability may edge it’s way between the covers after the man starts the job after which the book is named. I am just not sure it is worth the slog as so far the only enjoyable part of the book has been the knot work quotes at the start of each chapter.

2. (November 7) There is room for all books in the world, it is good that we do not all read (or write, alike) this review is my opinion however and in my opinion overblown descriptiveness is a cheap and nasty way of convincing people that they are reading high quality literature when they are (usually) not. It is a specific style of writing that is only worthy of parodies such as Cold Comfort Farm, which mocked the florid style very well indeed.

As an example of what I dislike about the over-florid style, The Shipping News is made to measure. Consider the following sentence; “... oilcloth the colour of insect wings” [pg 57]. Do you feel that information as to the colour of the oilcloth has been imparted to you?

Really?
Wings of which insect?
Fruit flies and mosquitoes? (transparent with lovely iridescence and dark veins), Praying mantis? (usually, a delicate shade of green) Cockroaches? (dark brown for the outer wing case and light brown for the inner wings in ninety percent of species).
Or maybe a butterfly which is also an insect, a fact that cannot have escaped an author as addicted as Annie is to using every English word in the dictionary whether or not it is relevant to the meaning she is trying to impart.

3. (January 5th 2013) Finished. Thank goodness! there should be a way to give negative stars.

4. December 2016
It was certainly memorable. The painful, unpleasant memory has lingered over the years even though the memories of more enjoyable books have faded. So very memorable that I wince whenever I see the authors name printed and refuse to so much as pick up a book by her.

At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go."

Quoyle lives the life of a sad cliche. His family doesn't like him, his wife has affairs and he's socially awkward. His only thought is for his children, Bunny and Sunshine. When a situation causes them to move from Mockingburg, New York to Newfoundland, Canada, home of Quoyle's ancestors, he finds himself in over his head. Proulx is a master manipulator in this story as she forces the reader to sympathize with Quoyle's situation. He's dumped into a new setting, new country with only his children and Aunt Agnis to keep him company.

The descriptive detail in this book is fresh and full. "In the bay they saw a scallop dagger halfway to the narrows, a wake like the hem of a slip showing behind it." I feasted on this line because I loved it so much and you can look forward to this richness throughout the story.

Proulx makes Newfoundland come to life. This is likely due to the fact that she splits her time between there and Wyoming. This may not be the kind of Newfoundland you know though. It has this wild and dark, mythical side to it that you may have heard as a stereotype about the province. Incidentally when this book came out, there was some controversy about Proulx`s portrayal of Newfoundlanders. Some people from the province thought readers would assume these stereotypes were true. I would say the novel does nothing to dispel the stereotypical view of `The Rock` and its inhabitants but you have to remember this is Fiction. This is clearly stated on the back of the book.

Watch for the chapter titles. Each relates to a type of knot and informs the reader on the content of the section. Chapter One is entitled "Quoyle", 'a Flemish flake is a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary.' This gives you an idea of Quoyle`s character even before you start reading.

Something that deserves mention is the book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1994.

Proulx's writing style is unlike anything I've read before. Her syntax is fragmented and her removal of pronouns interrupts the fluidity of the story. For some this may be difficult to get around.

As well, a suspension of disbelief is required as various coincidences and other `unbelievabilities` pop up throughout the book and would be difficult to take otherwise. This includes the strange characters with quirky names like Billy Pretty, Tert Card and Beaufield Nutbeem.

Please note, this novel is not for everyone. The climax of the story occurs at the very beginning of the story and settles into a slow denouement. This is completely contrary to the normal story arc. This a quiet, steady book about family and the idea of home. It is not, I repeat, not a page turner. That being said, I enjoyed the stillness and contemplative quality that rose out of the book. For those who like stories about how a person can change and the influence of the land on the mind, this book is for you.

It is no wonder this won a Pulitzer Prize as this is a great novel with a unique, and beautiful prose style, using language I loved. That style was perfectly matched to the whole setting, like it was too cold to get out a long sentence or even communicate clearly. I felt the cold, felt the bite and the loneliness, and the way that self-reliance is required and how community can be a vital part of that life at the same time. A lot of big ideas in those little sentences, those strange interactions. It felt ragged and rugged, and constructed without being artificial.

