Tinkers

I think I might have read this book too fast. The prose is so beautiful it needs to be savored. These are the thoughts and remembrances of an old man dying. We travel with him into his past, alighting on moments of especial poignancy. A lyrical narrative with the pacing of a dream. This short novel is an ode to the fading beauty of life itself. Touching, sad, and ultimately comforting.

George, an old man, lies dying. As he dos so, we see glimpses of his memories, and of the memories of his father, who was a tinker selling household goods from a mule cart in the backwoods in the early 20th century. We also get complex, oblique philosophical musings and poetic thoughts and vivid images, some hyper-realistic, some strangely hallucinatory.

The whole thing seems like it should feel annoyingly disjointed and obscure. But holy crap did it work. There's just something about the writing. I don't know what, and I don't understand how. But you just want to to sink into it, to roll your brain around and around in it until your cortex is saturated with prose.

Well, I did, anyway. And I read it under very non-ideal circumstances. I show more think this is the kind of book you really want to read in one or two big chunks, on a quiet day when you're feeling focused. And I was the exact opposite of that: sleep-deprived, distracted, frequently interrupted. And it still had that effect on me.

I'm not much of a re-reader, in general, but I think this is one I'm going to want to come back to sometime. It feels like there's probably always going to be more to get out of it, always going to be sentences worth savoring again. show less

I took my time getting through the slim but somehow hefty 191 pages. This is a story about fathers and sons, marriage and loyalty, about dreams and the workings of clocks, generations, the flow of water, immortality, epilepsy, grass, mud, mules, hermits, and the richness of life and death. Even the dieing is lovely in this Pulitzer-prize winner. Much about the story reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, another spare treasure of a read. The prose is deep and tangential, but in a way that is reminiscent of a beautiful dream; while you are immersed in it, you know you are surrounded by grace and you want to savor it, but there is a lovely fog enveloping you and you know the beauty can't last.

Nature is an unknown factor in our lives; while we have tried to tame it, to understand it wholly, nature always comes back with a destructive violence or a majestic beauty, an unexplained phenomenon that halts humanity's hubris. The same can be said of human nature, that we'll never know the effects our lives will have on others. With his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Tinkers" Paul Harding examines the lives of three successive generations of men, and seeks to describe the impact of the unknowable human nature on their families. Interweaving the narratives of their lives--inner and outer--Harding effortlessly moves between the ages and the minds with an exactness that left me stunned. Encountering the moments in our lives when we feel a show more profound sense of connectedness to the greater mysteries is difficult enough, but tackling these ethereal experiences and putting them to words is a remarkable feat. My favorite moment came at the end of the novel (no spoilers here, I promise) when he wrote "We sensed, finally, the foolishness of attributing the unknown to secret cabals, to conspiracies. Everything was almost always obscure. Understanding shown when it did, for no discernable reason, and we were content." Amen to that. show less

lovely, truly lovely. Harding has a great eye, and a wonderful way of putting the reader in nature, whether the environment of the Maine backwoods, the urban market, or the mind of a man having a seizure that is as much visitation as affliction. The man in question, Howard, is a tinker, a itinerant fixer of pots and pans, a vendor of soaps and brooms. His father was a preacher who suffered from early dementia, his son George a successful teacher who also lovingly repairs clocks, another kind of tinkering. As George lies dying, amidst his large family, his life is counted down in hours, and he remembers his life, his father's life, their connections to nature and time, and their different philosophies.

The structure goes back and forth show more between these two men, as boys, as fathers, together and separated. Memories, hallucinations, are all mixed as the story of both men, but mainly Howard, unfold. It's quite magical show less

George Washington Crosby died. That, in sum , is the plot of this short novel, but within that death there is told a story of a life, a family, and a world made interesting through the beautiful prose of Paul Harding.

The book could have been called As I Lay Dying, but that title has already been used; it could have been called Clocks, or Timepieces, for that is one motif that recurs again and again in the story of George and his family, especially his father.

"That was it, he realized; the clock had run down." (p 33)

As we count down the hours until his death we experience images of his dreams, of his life, and of nature. Harding's prose brings each small detail alive as he shares the wonder of a life lived full of things, of tinkering, show more odd jobs, family interests, and disinterests. It is written with details sure to bring personal memories to the mind of the reader. It did for me, not that the small town may have been similar to my own, or not that the incidents might suggest ones I experienced; but one reference, to a Cribbage Board, brought back fond memories of learning how to play Cribbage and playing it with my Parents, Grandparents, and family. I still have a Cribbage Board hidden away in a closet, behind my Chess set. George's memories were like that, hidden away in the closets of his past, behind events long forgotten until the last days of his delirium.

We find out that George could not, or at least felt he could not, fill his father's shoes. Yet we are not told, but shown how, in a dream, George goes looking for his father and puts on his father's old boots which are too big for his feet, requiring additional layers of socks to make them fit. That is the way of this story: "Choose any hour on the clock. It is possible, then, to conceive that the clock's purpose is to return the hands back to that time . . ." (p 179) Thus the hands on the clocks go around and signal both the past and the present and, ultimately, the end.

Paul Harding has written a simple, subtle, and surely beautiful story about a man and his memories. As a story of one man's death it reminded me of Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil. Each story provides meaning, if that is possible, using exceptionally poetic prose to share the final dreams and thoughts of one man who has reached his end. show less

It's hard to review a book with no plot exactly, but I can tell you this is one of the most rich and beautiful books I've read in a long time. Mr. Harding is a real writer - every subject he brings up is an opportunity for his prose to shine. This is a real gem. I particularly loved his descriptions of the various clocks and their inner workings. And everything about Howard was a delight to read.