The Shipping News was published in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. This was a somewhat compelling novel as the story revolves around Quoyle, a newspaper reporter from New York. Quoyle's story is filled with tragedy. His philandering wife is killed in a car accident leaving him with his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, who he has to rescue from a man who bought the two girls from his wife. Quoyle's father had immigrated from Newfoundland and with little prospects in New York, his paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to make a new beginning by returning to their ancestral home there. There, they move into Agnis's childhood home, an empty and abandoned house on Quoyle's Point. Quoyle finds work as a reporter for the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, a small town. The editor asks him to cover traffic accidents and also the shipping news, documenting the arrivals and departures of ships from the local port. His reporting develops as Quoyle's signature column. Quoyle experiences the hardships of living in the bleak and frozen land of Newfoundland. He finds out secrets about his ancestors, makes friends with the locals as he builds a new life in Newfoundland.

Overall, I did enjoy this novel and its look at the people and place of Newfoundland. It tells of the fishing community and how the fisheries have almost disappeared. Many tragedies happen through the years including the drowning deaths of family members close to Quoyle. The novel is also full of humor and very colorful characters. The names of people and places were also very unusual and colorful including the towns of Killick-Claw and Four Hands Cove and the characters Nutbeem, Tert Card, and Wavey. However, Proulx's writing style was a little hard to read sometimes with many fragmented sentences among her descriptions. There is also a 2001 movie adaptation of this starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench that I'll be on the lookout for.

A beautiful, mesmerizing tale about northern seas, the power of new begininings and unconditional love. Smells like salt, icy ocean and lobster bait. Of life, death and everyday struggles that give one's existence its true meaning. Perfect.
________________________
Nie ma nic bardziej morskiego, nic bardziej północnego jak opowieść rodem z Nowej Fundlandii pełna legend, duchów, śmierci i wody. Wody, która zabija i ożywia jednocześnie. Co więcej, ta historia niezmiennie porywa z rozhulałym wiatrem, a teraz, gdy Jędrzej Polak swoim nowym tłumaczeniem mruga okiem do czytelnika i wyciąga językowe gry, które prowadzi Annie Proulx, to całość opowieści snuje się jak pyszna opowiastka snuta w tawernie podczas sztormu, po jednym albo dwóch. Z czarnym humorem, życiową swadą – ta historia żyje, płynie, aż się pieni na języku. Czyta się wspaniale, sunie się z falą i warto to docenić, warto się zachwycić.
Duży Buk? Co najmniej!

Annie Proulx's style of writing calls to mind the old saying of new shoes and how they pinch the feet until the owner gets used to them, or is it the shoes that get used to the owner? In any case, Proulx is an excellent writer, and this story required some patience on my part. At first it seemed as though just as I was getting into the story, it would make a jerk and toss me off my course until at some point the fragments seemed to align themselves and what was the final piece, was a beautiful mosaic, exquisitely rendered.

Quoyle, the main character in this novel, is an outcast with what he calls generational ill luck. From childhood, he has been bullied and shut off by his family and those around him with the exception of his friend Partridge. His wife Petal hates him, abuses and misuses him while leaving all parental duties of their two daughters to him, he finds no fulfilment in his work and it is until tragedy strikes and an aunt arrives that Quoyle is able to disentangle himself from a rather sad life leaving for a small community in Newfoundland.

It is in this small tightknit community that Quoyle finally, even though in his late thirties, blossoms. At first, Quoyle is filled with such low self-esteem and great self-loathing that he invites more contempt than pity, even to the reader. He slowly comes to a point of self-realisation, surrounded by a community that offers friendship and love.

Proulx depicts this small community with such brilliance. Its traditions, landscape, economic state, weather, kindheartedness, cruelties all done with incredible compactness.

A wonderful story. I love a good tale about reinvention and starting over and I'd especially recommend this if you do too.