Each of the characters were 3D real and subtly endearing. They felt genuine to the place and time, and while they are not the typical character we encounter in mainstream suburbia, they are familiar enough to echo those living close to the land and sea.
The main character grew and changed from the inside out, learning to leave behind the wreckage and make something beautiful. I enjoyed the character relationships a lot, and I loved what the book revealed about the Newfoundland culture.

The book has great drama, a good deal of humor. . . dark humor at times, but humor nonetheless. Mystery, too. The reader is allowed to unravel these mysteries, one by one. And of course there is romance. The book is a gem which I highly recommend.

By my calculation, Annie Proulx owes me close to $20, and several unrecoverable hours of my life. Not only did I buy and read this wretched book, but - inexplicably - I forked out another $7 to go see the equally wretched movie. I suppose I have only myself to blame for the latter exercise in misjudgement, given that I knew in advance how appallingly bleak the book was, and that it involved the wretchedly vile Kevin Spacey.

gaaaaah!

OK, so Annie P. achieves partial redemption through having written "Brokeback Mountain". Spacey still has his own special reserved circle of hell, though, if there is any justice in this world, or the next.

I wanted to start off my Pulitzer Prize Challenge--I'm trying to get in a winner once a month during 2020--with a book I'd been meaning to get to for some time. E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is pretty well regarded, but also happens to be about my adopted home province. Amidst a record-breaking and city-closing snow storm I read through the most of this ode to Newfoundland culture and lifestyle. Though I'd really hoped to like or even love this book, it failed to really grab me with its character-driven narrative.

That's in no small part to the gloomy and miserable life of Quoyle. The poor dude just can't seem to catch a break, and though he eventually finds his place in his ancestral home, it's a bit of a boring journey to get there. I'm willing to concede that to a person unfamiliar with Newfoundland this book could have a lot of charm: it's got reflections of people I've known even if some bits feel a bit outdated. I think Proulx does The Rock justice, but it just didn't end up being my cup of tea.

Even though this fell flat for me, I can appreciate Proulx's writing and her incorporation of Newfoundland slang, places, and people. I liked some of the book's philosophy, but won't be flipping through the pages when I walk by it on the shelf. Ah well, a bit of a shame that it didn't work for me, but there's lots of other Pulitzer's in my future! [2.5 Stars]

This is the first book in my 2020 Pultizer Challenge!

Un inno alla resilienza questo libro
I protagonisti tutti, dal primo all'ultimo, affrontano le difficoltà della vita, si fanno forza, vanno avanti.
Una storia pacata che mi ha stregato e graffiato. E l'ambientazione è indimenticabile

The writing out of which this tale is woven is awful… and yet I got to the end of this interesting, deep, and fulfilling story. I read slowly and carefully, and sought to find reasons for the disjointed and disconnected sentences. There must be a reason for this style, I thought. What is it? Consider the following sentence:

"Though the ferry heaved toward Newfoundland, his chance to start anew.” (p. 29)

This is a typical example of a typically awful sentence in this novel, which the casual reader may sum up as horrible grammar, fragmented sentences, lack of proper connections. Edna (the rewrite editor at the Mockingburg paper where our hero Quoyle works) would mercilessly criticize such a sentence, a fragment that begins with a subordinating conjunction and delivers no main clause. She would consider her author, Annie Proulx a "lobotomized moron.” (p. 8)

But there is nevertheless a poetic image here; though the grammar is disjoined, the effect upon the reader is to draw him in to a deeper emotional awareness of what the characters are feeling. In transcending the rigorous, intellectual grammatical requirements and syntactical prescriptions, we reach and strike at the raw marrow of life. Emotion and perfect grammar are opposed, or inversely proportional, and to marshal our emotions into careful grammatical expression is to lose the richness and depth of the emotions, be these moments of sublime beauty or moments of abject and horrible despair. This would be taking the golden essence of emotion and reducing it alchemically to wooden ashes. Proulx has broken the rules, transcended grammar, and accomplished something big, though it is sometimes hard to digest.

