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Loading... Tinkersby Paul Harding
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. To be read: Nancy Pearl: 192p "stunning use of language; reflection on life..."  audryh | Aug 9, 2009 |  This remarkable first novel is a testament to the power of observation. Tinkers is an examination of the relationships between fathers and sons. George Washington Crosby, who repairs clocks for a living, is on his deathbed. As his life begins slowing down just as his clocks begin to lose time and eventually stop, Crosby returns to his childhood. Memories of his father, a traveling salesman and epileptic, begin to fill his mind. Crosby’s father may not have been the most lucrative man, but he had an amazing sense of the world around him and his relationship to nature is almost ecstatic. The reader can work through the layers of meaning throughout the book just as George Washington Crosby works through the delicate workings of his clocks. While Harding’s novel is gorgeously written, his poignant attempts at understanding characters that are hard to pin down makes this novel a true work of art. (  )2  ironinklings | Feb 16, 2009 |  living2read | Feb 9, 2009 | This little paperback is covered with enthusiastic blurbs and glowing reviews; this always makes me skeptical. However, the story is set partially in Maine, my home state, and that is what attracted me most to this book, found while browsing the shelves (the following week it had been put on display). The life of George Washington Crosby is winding down as he lays in the hospital bed with his family watching over him. George had been a teacher of mechanical drawing and a skilled repairer of antique clocks. The dying George shares the story of his father, Howard, a peddler and tinker who had epilepsy. In turn his father tells a little of his father, a Methodist minister. This is a beautifully rendered novel, full of passages that can only be described as prose poems. The landscape of Maine, the intricacies of antique clocks, the experience of an epileptic seizures, and the cycle of the seasons and of life itself fill these 190 or so pages in lines and paragraphs and passages of fine craftsmanship. It's not so much the story as how the story is told that is so compelling. So, yes, the blurbs are accurate this time around:-) ( )2 avaland | Jan 10, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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"Tinkers is truly remarkable. . . . It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls."—Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Home and Gilead
"In astounding language sometimes seemingly struck by lightning, sometimes as tight and complicated as clockwork, Harding shows how enormous fiction can be, and how economical. Read this book and marvel.”—Elizabeth McCracken, author of Niagara Falls All Over Again
"Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work . . . fascinating—and sometimes horrific—to read, and is cumulatively moving because it is woven together into the single quilt of our humanity."—Barry Unsworth, Booker Prize–winning author of The Ruby in Her Navel
An old man lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Harvard. He lives in Georgetown, Massachusetts.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400)
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