The Stone Diaries (1993)

Mind-blowing - an amazing book that sucks you right into the concerns and cares of the protagonist(s). It really makes you care, feel and experience the various joys and dramas of the characters. A great example of feminist, poststructuralist and postmodern literature. ( )

Read it, can't remember it, lugged it home from my parents to re-read again. ( )

Like nothing else I've read.

I initially gave this fine novel a 10 out of 10 (on the Bookcrossing scale) but am docking a point for the author's cudgel-fisted mishandling of Southern dialect in chaper nine. It actually set my teeth on edge. Also made me realize that I feel somewhat proprietary about the speech of my native land. It's amusing to realize how exotic we are at times to our fellow North Americans.

Ms. Shields’ imaginings of how we talk down here (our “muddied southern tones”) were simply bizarre. Really. I’ve heard a lot of Southern dialects, and nobody, I assure you, talks like that. I probably wouldn’t have minded as much if the rest of the novel hadn’t been so skillful.

My main point, though, is that this novel is well worth your time. The dialect speeches in chapter nine did make me wince, but even so, the same chapter managed to draw me back with new insight to the last illness of my mother-in-law, who died in our home a few years ago. Thanks to Carol Shields, I could almost (a big “almost”) imagine how sad, how irritating, and how humorous it is to be the dear old woman who is dying.

Think about the title as you read. ( )

The Stone Diaries purports to be a biography/autobiography of Daisy Goodwill, and as such it begins slightly before her birth in 1905 and ends slightly after her death in the 1990s. The thing about Daisy, though, is that (with apologies for co-opting Gertrude Stein) there is no there there. She is adrift, lacking an inner life, detached from the world around her but seemingly not curious enough to spend much time trying to figure out why or how to remedy that.

The first few sections were interesting, and the end was thought-provoking. The middle 200 pages were mostly tedious for me. Although I understand the meta comments about the difficulties of biography/autobiography as it relates to truth, I just didn't find it compelling. We're always kept at arm's length from Daisy, and she in turn is always at arm's length from everyone in her life. It's a challenge to make a reader care about someone we can't really get to know, and it just didn't happen for me in this case. The book contains a section of photographs which are supposed to be the people in the story, although their physical characteristics don't always match up to what is written, nor do the photos always seem to be from the right era to my inexpert eye, so I found them more distracting and off-putting than intriguing.

Recommended for: stonemasons, ... I give up - I cannot think of anyone to whom I would recommend this book.

Quote: "When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up - regardless of how true and just it seems - we turn up our noses." ( )

Really got scared by this story due to my dislikes of mediocrity. Daisy is what i don't want to be but i cannot stop reading. I think it is very well made.Maybe a life like Daisy isn't so bad at all but the "what could have been" is very frightening to me.It is an interesting story that i cannot put down until i finished it. ( )