So, we have in this story ungrammatical, good writing, for an artful purpose. This often emerges in minor details: notice the artful use of the verb “heaved” in the sentence above, which emerges when this "sentence” is taken together with the preceding: “He was brimming with nausea. Though the ferry heaved toward Newfoundland, his chance to start anew.” (p. 8)

The text of this novel, the block of words, is as awful in its appearance, punctuation, grammar, and syntax as all of Quoyle’s surroundings; Mockingburg is uninspiring, as is the surface level of this prose of Proulx. Yet every sentence tells, and as one is deeper submerged in the style, one ceases to notice it as much. This would be a difficult exercise to sustain for long, if it were not for some artful reason, some sort of an ars latet arte sua reason. Have a look at this gorgeous "sentence" (Proulx makes us reconsider what should constitute a sentence.) and admire the placement of the word tuckamore:

“The car rolled over fissured land. Tuckamore. Cracked cliffs in volcanic glazes. (p.35)

I think this is a stylistically beautiful sentence, the structure of which reflects what is described.

In his review, my friend Eli Castro, discovered that "words that first sounded unnatural and coarse were perfect when describing the Newfoundland coastline, and the direct, honest, self-possessed people who live there.” I cheerfully agree with him (please read his review as well). As the symphony unfolds, the music begins to make more sense, but I must add another magical note. The language is directly reflective of the main character; his lack of connection to the world is exposed and brought into relief by the ever recurring asyndeta. Quoyle himself is a stumbling, muddled sentence, seeking a connection: “He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.” (p. 1) If we add a conjunction and fix the punctuation, it’s no longer Quoyle. The careful reader will discover this. And so, we find in the repetetive asyndetic clauses a sort of motif, with which the author, like a composer will, plays in manifold variety, and out of which she weaves a rich and deep symphony, expressive of the life and journey of our protagonist.

As in a symphony, there are transitions between passages of tremendous depth and beauty that in my recollection are spots I remember and wish to revisit again and again. On her homeward-bound journey here is the moment that Quoyle's aunt sees the island of Newfoundland from the deck of the ferry:

"The aunt looked out, saw the blue land ahead, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help tears.
“Comin’ ‘ome, eh?” said the man in the watch cap. “Yar, that’s ‘ow it takes you."
This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.
How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold. The lookout dreamed of roasted auk or sweet berries in cups of plaited grass, but saw crumpling waves, lights flickering along the ship rails. The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. She had caught the bitter scent as a child.
Shore parties returned to ship blood-crusted with insect bites. Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.
Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines––always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.
She had not been in these waters since she was a young girl, but it rushed back, the sea’s hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke and reeking armpits, the rattle of wash-ball rocks in hissing wave, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves….
Wondered which had changed the most, place or self? It was a strong place. She shuddered. It would be better now. Leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” (pp. 32-4)

One sees through the purposeful grammar a work carefully organized and structured. Connections are satisfying. There is good food for thought. I will not comment on the “journey” of the protagonist, for that would rob you, reader, of the joy of discovering it for yourself, but I can encourage you to keep reading, even if at first you are put off by its idiosyncracies; it is well worth the time. Perhaps even for those very idiosyncracies, an exercise in the creative use of language. I find this to be a story where style and content are perfectly in agreement. I wonder how Flaubert would judge of it.

