SHIPPING NEWS

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read. I read it over a year ago and it's still with me. It's one of those books that I wish I hadn't read yet so that I can read it for the first time. The writing is unusual, unique. I think it might be a hard book for some people to get into. But it doesn't take long, only a few pages. After I read it I wanted to visit Newfoundland immediately. The only sad thing is that those wonderful characters won't be there.

Rating:
Summary: Judge this book on its own merits - not critical acclaim!
Review: Despite my high expectations (due to critical praise & trusted recommendations), I found this book to be completely miserable. The protagonist is perhaps the least compelling creature in the history of literature. Read 10 pages before you purchase this book - it does not get any better!

Rating:
Summary: Man Becomes Man In Newfoundland
Review: Quoyle - the name refers to a coil of rope formed to be stepped on - is a large lump of a loser, molded at a formative age by uncaring and abusive parents. Utterly incapable and incompetent, yet somehow retaining hope and a caring heart, Quoyle suffers at the hands of everyone he is associated with - parents, siblings, whoring wife, even children - until he meets a friend, a hip journalist named Partridge who takes the Quoyle under his wing. Partridge sets Quoyle's redemption in motion and then departs, setting the stage for the true redeemer as the Aunt who (not so) strangely avoids Quoyle's father's funeral, only to then lead Quoyle back to the family homeland of Newfoundland. The story is then one of Quoyle's growing into his own manhood, of his family's final emergence from a sordid, suffering, violent past and of the many and varied characters and peoples that have populated the rocky hard life of Newfoundland. Not so much the story of a way of life passing as of the continuing sense of the passage of generations of lives in a hard - yet somehow magnetic - place. The characters and the cynical, deadpan, hardscrabble sense of humor are what make this story work. An easy paced, thoughtful, lyrical, funny, interesting read. Weakened by an inconsistent ending, but rates high marks nonetheless.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Book Ever
Review: I continue to be amazed people like this book. I found myself growing more and more hostile towards it with each page I read. Since it came so highly recommended, I continued reading, hoping it would get better. No such luck--I want those days of my life back.

Rating:
Summary: Detailed and innovative book.
Review: The Shipping News has unique style and interesting storyline. Annie Proulx almost poetic prose was a little hard to read in the beginning, but once I got used to it I was able to immerge completely in the book. Annie Proulx's attention to detail and knowledge of Newfoundland's customs created completly realistic atmosphere. She succeded in presenting the ordinary life of Quoyle - the main character - in absolutely new light. I could see the world through his eyes. The Shipping News was enriching experience for me, and I recommend the book to anyone who likes to expand his knowledge of different parts of the world.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for the psychologically intuned.
Review: The Shipping News is a wonderful coming of age story as well as a fantastic characterization of Newfoundland the unique characters that enter Quoyle's life and a little love story wrapped in one. Proulx takes you on a psychological journey through the eyes of Quoyle, an unlikely hero in his own right. Quoyle leaves you cheering for him to the end. Proulx's style is unique, vivid and powerful for the reader. A real treat for a change.

Rating:
Summary: The Shipping News was an incredible novel
Review: I began to read this novel and found it hard to involve myself in it. After the story progressed, though, it was incredibly easy to identify with Quoyle because everyone has been through childhood torment at one time or another as he did in the novel. The story of Quoyle's journey from a fat nothing to a man the reader has compassion for is really inspirational. It's also interesting to me that Proulx showed a great deal of reality in the novel when Quoyle doesn't really find happiness, "just the absence of pain". That truthfully is a great feeling and no one could have portrayed it better than E. Annie Proulx in her pulitzer prize winning novel, The Shipping News.

Rating:
Summary: An Original Novel
Review: "The Shipping News" shocked me with its crisp, evocative prose. Reading this book is like learning a new language - not easy at first, but in time you are rewarded with a gift of rich new meaning.

This book has so much to offer that its appeal can be difficult to describe: fascinating descriptions of an exotic (to me) location and culture; a funny, heartwarming story of a man coming to terms with himself; and a stimulating intellectual construct, illustrating how our various relationships are like different types of knots in the rope of our lives.

I unreservedly recommend "The Shipping News" to anyone with a heart, a mind, or a soul.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful writing
Review: After reading this book, I gave copies to all my friends and family, with mixed results. As you can see by the other reviews of this book, people seem to either love or hate "The Shipping News", there are no in-betweens. I loved it. Ms Proulx's writing is exceptional, and I found the book, while full of the agonies of life that we all face to varying degrees, overflowing with hope.

Rating:
Summary: A fine yarn
Review: Let me state at the outset that I am a Newfoundlander. I spent the first 38 years of my life on the island, cursing and loving the fickle weather, the stark landscape and the smothering isolation.

Concurrent with life in such a place is a certain xenophobia. Part pride, part fear, it tends to rear its head when someone from "away" decides to tell us about ourselves.

Annie Proulx is a "come-from-away", an outsider who came and settled for a time in Newfoundland, then went away and brought forth "The Shipping News".

By that time I'd moved off the island, like so many of my fellow Newfoundlanders. I left by choice to pursue a career opportunity, but it was still a wrenching experience. Thousands of others have had no choice but to leave, with the collapse of the fishery and the ensuing economic hardships. For them, leaving Newfoundland is a heart-breaking decision, because their loyalty to family and to the place is as fierce as a November gale.

A few years after I heard about a curious new novel written by an American and set in Newfoundland. So I read it.

As Quoyle made his inexorable if apprehensive way to Newfoundland I found myself wondering whether I would recognize Annie Proulx's version of my native province.

Not only did I recognize it, I came to know it better. She had found the poetry of the place, the brutal indifference of sea and stone, the soft light and the muffling fog. And the voices of the people.

Not a word rang false.

"The Shipping News" is rich in atmosphere, populated by people I know. It is a work fine in its observation and true in its telling. It's what Newfoundlanders would call a "fine yarn".