3.5/5

This book made me want to go live on the coast of Newfoundland (despite some of the horrors of the locals' lives), which is always a sign that the heart of a book has really captured me. I should probably learn how to tie a bunch of knots before going, however.

This book gets me every time. It has some of the most brilliant writing I've ever encountered, and I am amazed by the way the characters develop and draw me in. At the beginning of the book, the main character is hit by tragedy so many times in rapid succession that it actually seems funny in a way. Bam! parents dead! Bam! wife run off! Bam! children stolen! Bam! wife dead! And all of this happening to such a lumpen hulking dolt of a man that it is hard to feel any real sympathy, just a dazed and giddy awe. By the end of the book, when something so small happens to the little girl Bunny (I can't remember the details, so it must be time to re-read, it seems like something happens at school?) something so small that it hardly bears noticing just breaks my heart. The characters haven't gotten any less strange but they have become so real. It reminds me a bit of the knots that are featured throughout the book; at first you just see this jumbled gnarly mass of ropes with odd bits poking out every which way, but after you spend time with it, getting quieter and stiller, paying more and more attention to the details, you begin to see the pattern, how it all fits together, and in that final breathless moment you manage to undo the knot and let something free.

This was a Pulitzer winner. Going through all those glowing reviews,I finally came across one which describes it nicely,"Bullshit".

“One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”--Annie Proulx

I've read this novel twice, the 90's and approx. 2010. Until I get around to rereading it yet again and can post a "proper" review, here are a few excerpts. Hopefully they demonstrate why I love this book, why Annie Proulx is one of my favorite writers. It's a unique voice, maybe not for everybody, but it's my cuppa tea for sure.

“Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father. For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”

And here are a few pages from the first chapter:

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

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. 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.

A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim. Again and again the father had broken his clenched grip and thrown him into pools, brooks, lakes and surf. Quoyle knew the flavor of brack and waterweed.

From this youngest son's failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cells -- failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure.

Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew it. "Ah, you lout," said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick, the father's favorite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room, hissed "Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub, Greasebag," pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over head, sniveling, on the linoleum. All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.

A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.

Some anomalous gene had fired up at the moment of his begetting as a single spark sometimes leaps from banked coals, had given him a giant's chin. As a child he invented stratagems to deflect stares; a smile, downcast gaze, the right hand darting up to cover the chin.

His earliest sense of self was as a distant figure: there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he. Until he was fourteen he cherished the idea that he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real people, saddled with the changeling of the Quoyles, longed for him. Then, foraging in a box of excursion momentoes, he found photographs of his father beside brothers and sisters at a ship's rail. A girl, somewhat apart from the others, looked toward the sea, eyes squinted, as though she could see the port of destination a thousand miles south. Quoyle recognized himself in their hair, their legs and arms. That sly-looking lump in the shrunken sweater, hand at his crotch, his father. On the back, scribbled in blue pencil, "Leaving Home, 1946."

At the university he took courses he couldn't understand, humped back and forth without speaking to anyone, went home for weekends of excoriation. At last he dropped out of school and looked for a job, kept his hand over his chin.

Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.

He fell into newspapering by dawdling over greasy saucisson and a piece of bread. The bread was good, made without yeast, risen on its own fermenting flesh and baked in Partridge's outdoor oven. Partridge's yard smelled of burnt cornmeal, grass clippings, bread steam.

The saucisson, the bread, the wine, Partridge's talk. For these things he missed a chance at a job that might have put his mouth to bureaucracy's taut breast. His father, self-hauled to the pinnacle of produce manager for a supermarket chain, preached a sermon illustrated with his own history -- "I had to wheel barrows of sand for the stonemason when I came here." And so forth. The father admired the mysteries of business -- men signing papers shielded by their left arms, meetings behind opaque glass, locked briefcases.

But Partridge, dribbling oil, said, "Ah, fuck it." Sliced purple tomato. Changed the talk to descriptions of places he had been, Strabane, South Amboy, Clark Fork. In Clark Fork had played pool with a man with a deviated septum. Wearing kangaroo gloves. Quoyle in the Adirondack chair, listened, covered his chin with his hand. There was olive oil on his interview suit, a tomato seed on his diamond-patterned tie."

Incredibile



Sono su GoodReads che aggiungo commenti, inserisco schede, ripasso in pochi minuti le mie letture degli ultimi anni*, e arrivata qui mi accorgo che non ho commentato questo libro. Che pure è diventato con prepotenza uno dei miei preferiti.

Sempre essere disposti a cambiare e a reinventarsi, nella vita, è questa la lezione di Quoyle.
C'è sempre una terranova pronta ad accogliere ciascuno di noi.
Bello da leggere e da guardare, anche se Kevin Spacey era l'ultimo Quoyle possibile da scegliere.





Recentemente ripubblicato da Minimum Fax, non lasciatevelo scappare.

(*Tutto questo succedeva prima del 2014, prima che il mio primo account su GR si polverizzasse nell'iperspazio e fosse poi sostituito da quello attuale).

"Una moneta che gira su se stessa in equilibrio sul bordo può cadere in qualsiasi direzione"

Questa è la frizzante storia di Quoyle "sepolto in una corazza di carne" e con "un mento mostruoso, una specie di mensola che gli sporgeva dalla parte inferiore del viso".