اغلب ما ــ جرگه کتاب‌خوان‌های حرفه‌ای ــ پیش آمده که کتابی را خوانده و در پایان گفته‌ایم” چرا زودتر این کتاب را نخوانده بودم” و در حقیقت این همان جمله‌ای است که بسیاری از خوانندگان این کتاب در سراسر دنیا و از جمله خود من ــ فارغ از اینکه مترجم کتاب هستم ــ آن را بر زبان آورده‌ام. با اقتباس از متن کتاب فیلمی ساخته شده که انصافاً به لحاظ ارزش هنری به هیچ وجه قابل قیاس با کتاب نیست و به نظر بسیاری از منتقدین اقتباسی ضعیف و نارسا بوده است، بنابراین کسانی که این فیلم را هم دیده‌اند مطمئناً از مطالعه آن لذت بیشتری نصیبشان می‌شود. اما درباره سبک و محتوای کتاب گفتنی است که، نویسنده برهه‌ای از زندگی شخصیتی با نام خانوادگی کویل را به‌صورت سوم شخص و در سبک واقع‌گرا روایت می‌کند. کویل نماینده تمام انسان‌ها سرخورده از محیط خانوادگی و اجتماعی خویش است که وارد جامعه می‌شوند، کسانی که هرگز حتی فرصت شناخت خود را هم نمی‌یابند چه رسد به محیط پیرامونی و اتفاقاتی که در عصر جدید با سرعت بسیاری در حال بروز و افول هستند. کسانی که همه چیز، حتی تحقیر و فقر و بدبختی و خیانت و… را امری طبیعی و حق خود می‌دانند و درصدد مطالبه حقوق خود برنمی‌آیند زیرا اصلاً از وجود آنها مطلع نیستند. در واقع اگر کویل در اواخر داستان به شناخت نسبی خود و پیرامونش دست می‌یابد نه به دلیل پرسشگری و اراده بر دانایی و توانایی از جانب خود بلکه دست حوادث و قضایاست که او را به این سمت و سو می‌کشاند. زبان طنز کتاب که از سوی نویسنده بسیار به هنگام و درست به‌کار گرفته شده بر جذابیت داستان افزوده و فضاهایی متفاوت از آنچه خواننده انتظار دارد به او عرضه می‌کند. اما رمان “یادداشت‌های کشتیرانی” روایت ساده غم و شادی صرف نیست، رمانی است که در آن توصیفات و تشبیهات اشخاص و مناظر و اتفاقات به‌گونه‌ای کاملاً متفاوت از آن‌چه که در سایر روایت‌ها شاهد هستیم انجام می‌گیرد و ذهن خواننده را به وجوه دیگری از این آرایه‌ها سوق می‌دهد.

You know you're in trouble when you pan a Pulitzer prize winner, but pan I must. This book bored me to tears. Perpetual motion and its status as "currently reading" on Goodreads together got me through it. I didn't care what happened to whom or how it would end, I just wanted it over. Amazing the things that passed for excitement and were given excessive air time in this novel: an incredibly detailed rendition of the kids' Christmas pageant; knitting; the uneventful daily commute and various mostly silent car rides. Enough to make you want to shout FIRE! and see if any of these characters does anything but look around slowly, gather up his belongings--carefully--and think about that phone call he wasn't now going to get to make about that boat motor. Sheesh! Then when something interesting was happening, or happened before but was just coming up in conversation, nothing much is made of it! It's all brushed under the rug as not being worthy of the words it would have taken to adequately describe. I don't give a rat's a$$ about the detailed description of the animal paintings on the children's cocoa mugs, but I would have liked to have heard how, exactly, Mrs. Yark managed to rescue them from the total destruction of her house and her entire town.

And the names--nearly every one of them strange, and (to me) irksome. I couldn't decide through the entire book how to pronounce Quoyle--with a hard C or with a Kw. Wavey reminded me of Wavy Gravy. Petal. Marty for a girl. Beety. Last names (often used alone) were bizarre as well. Nutbeem. Pretty. Quoyle (double whammy, first and last). Buggit.

One review called the book "atmospheric." I'll give it that, if by Atmospheric they mean more "cold pea soup, no crackers" than "Middle Earth with Orlando Bloom." Another (this one on the back of the book), "a lyric page-turner." Whaaaa?

Enough, glad its done; it drove me nuts. Good thing Proulx's Brokeback Mountain is a short story, because I still do want to read that.

Romanzo molto bello, intimistico, centrato sulle vicende sentimentali e lavorative di Quoyle e della sua famiglia che, dagli Stati Uniti, decidono di tornare in Canada, sull'Isola di Terranova.
E' una storia delicata che svela pagina dopo pagina le debolezze e i traumi subiti dai personaggi e il modo che ciascuno di loro trova per andare avanti nonostante tutto.

My introduction to the fiction of Annie Proulx is The Shipping News. Published in 1993, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was one of several literary awards bestowed on this evocatively stark tale of a Statie, his aunt and two young daughters who relocate from New York state to the (fictional) town of Killick-Claw in Newfoundland for a second start on life. Much like Margaret Atwood, Proulx was on trial in my mind throughout her novel, which like Atwood, never ceases to remind the reader that they're reading a novel. It dazzles with its language and impressively bends conventions, but was difficult for me to love, with story and characters often yoked to the service of its descriptions.

