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Tinkers Kindle Edition

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Paul Harding (Author)
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Paul Harding (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars 439 customer reviews
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Length: 192 pages Word Wise: Enabled Audible Narration:
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Product Details

  • File Size: 195 KB
  • Print Length: 192 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 193413712X
  • Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
  • Publication Date: January 1, 2009
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B00607EWYC
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • X-Ray:
  • Word Wise: Enabled
  • Lending: Not Enabled
  • Enhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,946 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 starsPromising First Novel
By Richard Pittman on April 24, 2010
Format: Paperback
Tinkers was a well reviewed first novel and I think it is a very promising debut. Its recent Pulitzer Prize win was shocking to many as it wasn't on the radar of most critics or pundits. I liked Tinkers but think that awarding it the Pulitzer was overdoing it a bit. It's certainly not even close to the worst novel to win the prize but again I think, for me, it's a level below the really good Pulitzer Prize winners.

The maddening thing about reading this novel is that it has the parts to be brilliant. The characters are vivid. Some of the story lines are inspired. I clearly felt the sadness of some of the characters and ultimately their desperation.

The basic story line is that George Washington Crosby is near death and looking back at his life. For the largest and by far best section of the novel, George is a young boy. He reminisces about life as a child but we also see this period from his father's point of view. His father, Howard, is the most compelling character in the novel and the one I had the most affection for.

Howard is a man of little means with the heart of a poet. He scrapes together a living by travelling around the rural backroads with his strange wagon of diverse wares. Howard suffers from epilepsy and this is a burden both to himself and his family. His son George and wife Kathleen both bear him some ill will for his affliction. The readers feel Howard's sadness and desperation.

George grows up to be a fairly normal man who has a family and later in life makes a lot of money fixing old clocks. He has a passion for tinkering with clocks and with hoarding the money he makes from this endeavour.

As mentioned, I think several of the storylines are brilliant.Read more ›
6 Comments 174 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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5.0 out of 5 starsAnother Excellent Pulitzer Winner
By Mark Wilson on April 19, 2010
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
While the Booker committee has made a habit of laying eggs of late, the Pulitzer has selected an impressive collection of literary gems. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Edward Jones' The Known World, Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao and, now, Paul Harding's Tinkers represent what great literature is all about.

I was only 20 pages into this book when I felt the overwhelming presence of Marilynne Robinson. Lo and behold, upon reading a Wikipedia entry on the author I found that he studied with Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The similarities with Gilead are strong, but not obtrusively so. I would categorize Tinkers as a more experimentally daring Gilead, or perhaps a more transcendental Gilead. The narrative is more disjointed in keeping with the protagonist's hallucinatory final illness, so the experimental nature is not gratuitous. And while Gilead was chock full of good ol' conventional Sunday religion, Tinkers tends to be more mystical and perhaps a bit more melancholy.

So who should read this excellent novel? Here you will find no explosions, no cosmic battles, no schools of magic, nobody scurrying about to solve cryptic ciphers. The cast of characters is small but deep; there's no major whodunit here. This is a family saga as told through the final, disjointed memories of a family patriarch in Maine. Like Gilead, the novel consists of the reminiscences of an old man nearing the end of his life. The narrative is not linear; it changes tense, perspective and tone with few signposts for the reader. But if you like a literary challenge, if you like the previous Pulitzer winners and if you enjoy poetic use of the English language along the lines of Marilynne Robinson, you will enjoy this novel. It's a major achievement.
3 Comments 351 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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5.0 out of 5 starsAnother Pulitzer Winning Novel Set in Maine
By Eric Selby on April 17, 2010
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Even here in Miami Beach in mid-April I found myself shuddering occasionally as I slowly moved through this remarkable small book, mine not yet identified as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. A man is dying, his last hours ticking away in a hospital bed in the dining room of a house filled with clocks, for he has tinkered on them during his long life. He sees the world around him collapsing upon itself, the tiles of his life as meaningless, at least to future generations. And as he lies there, his kidneys almost functionless, he thinks about his father, an epileptic who was a door-to-door salesman in a fictional West Cove, Maine. The cover of this book is just so perfect: the life of the Crosby family is a bleak as is that part of the world in winter.
This may be a difficult book for some readers to get into because for a while one is provide with a richness of language that is not often found in current literature, as rich as the language of another novel set in Maine and also a Pulitzer winner, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. What is it about Maine that gets all these Pulitzer novels? Before that Richard Russo's Empire Falls.
Paul Harding's artistry allows readers into the minds of its characters. George's mother wishes she could kill herself, an impoverished woman with four children, an epileptic husband, and isolated in this tragic setting. But the lake is too frozen for her to chop the hole that would allow her to drown. The reader shivers as he reads what she is thinking. And this is only one small piece of the mastery of Harding's language. And as I read this novel I thought about my maternal grandparents who lived atop a small mountain in northern Vermont living without electricity until their fiftieth wedding anniversary in the early fifties.Read more ›
1 Comment 72 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 starsHardly worth reading. Void of any meaningful content. ...

Hardly worth reading. Void of any meaningful content. It is interesting that the Pulitzer Prize was granted to this book! Read more

Published 1 day ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsThis books requires time, thoughtfulness, and peripheral attention

This book is fantastic. I recommend reading it at the same time as Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson. I studied the books side by side, and the worlds they build are similar. Read more

Published 2 days ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsWorth a re-read

A wonderful, multi-generational novel which poses the most important questions plaguing human beings; what exactly are we to expect from our relationships with God, with nature,... Read more

Published 5 days ago by jbouch
5.0 out of 5 starswonderful

great book

Published 1 month ago by Croony
1.0 out of 5 starsWhat a disappointment

This book is not only boring, but is all over the place in terms of style and narration.

Published 1 month ago by J. B. Cordry
4.0 out of 5 starsMesmerizing

Rarely does a book pull one in as this one does to the inner workings of the heart and soul through a metaphor as profound as a wind up clock and death steadily approaching with... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Steven Dorsey
5.0 out of 5 starsreading this book is like walking uphill in a beautiful forest

reading this book is like walking uphill in a beautiful forest .... his use of the language is beautiful and unique, but also creates the "uphill" part of the venture... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Big Lou
4.0 out of 5 starsThis book is beautifully written. The story and characters are...

This book is beautifully written. The story and characters are detailed and Paul Harding wrote the entire book in a fashion that reads more like poetry than a true novel. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Nicholas Johnson
4.0 out of 5 starsBrilliantly confusing novel

Tinker’s is a book that no doubt polarizes readers given its eccentric style, comprised of excruciatingly long run-on sentences, story discontinuity as a result of the author... Read more

Published 1 month ago by todd karalius
2.0 out of 5 starsBoring

The book did not go anywhere.
Got tired after 30%.

Published 1 month ago by GS

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