The Shipping News
A Novel
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, and "a rare creation, a lyric page-turner" (Chicago Tribune).
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle’s struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons—and the unpredictable forces of nature and society—and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
The Shipping News “is charged with sardonic wit—alive, funny, a little threatening: packed with brilliantly original images…and now and then, a sentence that simply takes your breath away” (USA TODAY).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Proulx has followed Postcards , her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction. There, Quoyle finds a job writing about car crashes and the shipping news for The Gammy Bird , a local paper kept afloat largely by reports of sexual abuse cases and comical typographical errors. Killick-Claw may not be perfect, but it is a stable enough community for Quoyle and Co. to recover from the terrors of their past lives. But the novel is much more than Quoyle's story: it is a moving evocation of a place and people buffeted by nature and change. Proulx routinely does without nouns and conjunctions--``Quoyle, grinning. Expected to hear they were having a kid. Already picked himself for godfather''--but her terse prose seems perfectly at home on the rocky Newfoundland coast. She is in her element both when creating haunting images (such as Quoyle's inbred, mad and mean forbears pulling their house across the ice after being ostracized by more God-fearing folk) and when lyrically rendering a routine of gray, cold days filled with cold cheeks, squidburgers, fried bologna and the sea.
Customer Reviews
The Shipping News
I enjoyed this book for several reasons. Most of all I liked the setting, because it took place in Newfoundland, and that is a place that I would like to visit. Miss Proulx's story gives a good visual to the reader what the people, the topography and the culture is like in this locale. Secondly I liked the message that she passes along-mainly that no matter how grim your situation seems to be, you can always find a silver lining, and make lemonade when life throws you lemons. Lastly, I like the writer's style of using incomplete sentences throughout, to describe a scene. It adds to the gravity, but mostly to the humour, throughout the book.