The story involves a thirty-six year old oaf from the (fictional) town of Mockingburg, New York named Quoyle, who in the first of several reader-alienating devices, does not have a given name. An all-night clerk at a convenience store, he's befriended by a newspaperman named Partridge, who recommends Quoyle for the staff of a community newspaper as a reporter. A disappointment to his pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps father and walked over by his abusive wife Petal Bear, Quoyle's misfortunes continue when his terminally ill parents commit ritual suicide and Petal is killed in a car accident, having sold their daughters Bunny and Sunshine to sex traffickers on her way out the door.

Quoyle's only family (and the most realized character in the novel) is his paternal aunt Agnis Hamm, a yacht upholsterer who suggests her nephew and children need a fresh start. Aunt Agnis is nostalgic for the place she grew up and offers to relocate with them to Quoyle's Point in Newfoundland, their ancestral home where a house has stood unoccupied in coastal wilderness for forty-four years. Braving the wind and sleet and tire tracks standing in for a road, the Quoyles find the house uninhabitable. They move to the nearest town of Killick-Claw, where Partridge has recommended Quoyle for a job on the community newspaper, the Gammy Bird.

He had never seen so many ads. They went down both sides of the pages like descending stairs and the news was squeezed into the vase-shaped space between. Crude ads with a few lines of type dead center. Don't Pay Anything Until January! No Down Payment! No Interest! As though these exhortations were freshly coined phrases for vinyl siding, rubber stamps, life insurance, folk music festivals, bank services, rope ladders, cargo nets, marine hardware, ship's laundry services, davits, rock band entertainment at the Snowball Lounge, clocks, firewood, tax return services, floor jacks, cut flowers, truck mufflers, tombstones, boilers, brass tacks, curling irons, jogging pants, snowmobiles, Party Night at Seal Flipper Lounge with Arthur the Accordion Ace, used snowmobiles, fried chicken, a smelting derby, T-shirts, oil rig maintenance, gas barbecue grills, wieners, flights to Goose Bay, Chinese restaurant specials, dry bulk transport services, a glass of wine with the pork chop special at the Norse Sunset Lounge, retraining program for fishermen, VCR repairs, heavy equipment operating training, tires, rifles, love seats, frozen corn, jelly powder, dancing at Uncle Demmy's Bar, kerosene lanterns, hull repairs, hatches, tea bags, beer, lumber planing, magnetic brooms, hearing aids.

Quoyle's boss is Jack Buggit, a fisherman who launched a newspaper when the government proved inept at retraining him for anything else. Quoyle, whose journalism experience is limited to covering municipal news, is put on the car wreck beat, taking pictures and writing copy for the latest fatality, or using stock photos from past accidents if there hasn't been a new one. The fact that Quoyle's wife was just killed in a car accident seems not to have made an impression on Buggit, who also wants Quoyle to cover the shipping news, checking in each week with the harbormaster Diddy Shovel on which ships are coming and going.

The Gammy Bird consists the managing editor Tert Card, an alcoholic who detests the weather and economic malaise of Newfoundland and fakes almost all the ads in an effort to make the paper look profitable. Billy Pretty is Jack's second cousin, a bachelor who writes a salacious gossip column under the pseudonym Junior Sugg and offers to help Quoyle learn how to navigate the waters. Nutbeem is an English expat who covers the local sex abuse beat and reports foreign news he hears on the radio. Living in the Tickle Motel, where an inoperable phone and a broken doorknob traps them inside the room their first morning there, Quoyle gets a crash course in Newfoundland living.

With land passage often more difficult than water, Quoyle pays $50 for a homemade speedboat, which becomes the laughingstock of Killick-Claw. Pooling resources with Aunt Agnis, he begins repairing the house on Quoyle Point, but learns that winter will ultimately close the twenty-eight mile road to town and make travel impossible. The shipping news grows from a list to a column, which permits Quoyle to express an opinion. Agnis tries to match her nephew with one of her seamstresses, but he gravitates toward a young widow named Wavey Prowse whose spouse, he learns, was also a philanderer. He tries to survive in a land determined to kill anyone who crosses it.