This was one of the first twenty books I added to my to-read shelf here on Goodreads nearly eight years ago. Along the way, I somehow acquired not just one but two copies of this Pulitzer prize winning novel. Either my memory of what I own failed me, or I really wanted to read this. In any case, it was high time I grabbed one of those copies from my bookshelf! Besides, it’s so well loved, I was sure to be wild about it as well. I’m sorry to say that something went wrong here, friends. While I did respect Proulx’s work, I’m not able to write a gushing review of it! I’m kind of stumped to explain exactly what happened.

“Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.”

I’m all for the everyman or everywoman story. These are the kind of characters who appear to live rather ordinary lives; nothing flashy about these people. Kent Haruf and Elizabeth Strout write some of the best, in my opinion. John Williams’s Stoner comes to mind immediately as well. There’s a quality to their writing that makes me feel as if there is indeed something remarkable about these quiet folks after all. Their humanity shines through. I just didn’t feel it here, and I’m having difficulty pointing out why. Perhaps it’s all due to the writing style? Much of this novel is written in fragmented, choppy sentences - the sort your former high school English teacher would have gleefully marked up with the dreaded red pen in hand. Not that I mind this unconventional approach as a rule. I felt it lacked a kind of warmth here that would have been the perfect counterbalance to the stormy, frigid atmosphere of the Newfoundland setting.

“At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off. Translucent thirty-foot combers the color of bottles crashed onto stone, coursed bubbles into a churning lake of milk shot with cream.”

The setting is what truly stole the show for me entirely – that and the description of the old homestead, going back generations through the Quoyles, a family with a rather colorful, infamous history. Newfoundland is on my long list of places to visit someday. Proulx’s powerful descriptions went a long way in putting some stunning images in my mind’s eye. I wish that more of the plot had transpired at the old house. It was to this home that the protagonist, Quoyle, had fled with his two little girls and an aunt after misadventure and catastrophe struck. There was a delicious sense of foreboding whenever the house was described – I love it when a place becomes nearly like a living and breathing entity. My wish was not to be fully granted, however. A bit of a disappointment, I admit. I would have happily spent many more days beneath that nightmarish roof. I wanted more of this:

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odorless gas. The sea breathed in the distance… But the house was wrong… Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. That vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive… he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

There’s a motley crew of characters besides the Quoyle family. They were well described, but I can’t say I ever latched onto a single one of them. There are some unhappy and tragic pasts that are revealed. I swear I’m not completely heartless, but these failed to move me! I was fully inspired by at least three more novels before this one. Let’s just say that Anais Barbeau-Lavalette, Jeanette Winterson and Annie Ernaux are at least partly to blame for my lackluster response to The Shipping News. My apologies to Annie Proulx who through no fault of her own failed to seduce me as these three women writers did. I know I’m in the unpopular minority with my three star rating, but I’ve always said I believe in second chances. I have a collection of her short stories waiting for another day.

“All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.”

Easily one of my favorites. I did all I could to ignore the film when it came out and I recommend that you do the same. Book can be a bit hard to get into, but it's worth it. Somehow Proulx creates a landscape and a love story that are both sweet and stark.

Snore.

My initial review of this book was simply "Bullllshiiit", but, um, perhaps more explanation is deserved. After a handful of people whose taste I respect raved about this book, I was looking forward to it, and got to page 180 or so before finally admitting "This feels like a chore" and giving it away (and I *rarely* leave books unfinished).

What got to me about this book was mainly Proulx's style was too...forced. Nothing that occured felt real or believed by the author herself (and it's not that I demand "realism"; One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorites). It's that I felt like I could see the mechanisms behind all of her "tricks"...the anecdotes that characters told felt like ideas Proulx kept on a notepad before compiling them together for this novel. It read like the final project from a brilliant student finishing a course on creative writing.

I'm not saying Proulx isn't a good *writer*...but I don't see her as a storyteller.

