So instead of one thought explained you are getting a list of the things I want to talk to someone about. Think of it as book club but without so many delicious snacks and comment away.
Cousin Quoyle and his story-line were perhaps, my favorite parts of the whole book. I loved the white dog who terrorized Bunny that no one else believed in who turned out to be real. I loved the knotted pieces of string. I loved when Quoyle went to go visit his cousin. Quoyle had lived in fear of his cousin, felt like he was being harassed and worried that his cousin would put up a fight for the family homestead but when he got to his house, cousin Quoyle was a pathetic, poor, old man who did not have much life to live. I love that idea and metaphor--how many of the things that we fear and dread are really poor, pathetic old men dying in the corner.
2) Pulitzer Prize Winners
Reading the Pulitzer Prize winners has been more depressing than I anticipated. I understand that deep and thoughtful writing has to examine the deep and thoughtful things of life but by golly....these books have been hard--kids shooting up their high schools, the misdeeds of war, the cruelty of other people, slavery. The Pulitzer Prize winners have it all.
In this book I kept expecting things to go wrong. I kept expecting people to take advantage of one another, for their home to be taken away...for something to go horribly wrong. It didn't. People, on the whole, are kind to Quoyle and his family. He finds people to care for his children, he succeeds in his job, he makes friends. Sometimes life does turn out.
3) Hope
I loved the signs and thoughts of hope in the book. Jack Buggit coming back to life was perhaps my favorite of them all. I loved the final lines of the book.
For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
4) Life and Progress
I loved reading about life in Newfoundland. I grew up in the suburbs and now live in the city. The life they describe in the book is so far removed from the ones I know. I really liked reading about the way modern life is creeping in. I didn't have to feel guilty that Walmart is making us all stupider, the way that they addressed what's happening was so much more gentle. I loved this quote from the book.
"There's two ways of living here now. There's the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there's the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, your brother's in South Africa, your mother's in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. . . . Now we got to deal with Crock-Pots and consumer ratings, asphalt driveways, lotteries, fried chicken franchises, Mint Royale coffee and gourmet shops, all that stuff"
I also very much enjoyed the descriptions of the old way of doing things. The fishing, the sailing, the dragging of the Quoyle family home across the frozen ocean. I appreciated that even though Quoyle was new to Newfoundland he was taken in by the people and they showed him what life had been like.
5) Change
Along the same vein of life changing the characters of in this book grow and change in the best ways. Quoyle, who has never been successful at anything finds his nitch. The Aunt who has lost love gets to find it again--people get to change. So often I pigeon-hole myself and others. I say, "I'm not good at so and so." or "She is like x." This book was a nice reminder that life isn't really like that. We're not just one thing or another. Even if I am x I don't have to stay that way.
So what did you think?
Oh Sallee, I want to have you and your readers over for snacks and lavendar lemonade and really book club it up. Commenting on this book has been on my to-do list for too many weeks. I owe you a long email with a thousand other things that I've been meaning to tell you. When you are out in UT next, we must meet up. But on to the book . . .
ReplyDeleteAs I began this book, I was worried that it was going to be much like The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The main character is an unloved, unappreciated, overweight fella who is always getting the short end of the stick. The book started out fast and bright and a bit spicy (his wife and the kidnapping of his girls), but the pace and the tone of the book changed with the scenery and shift to Newfoundland. I loved the juxtaposition and the Oscar Wao comparisions were left back in the first chapters.
I really enjoyed this book as well, and this passage really seems to capture everything I felt about the book so perfectly:
"For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."
I also loved the green house and what it seemed to symbolize. Both Quoyle and the Aunt showed up at the old place with such broken lives, trying to piece together a semblance of structure, and it was the house that became the physical rendering of that desire. They struggle with wanting to put things back as they felt they should be, and life doesn't really take off for the Aunt until she abandons the house project in favor of a new location and her much-loved business. For Quoyle, he holds on tighter, always trying to get back there by his wreck of a boat or on almost impassable roads, and when he can't get there, he still looks across this bay at what should be his home, but never quite is a home. It's the same way he holds onto Petal and his life back in the States and what should have been. It is only when the house comes apart, and he lets himself love and be loved by another that Newfoundland becomes his home. Home seems such an important part of this book, and Quoyle always seems to be in search of one for himself and his daughters. My favorite bungled attempt at housing was when he was going to move into his pal's trailer, and during the rowdy farewell party, the drunk partygoers dump the place into the icy ocean.
Oh, there are so many quiet things about this book that I love and would love to chat about, but my Emily really must get to school, and at six she still needs mom to pack lunch and help her pick out her clothes on this rainy morning. I would never have picked up Moby Dick on my own (too daunting), so I'm glad it is our next read. I'm also rereading Gilead. Have you read that one?