the shipping news and brokeback mountain

And in the midst of it he finds friendship, love, and his own self-worth. He watches people fall on hard times and move away, endures monotony, deep cold, harsh storms and odd, forced relationships. Instead, the story of a middle-aged man who hates himself even more than he hates his circumstance, moving back to his modest roots, finding a lot of darkness in the places he comes from. No beautiful starry-eyed twentysomething trotting off to exotic locations or big cities here.

Its sort of the anti-coming of age story. I found this to be poetic and strangely uplifting. Quoyle finds redemption from a place that itself is bleak, full of hardship, and dying. Wanted to eat flipper pie with him and the girls. Before you know it, their presence is comforting. The thing of it is, they start to feel so honest. Instead, Proulx builds her momentum slowly, slowly, taking you deeper into the lives of these characters, who started out so hard, unattractive, broken, and nasty. No secret codes to be found in paintings. There was no melodramatic conflict introduced. Then at some point in the second half, the book went from a nice little read to a ferocious page-turner, and I still am not sure how it became so compelling. In the beginning it felt a little forced. And his wife Petal is a two-dimensional device created solely as a catalyst for the story to come.

Quoyle, a big, damp loaf of a man, as Proulx describes him, is the definition of pathetic. I found the book initially to be a relaxing solace on my commute home after a busy day of work, soley because of its use of language and setting. Proulx's writing style is mesmerizing, almost hypnotic. As the story progresses, the threads of plot slowly come together, creating a picture of life on the windswept coast of Newfoundland.This book snuck up on me. “The smooth flow of narrative is truncated by choppy dialogue and a sharply abridged disjointed plot. 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.Ī vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today. 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. At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife gets her just desserts.

The shipping news and brokeback mountain