I really had to persevere with this book because after 100 pages I was still not into it. However, it did get better although it didn't blow me away. I'm honestly surprised by reading other peoples reviews as so many had such a strong reaction to the book - be it positive or negative. This book left me with a few questions including, does everyone in Annie Proulxs books have randomly made up names like Tert Card, Rug Mcgeery or some such and how big exactly was Quoyles chin?

I liked the little info-bites about knots at the start of each chapter though. All in all, a pretty good read but not what I was expecting, and not as good as I was expecting.

Ależ to było dobre. Powieść, przy której mogę jedynie żałować, że przeczytałem tak późno. Aczkolwiek dawno tak beznadziejnego głównego bohatera, do którego ciężko czuć sympatię nie widziałem.

This is a book that I once owned when it was first published, but I am fairly certain that I did not read it then, because if I had, I would have remembered it. Not because it was so good, but because one doesn’t often read fiction set in Newfoundland.

Fun facts I learned: Newfoundland is not pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, but on the last. Newfoundland is the easternmost tip of North America, and in case you don’t know, part of Canada. I also learned that it is not a place that I would choose to live — Chicago has enough winter weather for me, thank you!

The book is about an awkward, low achiever man who makes a home where his ancestors had come from. After his cheating wife leaves him and two young daughters, Quoyle and his Aunt pack up the kids and attempt to restore the ancestral home. Quoyle finds employment writing a column called The Shipping News for the local paper. Lots of things happen, mostly of the man against nature variety.

There were moments I enjoyed, but overall, I thought the book was too long.

And, I have a pet peeve: I prefer sentence style to have a subject and a predicate, without just an implication. So the author’s style got in the way of my enjoyment of the story. To be fair, maybe that is the way that Newfoundlanders actually speak — that is, starting right off with a verb. A sentence like this —Standing in the snow.— is not a sentence to me. There were just too many of them.

So 3.5 stars, rounded down.

This is my first Proulx, so I didn't know if the unusual writing style is typical, or specially chosen for this particular story. I hope it's the latter, as it works very well.

Update: I've now read the collection, Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories, which I reviewed HERE. Those stories use similar language, but somewhat toned down.

It covers a couple of years (plus some backstory) in the life of thirty-something Quoyle: a big, lonely, awkward and unattractive man, always having or doing the wrong thing. He is a not very successful journalist in New York, who ends up moving, with his young daughters (Bunny and Sunshine) and aunt, to a small, somewhat inbred, community in Newfoundland where the aunt and his late father grew up. Somehow Proulx keeps the reader on the fence: he isn't especially lovable, and yet he elicits more sympathy than mockery in this reader.

I think one weakness is that the mother of the girls is too horrible, and the manner of her departure from their lives stretched my credulity somewhat.

LANGUAGE

The narrative style is the first thing to hit. It is very distinctive, continues throughout the book, and could be infuriating, though I didn't find it so. It is telegraphic and observational, reflecting Quoyle's job. There are staccato sentence fragments, and some overworked analogies, some of which are wonderfully vivid, and a few of which are laughably awful. Grammar sticklers may struggle to enjoy this book, but it's their loss - context is all, and in this context, I think it works.

If I were as clever and witty as some of my GR friends (you know who you are), I would have written this review in the style of the book.

Anyway, some typical examples:

This is the entire opening paragraph of a chapter:
"The aunt in her woolen coat when Quoyle came into the motel room. Tin profile with a glass eye. A bundle on the floor under the window. Wrapped in a bed sheet, tied with net twine."

Another whole paragraph:
"Near the window a man listened to a radio. His buttery hair swept behind ears. Eyes pinched close, a mustache. A packet of imported dates on his desk. He stood up to shake Quoyle's hand. Gangled. Plaid bow tie and ratty pullover. The British accent strained through his splayed nose."

