Gift Of Stones [Paperback]

Jim Crace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1996

Set before the advent of the Bronze Age, The Gift of Stones centers around a community of stoneworkers who live in a village near the sea. Wealthy and complacent, they survive by the trade of their unrivaled skills, secure in the supremacy of their craftsmenship. A small boy, outcast by misfortune, ventures from the confines of the enclave to explore the unknown. He returns with enchanting tales of ships and the seashore, of new vistas and horizons, that beguile and disturb the villagers. In spite of his words and intuitive wisodm, the stoneworkers remain oblivious to the winds of change beginning to blow in the outside world. Until, that is, the storyteller brings back to the village a strange and angry woman whose presence foretells the coming of metal, the end of stone, and the demise of their way of life.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

If Crace's name is not yet familiar to American readers, it soon should be. This 42-year-old Englishman's second work continues in the imaginative and almost poetic vein of his Continent ( LJ 3/1/87). Once again he creates a world, in this case a Stone Age village, seemingly distant from our own and yet so like it as to be almost frightening. It is a world confronting change brought on by the advent of bronze, a technological development not unlike the coming of the computer. The villagers, once secure and flourishing, suddenly find their craft--and themselves--obsolete. As the fabulist tale unwinds, Crace looks into the role of the artist in society--here, a storyteller--considering both the impact and limits of imagination in guiding us toward new horizons. A marvelous literary effort; highly recommended.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, and Arcadia. He has won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the David Higham Prize, and the Guardian Fiction Award. He lives in Birmingham, England.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (May 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880014504
• ISBN-13: 978-0880014502
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #680,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flawless Craftsman at Work, February 22, 2001

By 

Norman Dale (Prince George) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gift Of Stones (Paperback)

I was unfamiliar with Crace before reading this muted narrative in the voice of one who survives awful and awesome economic hardship, wrought by technological change. I intend to make more of his acquaintance.

The setting is pre-Roman Britain in a community prospering because of its unsurpassed working of flint. The story centers on a man who loses a limb as a child and must survive on the contemptible outside of his people's working world . He becomes a superb story-teller using skills of an unrivalled social observer and even what today would be called a "futurist". He carefully watches and records, through semi-fictional stories, all the subtle as well as obvious forces inexorably gathering to undercut his people's world. For this is the dawn of the Bronze Age when that material would far outperform the best of the stonemasons' product. And so their world falls apart. But, using the skills he has had to hone because of being a misfit for so long, he finds a way to survive. This, we are left feeling, may be the sole legacy that transcends the vagaries of economic change. For those who can tell good (not necessarily true) stories of the past are sometimes the only ones whose understanding is enough to tell a story in the future tense, to, in essence, invent the future.

No one can say what that world was really like back then and thereby comment on how validly Crace depicts this long gone era. Yet I felt transported and that the sense of those unrecorded times was powerfully captured. Validity, who knows? Propinquity? For sure. Crace has built so very different a world yet one, which we feel familiar with, indeed, even at home in.

I would commend this fine book to anyone but especially those who believe that ours is an age of never-before experienced turbulence and uncertainty. Just as Barbara Tuchman did in "A Distant Mirror" but this time using fiction, Jim Crace disabuses us of the presumptuous idea that we bear heavier crosses than our long passed ancestors. Economic transition is never easy and this is an absorbing account of how it feels from the inside.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Change, September 16, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Gift Of Stones (Paperback)

"The Gift Of Stones", is the second novel written by Jim Crace. He tells this story through a storyteller he created from the notes of Sir Henry Penn Butler in, "Memoirs of an Excavationist circa 1927". Evidently while pursuing old stone implements they came upon the bones from a lower arm of a child. Mr. Crace has done as they did the evening of their find when they sat around their fire and spun tales of why the bones were there, and where the balance of the bones were to be found. Mr. Crace took the same bit of information and created a remarkable work that is about change. The change is this book is not unlike the changes faced today. A fundamental shift in knowledge can have dramatic and even catastrophic effects on a people. And this is the tale of, The Gift Of Stones".

At some point most have read about the implements of The Stone Age, and also the dramatic changes that were brought about by the advent of bronze. Many have perhaps learned of this change through textbooks and classes in history. Jim Crace has told the same story of change as it might have been seen through the eyes of those who were dependent upon stone for their way of life. From the mention of the bones from a child's lower arm, he recreates history as he creates a wonderful novel.

The community of stoneworkers is recreated with marvelous detail about the methods used in creating stone implements. The descriptions go far beyond the crude instruments hacked from the blows of another stone. The author illustrates the artisans these people were with a stoneworker nicknamed, "the Leaf". Here was an artisan who would keep on his workbench a leaf as produced by nature, and use it both as inspiration and an item of beauty he would seek to emulate in his work. The craftsmen in this book are treated more like skilled sculptors/artists, than the makers of crude tools.

The author creates a circle with the flight of an arrow creating the basis for his story, and yet another arrow that brings everything to an end. The second arrow is of course fashioned from bronze, and it is an arrow that can kill much more than an animal or a man. It brings complete destruction to a way of life, to what is also referred to as an age. As he has done before Jim Crace is able to take a subject that is not unfamiliar, and recast the ideas to create a read that is new and unique.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The nature of storytelling explored, September 21, 2002

By 

"excession" (Westfield, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gift Of Stones (Paperback)

This short novel ruminates on a number of very interesting themes in an unusual way. It is a book about the nature of stories, the nature of people, and the ways that we think about ancient peoples. Most of all, though, it makes the reader think about how change affects individuals and groups ... all through the story of a young man and his daughter.

If a book about the stone age conjures images of The Clan of the Cave Bear for you, then wipe it from your mind before starting this. The Gift of Stones starts from a simple premise: an archaeologist has found the amputated arm bone of a young boy, and he and his colleagues imagine what must have been his life. This young man also imagines lives, and tells those stories, much to the delight of his village. His daughter carries on the tradition as the true narrative voice of the book.

I had never read any of Crace's work before this slim volume, but I've already gone out to buy all of them. He is a wonderful writer without over-writing or involving himself in senseless wordplay. If you are looking for a thought-provoking story with memorable characters, then this book is definitely for you.