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Loading... The Line Painter (edition 2007)by Claire Cameron
Work InformationThe Line Painter by Claire Cameron
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Not what I expected but I liked it and thought it was impressive for a debut. Full review: http://www.canadianauthors.net/c/cameron_claire/line_painter_the.php no reviews | add a review
It's 1:08 a.m. when Carrie's car breaks down on the highway somewhere north of Lake Superior. It's dark, the road is quiet, her cell phone is down, and she is alone. She took off from Toronto that morning, running from grief over the death of her boyfriend, and unable to cope with the truth about the events that led to it. The relief Carrie feels as a truck pulls up soon turns to fear after its driver offers her a lift. Frank, her would-be rescuer, is a line painter, putting lines on the road "to stop people from being killed." But after Carrie gets in the truck, she starts to realize that this will be the road trip of her life -- a trip of terror, transformation and forgiveness. Claire Cameron has created a unique portrait of Carrie, a young woman whose actions are driven by grief and shame, her personality a beguiling combination of naïveté and streetsmarts. Frank is equally sharply drawn, his flashes of humour and tenderness disguising the wreckage within. Written in spare, unvarnished prose that brims with menace against the forbidding backdrop of a northern landscape, The Line Painter takes us on a riveting trip down a twisted road of memory and redemption. No library descriptions found. |
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In a remote area, north of Lake Superior, Carrie's car breaks down in the middle of the night. She hasn't passed another car for hours, her friends and family have no idea where she is, her cell phone can't find service, and most immediately pressing of all, she has an overfull bladder. Universal law dictates that as soon as she squats, headlights appear. But--no ordinary headlights--these belong to the truck of a line painter. In the remotest regions of Canada, Frank works the night shift, alone, tranforming dingy grey road lines into bright white reflective ones, with the help of millions of tiny glass beads suspended in the paint. He offers Carrie a (very slow) ride into the nearest town.
Carrie, we soon realize, is an enigmatic character: she takes up smoking again, because it seems like the thing to do; she tells us she tried, earnestly, to make herself "grow up" by moving in with her boyfriend, wearing suits, and playing house; and she alternates between extreme naivete and a heavy world-weariness. At times, Carrie's inability to distinguish real danger from imagined, her impulsive attempts to establish control over the situation, and her refusal to face her problems are a source of readerly frustration. But as the story unfolds, her doubts and anxieties begin to make perfect sense. By the end of the book, I was captivated by Carrie's experiences and by her heart, which was larger than I ever expected. The layers of guilt, regret, grief and loss that emerge in the last third of the book expose the beating heart of this unusual story.
At it's core, I believe that The Line Painter is a high concept novel. Like Life of Pi, or The Alchemist, Cameron's novel covers a physical journey--a journey with strange, fantastical elements--that leads the protagonist to a life-changing epiphany. If Life of Pi's high-concept hook is, "Boy crosses the ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger," The Line Painter's hook could be, "Stranded woman gets picked up by a line painter, embarking on a road trip of terror--and ultimately of forgiveness." ( )