These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorers gurgled down into sea holes as black as a dog's throat. Bawling into salt broth. Vikings down the cracking winds, steering through fog by the polarized light of sun-stones. The Inuit in skin boats, breathing, breathing, rhythmic suck of frigid air, iced paddles dipping, spray freezing, sleek back rising, jostle, the boat torn, spiraling down. Millennial bergs from the glaciers, morbid, silent except for waves breaking on their flanks, the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore. Foghorns, smothered gun reports along the coast. Ice welding land to sea. Frost smoke. Clouds mottled by reflections of water holes in the plains of ice. The glare of ice erasing dimension, distance, subjecting senses to mirage and illusion. A rare place.

The pleasures of The Shipping News can be found in Annie Proulx's descriptions. She's peerless when it comes to describing atmosphere, weather or landscapes and transporting the reader to the environment, or the moment, of the scene she's describing. Newfoundland comes to life as an alien world populated by frontiersmen victimized by drowning seas, car accidents or a downturn in the fishing industry. In a misstep, Proulx also throws sexual abuse into the cauldron in a cavalier, almost jokey way, but the novel is at all times unique in its ability to carry the reader away to the far side of the world without judging it or making a mockery of the locals.

Tert Card slammed through the door. "I'm shinnicked with cold," he shouted, blowing on his chapped hands, backing his great rear up to the gas heater, "this degree of cold so early in the season takes the heart out of you for the place. Trying to drive along the cliffs this morning with the snow off the ice and the wipers froze up and the car slipping sideways I thought 'It's only November. How can this be?' Started thinking about the traffic statistics. Last January there was hundreds of motor vehicle accidents in Newfoundland. Death, personal injury, property damage. In just one month. That's how the need begins, on a cold day like this coming along the cliff. First it's just a little question to yourself. Then you say something out loud. Then you clip out the coupons in the travel magazines. The brochures come. You put them on the dashboard so you can look at a palm tree while you go over the edge. In February only one thing keeps you going--the air flight ticket to Florida on your dresser. If you make it to March, boy, you'll make it to heaven. You get on that plan in Misky Bay, there's so much ice on the wings and the wind from hell you doubt the plane can make it, but it does, and when it glides and lands, when they throws open the door, my son, I want to tell you the smell of hot summer and suntan oil and exhaust fumes make you cry with pleasure. A sweet place they got down there with the oranges." He sucked in a breath, exhaled a snotty gust of sleek yellow water like a liqueur. Addressed Quoyle. "Now, buddy, you got some kind of a car or boat wreck this week or not?"

If The Shipping News were narrative non-fiction or an article in the New Yorker, it would be a five-star winner for me. Almost every paragraph is beautifully written, but they didn't add up to compelling fiction. Proulx's imagination falls short after the character of Aunt Agnis, who feels like she should be the protagonist. Quoyle and Waverly's relationship is given hardly any care or attention, while Bunny and Sunshine are also just there, adding nothing (the cute names of these characters adding to their artificiality). Descriptions of Newfoundland are the star attractions and I recommend the novel for those; story and characters small print on the back of the program.

Nice novel in which it appears that to some extent you can overcome your past.

It's also a nicely constructed piece with this quiet core surrounded by these wild events (the apparent sale of the daughters, the past sexual abuse, the horrors of the ancient ancestors, the murder). However wild the events, crashing and buffeting against the rocky coast it is the quietness that predominates and wins out.

It is the kind of novel that wins prizes, because it is healing book, the past here is full of horror but in the present all those horrors are firmly confronted, resolved, stitched up, frayed ends knotted, no loose ends left and the future the author assures us can be happy irrespective of sexuality, personal needs or even the economy.

The interesting idea I felt was the notion of place and person, every person has they place and out of their natural and proper environment they will fail like an oak in the Sahara, even their physicality will come across and ridiculous and uncouth, however once in their correct ecological niche, the human person can flourish. And this book is the story of one man finding his place. The square peg sliding comfortably into the square slot. There is a charm in that though you could read it as a condemnation and belittling of the regional novel - 'hey look, this is where loosers make sense!' a kind of elephant's graveyard for off beat literary characters.