Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"You don't have the sense God gave a donut, do you?", October 29, 2005
It's always fun to reread a novel that was a favorite ten years ago and discover that it's just as much fun the second time around. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1994, The Shipping News is set primarily in Newfoundland, the ancestral home of Quoyle, a widower from New York, and his aunt, Agnis Hamm, who return to Newfoundland with Quoyle's two young daughters to try to create new lives. Quoyle, with minimal experience as a newspaper man in New York, gets a job at the local newspaper, the Gammy Bird, at Killick Claw, recording the weekly shipping news, doing features on visiting ships, and covering local car wrecks. Agnis continues her business of upholstering ship and yacht interiors, and Quoyle's little girls settle into school and daycare.
As Quoyle and Agnis become friends with their fiercely independent and often quirky neighbors, their own pasts gradually unfold for the reader, and as they face the stark challenges of their new lives in wintery Newfoundland, they begin to understand more fully who they are and to recognize what is important in their lives. As Quoyle, who is still coming to terms with the death of his flagrantly unfaithful wife, Petal Bear, gains respect from his colleagues for his work at the paper and from his neighbors for his strength of character, he also begins to gain some self-respect. Agnis's departure from Newfoundland many years ago was the result of a terrible trauma, and upon her return she finds unique ways to put some of that trauma to rest.
Life in Killick Claw is often bleak, and its population must deal with violent storms, winters lasting six months, few connections to the outside world, and sudden death at sea, all of which Proulx describes in vivid and moving passages. But survival in this world also inspires kinship among its residents and a kind of dark-humored resignation which is even more vividly depicted. All of Proulx's characters wrest grim humor from life's tragedies, buoying their spirits (and those of the reader) as they soldier on, refusing to engage in self-pity, no matter their difficulties. As irony piles upon irony, their resilience shines through, making this novel both a story of harsh reality and one of inspiring strength. n Mary Whipple
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine yarn, May 13, 1999
By A Customer
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".
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The novel that got me to read fiction again, February 27, 2001
I started reading fiction again after reading The Shipping News. It was so good that I wanted to find more contemporary fiction of this caliber.The novel's a main character is a loser who is hard to love because he is so unbelievably inept and knows it. The background is maritime Canada with all the romance of the sea and of small town life. Proulx studs the landscape with some grotesque characters and others who are extremely real. The writing is sharp as a razor; a single word used in one chapter had me astonished at how apt it was, creating an entire (sordid) scene with a single syllable. The theme of the book is redemption and learning; the main characters learn and change. This is what makes this book worth reading. Without it, the bad stuff would have remainded the type of thing you'd hear about on daytime TV. Instead, it becomes a journey from night into daylight.
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