Product Description

A new edition of Annie Proulx’s bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning novel to tie-in with the film of The Shipping News starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19087 in Books
• Published on: 1994-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
Reissued to coincide with the release of her new novel 'That Old Ace in the Hole', Annie Proulx's highly acclaimed, international best-seller and Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers -- the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland. With 'the aunt' and his delinquent daughters -- Bunny and Sunshine -- in tow, Quoyle finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. The Shipping News is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility. 'To read The Shipping News is to yearn to be sitting in The Flying Squid Lunchstop, eating Seal Fin curry, watching the icebergs clink together in the bay.' The Times

About the Author
E..Annie Proulx published her first novel Postcards in 1991 at the age of 56. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Prize. Her most recent book, CLOSE RANGE, was a number one bestseller.

Excerpted from The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he sur-vived childhood; at the State university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.

A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim. Again and again the father had broken his clenched grip and thrown him into pools, brooks, lakes and surf. Quoyle knew the flavor of brack and waterweed.

From this youngest son’s failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cells—failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; fail-ure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure.

Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew it. ‘‘Ah, you lout,’’ said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick, the father’s favor-ite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room, hissed ‘‘Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub, greasebag,’’ pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over head, sniveling, on the lino-leum.
All stemmed from Quoyle’s chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.

A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting
from the lower face.

Some anomalous gene had fired up at the moment of his begetting as a single spark sometimes leaps from banked coals, had given him a giant’s chin. As a child he invented stratagems to deflect stares; a smile, downcast gaze, the right hand darting up to cover the chin.

His earliest sense of self was as a distant figure: there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he. Until he was fourteen he cherished the idea that he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real people, saddled with the changeling of the Quoyles, longed for him. Then, foraging in a box of excursion momentoes, he found photographs of his father beside brothers and sisters at a ship’s rail. A girl, somewhat apart from the others, looked toward the sea, eyes squinted, as though she could see the port of destination a thousand miles south. Quoyle recognized himself in their hair, their legs and arms. That sly-looking lump in the shrunken sweater, hand at his crotch, his father. On the back, scribbled in blue pencil, ‘‘Leaving Home, 1946.’’

At the university he took courses he couldn’t understand, humped back and forth without speaking to anyone, went home for weekends of excoriation. At last he dropped out of school and looked for a job, kept his hand over his chin.

Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drift-ing into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.

He fell into newspapering by dawdling over greasy saucisson and a piece of bread. The bread was good, made without yeast, risen on its own fermenting flesh and baked in Part-ridge’s outdoor oven. Partridge’s yard smelled of burnt cornmeal, grass clippings, bread steam. The saucisson, the bread, the wine, Partridge’s talk. For these things he missed a chance at a job that might have put his mouth to bureaucracy’s taut breast. His father, self-hauled to the pinnacle of produce manager for a supermarket chain, preached a sermon illustrated with his own history— ‘‘I had to wheel barrows of sand for the stonemason when I came here.’’ And so forth. The father admired the mys-teries of business—men signing papers shielded by their left arms, meetings behind opaque glass, locked briefcases.
But Partridge, dribbling oil, said, ‘‘Ah, fuck it.’’ Sliced purple tomato. Changed the talk to descriptions of places he had been, Strabane, South Amboy, Clark Fork. In Clark Fork had played pool with a man with a deviated septum. Wearing kangaroo gloves. Quoyle in the Adirondack chair, listened, covered his chin with his hand. There was olive oil on his interview suit, a tomato seed on his diamond-patterned tie.

Customer Reviews

Hard work
Either you love it or hate it, unfortunately I belong to the latter group.

Narrative style was really hard to get into and none of the characters possessed any sparkle that made me care what happened to them next.

Sadly, I never finished reading the book as I just couldn't stand it anymore. There are plenty more books out there for me to read and enjoy rather than wasting my time on.

Persistence
Gave up once on this book. Damn near gave up twice. But a good book, in the end. By the end, maybe. Worth the long haul. Ar, a long haul, like pulling a net full of cod off them Grand Banks, after a day's going out of No Name Cove, past Loopy Lolly Rock and Far Away Island. Sea the colour of sky and sky the colour of paint.

But you pull in the net. Full of cod. not one or two. Many. Many, like the old times. but they was hard, the old times. Hard.

That's broadly the style. And it is. Hard. Work. At first. But it was worth it. She made sympathetic, even likeable, a lead character for whom most wirters would only have managed to arouse pity. The landscape and the people start to make pictures in the mind. I looked up images of Newfoundland once I'd finished and it all matched. There is never a problem telling one character from another, though some of the names were deeply unlikely, such as Nutbeem for a Briton who, though saying 'bloody' and 'Rather!' - who says 'Rather!' now unless taking the mick? - then says that someone must 'come visit'. Aargh! No!

On the whole, though, the story balances the dark and light sides of life, shows that there is comfort to be found in unlikely places, and does well on both the close networks of belonging and the cramping of opportunity to be found in a small town.

Transports you.......
I read this the week after seeing the film.
A highly evocative book, using a number of devices to engender the spirit of Newfoundland. I feel like I have been there.... The oft mentioned style of prose is spot on; life there clearly has no room for padding.
I virtually never read fiction, but did not find this book in any way slow or turgid. I would strongly recommend this to any reader wishes to engage with a novel viscerally, emotionally and intellectually.
As for the film...remarkably faithful to the original. Beautiful cinematography revealing how brilliantly the author has captured the essence of Newfoundland. Sure there are differences which may jar to some, but as a whole, the two complement each other very well.