The Stone Angel (Phoenix Fiction Series)

Rating:
Summary: We should stone that angel
Review: this book is horribly wrong. Really, who wants to read about growing old and dying alone because you hated life and all the people it brought to you. This book is full of regrets and is endlessly tormenting to the reader that your every mistake will kill you in the end and that self-independance is a killer. They make you read this book in high school now and everyone in the free world with the right to education knows that a book they have to MAKE you read is not one that most people would WANT to read. Too bad you cannot make it no stars.

Rating:
Summary: One of the reasons that people do not read more.
Review: This book was shear torture. Who wants to read a book about a depressing girl growing up in one of the most boring parts of the world? No one.

Rating:
Summary: Do not go gentle into that good night.
Review: This is essential CanLit 101.
Iconic!
For the longest time I have intended to read Margaret Laurence, and this is where I have started. I now know that I will continue on and read more of her work, especially the other Manawaka books in the series.
I think we are looking at some essential Canadian literature here, and yet, nearly every high school student from St John's to Victoria would rise up and say "What? Are you nuts?" As much as this book is inflicted upon the high-schoolers of Canada, it sure has not gained a welcome reception by that age group! For the Canadian teenager, seeing The Stone Angel on the English syllabus has become the equivalent of.... hmmm what would one say? Having a radio that is locked on the CBC station?
I believe this is because The Stone Angel is a book that is all about the "interior" and to truly love the book the reader must have an appreciation of the life processes involved in becoming an elderly person. From start to finish we are on the inside of this character Hagar Shipley. It is not the realm of the exciting pace and involved plotline. This book is rather a very somber, brooding, introspective look at a proud and uncompromising woman in her nineties. She is a woman who does not (in the slightest) want to succumb to the realities, adjustments, and inconveniences of aging and dying. As she faces the combined trauma of diminished health and loss of meaningful relationships, she has to come to terms with who she really is.
How far will her incessant pride and irritable crankiness get her in this last year of her life? How can she escape from those who try to make it all easier for her? Will she confess her unmitigated (and inevitable) need of others... of those who truly, and undauntingly, care for her well-being? Will she break down or remain haughty?
Laurence is simply brilliant in that she weaves a seamless web between the present and the past, between Hagar's current experience and her memories.
It is not easy, the transition[s] that we who will live on into old age will have to make if we are to succeed at being old. This book pulls no punches with how difficult the process can be, especially for the type "A" personality.
It is no accident that the book begins with the lines from Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It is a story about a woman who raged. And yet (in my opinion)there is not one real angry tirade in it! It is (I think) a different sort of "raging" that is being dealt with here in the story, as with the poem by Thomas. It is not the kind of raging that is with gritted teeth and defiance, [denial] it is the kind of raging that is mingled with profound sadness and regret... yes, anger too I suppose, but anger only because one has to leave behind so much of what one loves.
Here is the realistic journey of a woman who has to come to terms with the fact that "what's going to happen can't be delayed indefinitely."
I think the book is somewhat of a masterpiece. Voraciously, I read it.