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The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
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The Stone Diaries (1993)

by Carol Shields

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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3,971741,178 (3.74)1 / 296
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Showing 1-5 of 70 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  literary.elitist | May 9, 2013 |
Read it, can't remember it, lugged it home from my parents to re-read again. ( )
  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 |
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. ( )
1 vote Muscogulus | Mar 1, 2013 |
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." ( )
  ursula | Feb 6, 2013 |
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. ( )
  Nabilah | Oct 31, 2012 |
Showing 1-5 of 70 (next | show all)
There is little in the way of conventional plot here, but its absence does nothing to diminish the narrative compulsion of this novel. Carol Shields has explored the mysteries of life with abandon, taking unusual risks along the way. "The Stone Diaries" reminds us again why literature matters.
added by kathrynnd | editNew York Times, Jay Parini (Mar 27, 1994)
 

» Add other authors (13 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Carol Shieldsprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Gossije, MarianneTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
nothing she did or said
was quite what she meant
but still her life could be called a monument
shaped in a slant of available light
and set to the movement of possible music

(From "The Grandmother Cycle" by Judith Downing, Converse Quarterly, Autumn)
Dedication
For my sister Babs
First words
My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill.
Quotations
It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her...
She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf.
These last ten years had been a period of disintegration; he saw that now. He had imagined himself to be a man intent on making something, while all the while he was participating in a destructive and sorrowful narrowing of his energy.
Moving right along, and along, and along. The way she's done all her life. Numbly. Without thinking.
That life “thus far” has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing – she's done this for so many years it's become second nature.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (2)

Book description
From her calamitous birth in Manitboa in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughot her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill has struggled to understand her place in her own life. Now she listens, she observes, and, through sheer force of imagination, she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling miconnections she discovers in between. With irony and humor, CS weaves together the poignant story of this twentieth-century pilgrim in search of herself, and in doing so she creates a story that is a paradigm of the unsettles decades of our era. (0-14-023313-X)
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 014023313X, Paperback)

This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 21 Sep 2010 01:07:31 -0400)

(see all 4 descriptions)

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life -- from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.… (more)

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Voland Edizioni

An edition of this book was published by Voland Edizioni.

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