Friday, August 22, 2008

The Shipping News



why don't you "drive around and learn all four of our roads"?


Today I finished listening to "The Shipping News" on CD. Another story of imperfect, difficult, and true love by the author of everybody's favorite writer of gay cowboy stories... I mean "Brokeback Mountain". I have no other experience of Annie Proulx - so I have to compare. Well, maybe I don't HAVE TO, but I feel it is a reasonable thing to do. Both are stories of finding and losing love -though very different loves and by this I do not mean different by sexual orientation, but rather passionate, overwhelming, consuming love as compared to warm, safe, companionable love - set in remarkable, isolated, vast and beautiful landscapes. In the case of "The Shipping News", it is Newfoundland (in which, I learned, not everyone would consider Canada a foreign country.) I would have liked to have held these words in my hands and lingered over her descriptions of bleak, beautiful, desolate, and destructive winter. Brrrrr. Pass my tea.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loved The Shipping News. What was that disgusting Seal Flipper Pie or whatever it was that she described...Her control of the plot is outstanding in this book, and the landscape is a character just as much as Quoyle and all the rest.

Must read it again

NNV said...

I think that it was it exactly- seal flipper pie- but made from the shoulder. The idea of biting into a pie filled with flippers was outstandingly gross. I'm more interested in the squid burgers or fish stews or some of those lobsters or shrimp. I'll pass on the moose, too.

A