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Suzanne
Rating:
Review
This book made me lose all interest in ever visiting the entire Canadian Eastern seaboard. Life there is portrayed as unceasingly miserable, and the people as hillbillies, or, at best, losers. Quoyle, the main character, fails to inspire much empathy in me. He suffers some sickening betrayals by his wife, and subsequently retreats with his two daughters to his family’s old home in a desolate, freezing Newfoundland fishing village. Quoyle’s estranged aunt, Agnis, moves with them, and adds what little depth and interest there is to his family. The quotes about different kinds of knots at the beginning of each chapter are the only clever thing in the book – they relate to the maritime culture of the town, and hint about what’s to come. I think the idea is that Quoyle is supposed to slowly grow or heal in his new situation, but I didn’t see that happening. He interacts with the locals, certainly, but doesn’t gain much from it. Instead the whole community seems significantly dysfunctional, in a “misery loves company”, inbred, moronic sort of way. Enough said.
Best Line:
“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.” (at the end of the book)
Kim
Rating:
Review
This was the first book I read for a book group, and completely fell in love with it. My sister hated it. I’m not sure if she didn’t like that a lot of the sentences were incomplete, or if the characters were too weird, but I found both of those things challenging and charming. Events in this novel go from miserable to scary to funny to endearing. I was introduced to the main character, Quoyle, “at thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love” on page 1 and loved him throughout the book. His is not a particularly happy, carefree life, but I found him more real than some people I know. With help from his aunt, Quoyle is raising his two young daughters after their mother dies. He packs up his new family and moves from the US to Newfoundland, hoping to claim his father’s home near the town of Killick-Claw, and get a job with the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird. There were several unusual names I came across which made me laugh (Petal Bear, Tert Card, Billy Pretty, Adonis Collard, Nutbeem) but anyone who has read other works by Ms. Proulx knows her propensity toward unusual and often funny-sounding names. I also arched an eyebrow at what the aunt did with her brother’s ashes. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and rightly so. I loved it.
Best Line:
“Dog Farts Fell Family of Four”. The lines leading up to that one were pretty hilarious too, along with so many others in this book.
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