The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1993)

Many years ago, a co-worker/friend of mine (Jeff) highly recommended The Shipping News to me, saying "You'll love it! It's about this depressed guy who winds up in Newfoundland writing about boats. The humour is just like yours, deadpan and dry. You'll really relate to this guy." I never got around to reading it, although his words did linger in my thoughts when I saw the (to me) rather baffling screen adaptation (with Kevin Spacey, Judi Dench, Julianne Moore, and my favourite Canadian actor, Gordon Pinsent). The film moved me to buy the book, hunker down and read it in a comfy chair while...

Hive spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood. . P.1 Thirty-six year old Quoyle, a born loser, relocates from the States with his two young daughters to their ancestral home in Newfoundland -- his unfaithful and nymphomaniacal wife having sold the daughters to a pornographer photographer and dying in a freak car crash. Quoyle is scarred by both his wife s life and death, not understanding the difference between love and desperation, unable to later recognize the purity of a growing affection and attraction. He is scarred by his father s constant disapproval; he is...

I heard this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Moreover, it won a National Book Award and several other prizes, My son-in-law loved it; he gave it to my wife to read. She loved it. My son-in-law is an English Professor. My wife is..well, ...my wife. How could I not read it? So I read it. I read most of it, again, assuming I must have missed something the first time. It s only three hundred pages and some change, so it wasn t a terribly long task, but neither was it a pleasant one. If I missed something the first time, I also missed it the second. I didn't have the heart to try again. What, on earth,.

This is the first Annie Proulx work I've read..and only did so because it was our book club's selection. I found it to be engrossing, insightful, and interesting. Proulx's writing style was so different that it took me a while to get used to her fragmented sentences and curt, shorthand way of getting her point across. Once I quit 'fighting' her intentionally choppy and unique way with words...I got into the book completely. Quoyle, the main character, has nothing going for him.....he's beyond ugly: "A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a.