Shipping News: A Novel (Scribner Classics) (original 1993; edition 1999)

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, but just didn't get around to it until now. I must say that the book was totally unexpected. This is a book to be savoured and enjoyed. This is a book that is to be marvelled at. This is a real story about real people and real experiences. I know the book is fiction, and the characters are not real, but Ms. Proulx makes them all so realistic and believable. I loved every single one of the characters in the book. I loved the setting - a rocky coastline in Newfoundland. And I think that these characters depict so clearly the toughness and resiliance of the people who actually live in Newfoundland. The fishermen, the boat builders, the small town newspapermen, the tough and reslient women - all are depicted here in this book. The main character who we know a Quoyle undergoes a metamorhisis when he returns to his ancestral home with his aunt and his two young daughers. He was escaping his life in the States and trying to start fresh after his wife was killed in an automobile accident. Little did he realize that his anscestral home would welcome him back with open arms. He finds a life here that is totally different than anything he has experienced before. This book is so lovely. We see the stark beauty of Newfoundland and it's constant love/hate relationship with the weather. We see the warmth of people who all know that they are in this all together, and no one is really alone. The book is warm, funny, sad, melancholy and magical. A true Canadian masterpiece and a well-deserving winnner of the Pulitzer Prize. ( )

Well, this was a quirky book, in my opinion.
Maybe why I liked it - bleak bleak bleak - but that house seemed to have personality and so trailer trashy, yet hope amidst the despair.
Saw the movie after reading the book and that tied it all up nicely for me.
It's an ok read.
Read in 2004. ( )

“Omaloor Bay is called after Quoyles. Loonies. They was wild and inbred, half-wits and murderers. Half of them was low-minded.” (162)

Annie Proulx Rocks. Pun Intended.

Quoyle, protagonist of The Shipping News and known only by his surname, is a huge, miserable lug of a man, a failure-extraordinaire, excoriated by his family and cheated on by his wife. Middle-aged and father of two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, he agrees to move with his aunt, Agnis Hamm, back to the land of his roots: Newfoundland. Killick-Claw proves to be his silver lining. He lands a job at a quirky, local newspaper, Gammy Bird, where he writes a weekly column, “The Shipping News.” (Part of his charm, the paper owner assures him, is that he doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about). Quoyle settles in, and one new experience follows another: he makes some steadfast friends; experiences some adventure on the high seas; and is in danger of coming of age when he is attracted to local widow, Wavey Prowse.

The Shipping News is a story of Newfoundland and of its people: an isolated, wild, untamable place, populated by characters who are quirky as hell, tough as nails, and salt of the earth. By extension, it is also a story of the sea, glassy and murderous in equal parts. Proulx excels at bringing both place and character to the page. She introduces us to Killick-Claw’s harbormaster, identifying him first by physical appearance, and then by place, as he recalls a storm at sea:
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“Diddy Shovel’s skin was like asphalt, fissured and cracked, thickened by a lifetime of weather, the scurf of age. Stubble worked through the craquelured surface. His eyelids collapsed in protective folds at the outer corners. Bristled eyebrows; enlarged pores gave the nose a sandy appearance. Jacket split at the shoulder seams.” (79)

“It never leaves you. You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moan, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning. Bad enough at any time, but this was the deep of winter and the cold was terrible, the ice formed on rail and rigging until vessels was carrying thousands of pounds of ice. The snow drove so hard it was just a roar of white outside these windows. Couldn’t see the street below. The sides of the houses to the northwest was plastered a foot thick with snow as hard as steel.” (83)
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I think I’ve already made it obvious, but Proulx is genius. Her writing and her tone throughout capture both Newfoundland and its inhabitants beautifully, her sense of place and of character brilliant. Nor does she shy away from political comment, addressing head-on the longstanding economic strife of resource-rich Newfoundland, created in large(st) part by politics and politicians – “those twits in Ottawa.” (285) This is a book I’ve had on my shelf for years that I kept meaning to get to – I’m glad “later” finally arrived. Highly recommended.

“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.” (196) ( )

i love discovering excellent new writers!! (that is, new to me) ( )

unforgettable characters..and insightful chapter openings...her best work.. ( )