Analogies:
* "eyes the color of plastic"
* "the sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of fog"
* "On the horizon icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased."
* "parenthesis around her mouth set like clamps. Impossible to know if she was listening to Nutbeem or flying over the Himalayas"
* "In a way he could not explain she seized his attention; because she seemed sprung from wet stones, the stench of fish and tide."
* "eyes like a thorn bush, stabbing everything at once"
* The ghost of his wife, "Petal's essence riding under his skin like an injected vaccine against the plague of love"
* "Fingernails like the bowls of souvenir spoons." (That's the whole sentence.)

THE TOWN AND COMMUNITY

Aspects of the town and its characters remind me of David Lynch's 1980s TV series "Twin Peaks": strange characters, often with impairments of mind, body or emotions, slightly strange names, odd superstitions, and dark secrets (murder, incest, rape, insurance fraud).

The town of Killick Claw isn't prosperous, and the environment is still harsh, but it's better than when the aunt grew up there: "The forces of fate weakened by unemployment insurance, a flaring hope in offshore oil money."

The Gammy Bird is the local paper, and it's like no other: lots of adverts (many of them fake), deliberate typos and Malapropisms, libelous gossip (including a regular catalogue of sex abuse cases!), shipping news and "we run a front-page photo of a car wreck every week, whether we have a wreck or not". Poor Quoyle is bemused and has the uneasy and familiar feeling "of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know".

THEMES

Knots are the most obvious one. Each chapter opens with a quotation pertinent to what it contains, and many are from Ashley Book of Knots, which Proulx found second-hand, and gave her the inspiration and structure she sought. Knots feature in the plot metaphorically (in terms of being bound or adrift), in a more literal and superstitious sense. Rope can be wound and knotted to make good a wound or separation. We also learn that Quoyle's name means "coil of rope", and I suppose he is pretty tightly coiled for the first half of the book.

Shipping is obvious, too, not just from the title, but because Quoyle ends up writing the eponymous shipping news in the local paper, in a community where everyone needs a boat. Most of the introductory quotes that are not from Ashley Book of Knots are from a Mariner's Dictionary. I confess there were times when the quantity and level of detail slightly exceeded my interest, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

The book is riddled with pain, rejection, estrangement and mentions of abusive relationships (never graphic); many are haunted by ghosts of past events and relationships gone wrong. But although it is sometimes bleak, it is rarely depressing, and sometimes it's funny. Even close and fond relationships often have an element of awkwardness and distance; for instance, Quoyle always refers to "the aunt", rather than "my aunt". Even after living with her for a while, "It came to him he knew nearly nothing of the aunt's life. And hadn't missed the knowledge."

Ultimately, it's at least as much about (re)birth and healing as death and doom. One character slowly realises it may be possible to recover from a broken relationship: "was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once?"

OTHER MISCELLANEOUS QUOTATIONS

* "a failure of normal appearance" - if you can't even achieve that, what hope is there?
* "believed in silent suffering, didn't see that it goaded"
* In a shop, "the man's fingers dropped cold dimes"
* "fog shuddered against their faces"
* "the house was garlanded with wind"
* In such a harsh environment, "The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast"
* "a few torn pieces of early morning cloud the shape and color of salmon fillets" (I think I'd prefer that one without the fish)
* "the woman in the perpetual freeze of sorrow, afloat on the rise and fall of tattered billows"
* a babysitter "doing overtime in a trance of electronic color and simulated life, smoking cigarettes and not wondering. The floor around her strewn with hairless dolls."

From The Ashley Book of Knots:
"To prevent slipping, a knot depends on friction, and to provide friction there must be pressure of some sort."

Probably not a good idea for me since reading convoluted descriptions of the weather is never going to be one of my favourite forms of entertainment and long languid non-stories involving lotsa far-fetched sitcommy eccentric types with daft names all being telegraphed to my brain in a staccato style studded with many outre dialect words that aren’t in big dictionaries so I guess musta bin quarried out of The Dictionary of Newfoundland English by G M Story et al (847 pages, revised edition published 1990) are when I’m brutally honest the thing I would tiptoe barefoot over broken glass to avoid, mostly. I kept leaving this paperback outside, but it didn't rain.