Finished Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (#133) yesterday. I really enjoyed this one; duly deserving of all its pomp and fanfare of awards and titles. What a pleasant read: subtle plot, complex and realistically human emotions, a fine balance of fantasy and reality, and thoughtful humor. Quoyle, the protagonist, is simultaneously tragically pitiful and yet endearing and surprisingly lovable (the fact that he is such a good father melts the heart), and there is a tenderness in Bunny that is very maturely drawn.
This is a book that makes me glad for text - I would not ever want to see this novel in its movie form. I can picture Quoyle and Wavey, but harbor not an ounce of desire to see them as a real-life entity represented by actors. They are like beautiful dreams or paintings in my head, sharp yet blurred at the same time in a complex way that I wish to remain so.
I have great respect for Proulx. Her imagery (and therefore, her imagination) is so vibrantly fresh and unconventional. Take this example, in Chapter 7 (The Gammy Bird); "...the wall behind him covered with oilcloth the color of insect wings. His face: wood engraved with fanned lines...Bushy eyebrows, a roach of hair the color of an antique watch". The book's end, is my favorite. How gracefully she managed it: "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...it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery".
So on my see-saw between eras, I now return back to the 1800s, with Dickens' Great Expectations. I am hoping that The Shipping News has started a trend, tunneling out of the darker, more pessimistically mooded stories, but considering the context of this book centering around an orphan, I am not exactly confident that it will be so. I should, also, probably know more about classics such as these already, but I will throw in the towel and acknowledge that I am a complete n00b to many literary classics. But hey, that's what I'm working on, by reading through this list, right?