Questa è la storia di chi fugge e chi ritorna.
Con una scrittura briosa Annie Proulx narra d'intrecci che annodano passato, presente e futuro in una trama dal sapore paradossale e e fiabesco.

Quoyle: A coil of rope.

"A Flemish flake in a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary."

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

The above is the first thing we read on page one and a perfect introduction to our protagonist, Quoyle, a passive figure when we meet him that has been tread upon repeatedly. As it turns out Annie Proulx acquired a copy of The Ashley Book of Knots at a yard sale for a quarter and it was an inspirational source that she used to cinch together her story - starting out many of the chapters with an applicable knot description quoted from it.

Proulx goes on to describe Quoyle, the character, as being a large, lumpy figure with an enormous chin that he attempts to conceal with his hand more often than not; a wretched, unsuccessful man in a one-way relationship with his unfaithful wife, Petal, and father to two young daughters. The words 'sad sack' come to mind when I think of our introduction to Quoyle. Some very dramatic, life-altering events transpire in quick succession, leaving our sad-sack of a protagonist un-moored, allowing him to be taken up by the momentum of an aunt that heretofore he had not met, and thus the story has it's real beginning as the entirety of the remaining, and newly introduced family, make for their ancestral home in Newfoundland.

Proulx's writing style is interesting in an understated yet flourishing way (as if that makes any sense). I felt almost immediately pulled in by the characters and even the slightly off-kilter (to my mind) speech patterns. I found the actual story to be somewhat dark, but optimistic, and there was an underlying humor of the self-deprecating and often 'if I didn't laugh I would cry' variety. This is a book about getting to know oneself and second chances, as well as, perseverance. More than anything else though the star of Proulx's writing is the setting, Newfoundland is an imposing force within this book.

I was convinced for most of my time reading this book that I was starting out the year on the perfect foot, but for some reason once I had closed the cover I felt as though the overall impact was less than the sum of it's parts. I don't know if it had one chapter too many or about four too few, but I know that it didn't feel quite right upon it's completion. Befuddled, I guess, is the best way I can describe my ending impression, not disappointed exactly, but not quite satisfied.

One of the books whose middle part could bore you to death but when you finish it, you would like to go back and read again. I brought this book when I went to San Diego, CA in January 2017 to visit my mother for her 81st birthday. Even though I read nothing except this for the 16-hour flights (total of 32 hours plus stopovers and waiting) and during my 10-day stay in her senior's apartment where there was no wi-fi, I went back with an unfinished book. I have this habit of finishing what I started (even on things not related to reading) and sometimes I find it unpractical (like I am just wasting my life) but in the end, as they say, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. And this book, with its boring maritime references and the chapter-to-chapter illustrations of knots, is very much like reading inside the tunnel (at times in my reading, I did not know already what was going on in the story).

This is the story of 30ish man named Quoyle who has two daughters, Sunshine and Bunny whose mother Petal died in a car accident with her lover (they died after the mother sold her daughters). Quoyle decides to go back to his family's ancestral house in Newfoundland in Canada. There he has to reunite with his lesbian aunt, Agnis who is into ship furniture refurbishing. There, he gets to write in a small newspaper The Gammy News writing about small ships docking in the town's port and also, ironically, deaths in car crash.

The writing is very vivid but could be disengaging because the milieu is totally unknown to me. I grew up in an island but I guess maritime sea in Canada is totally different from our town here in Southeast Asia. Having a a century-old ancestral house stumbles in just few seconds when there is no tsunami or signal number 3 typhoon is unheard of. There is also no newspaper, even how small it is, in our town (even up to now) as people there are not really readers.

But still, even if I was not able to relate to any of this book's characters, I plodded on and continued reading till the last word of the book. And it just rewarded me big time. There were a couple of surprises in the end and made the reading totally worth every minute I spent on it.

And it gave me the desire to visit Canada and see my sister someday.

It took me a while to get into this book, but once I did I really liked it. Annie Proulx does a fantastic job writing this novel in a style that places you in the heart of cold, fish-stinky Newfoundland. She then fills that land with such a warm, genuine and quirky cast of characters that you have no choice but to warm up to the novel. By the time you finish, her themes and motifs are very obvious, but she develops them so subtly that they are completely believable and not at all forced. To top it all off, the novel ends with the most perfect final sentence of any book I have ever read. Sometimes I wonder about books that win top literary prizes, but this one definitely deserved it.

This novel has been on my mental “want-to-read” list since it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, and now I’ve finally gotten to it after recently traveling through Newfoundland, where the story is mostly set. My current Goodreads profile picture is of me in St. John’s, Newfoundland

This novel was for me one of those rare cases where the story is extremely compelling, the characters so rich & beautiful, the setting haunting, but the writing style not fully my cup of tea. I couldn't find my way into it and I kept getting distracted by never-ending dialogues and extra layers of information. Still a fantastic tale though, difficult to forget.

Personal rating
Plot: 4/5
Plot movement: 3.5/5
Characters: 4/5
Characters' arch: 4/5
Writing style: 3/5
Personal Engagement: 3.5/5

Overall rating: 3.6/5