Desert Island Books #1

This weekend has been totally hectic and I got virtually no reading done, so instead I’ll tell you about one of my desert island books – a book that’s made a big impression on me, and shaped my reading habits thereafter …

The first on my list is The Shipping News by Annie Proulx who in those days was billed as E. Annie Proulx – it seems she’s dropped the ‘E’ lately.

Published in 1993, Proulx was in her late 50s before her writing career really took off with this novel and The Shipping News subsequently won the Pullitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. It was filmed in 2001 with rather more mixed success starring Kevin Spacey. But back to the book …

Whereas the English equivalents of novels based in small-town America often seem so claustrophobic they have an unreal quality about them, this is not true of their US counterparts for me. North America is so vast, the novels also have a quality of space about them. Sure, everyone still knows everyone else, but they’re not squashed together like sardines, they have to make an effort to interact.

This is so in The Shipping News, where one of life’s failures, Quoyle, betrayed by his wife, opts to start all over again in faraway windswept Newfoundland. The novel is all about how he starts to fit in with the local community which takes time, as they’re mostly failures of a kind too. The quirky characters are superb, both comic and sympathetic. If you liked the TV series Northern Exposure, you’ll find similarities here, but that’s where it ends, as Annie Proulx’s writing leaps off the page and makes everything seem totally real. The chapters are headed with figures from a 1944 book of knots and quotations from the Mariner’s Dictionary which add to the considerable charm of this book.

I’d not read many contemporary American novels set outside the great metropolises before, and this one fired my interests. I’ve since discovered powerful novels by Daniel Woodrell in Winter’s Bone set in the Ozark mountains, and The Resurrectionists set in Michigan by Michael Collins together with the rest of Annie’s of course.]


Source: Own Copy. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, (affiliate link)

0 thoughts on “Desert Island Books #1

  1. Mickey says:

    The Shipping News is a book that’s never really appealed to me. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen the film or not (I’ve a feeling I might have done, I’ve watched a LOT of films!). I’ll look out for this one next time I’m in a bookstore though. I like quirky characters in books – have you ever read a Confederacy of Dunces? That’s certainly got a few quirky characters! And of course old Lionel Essrog. Definitely quirky.

  2. Annabel Gaskell says:

    A Confederancy of Dunces has been on my TBR pile for ages – I’ve heard so much about it and its author, I ought to promote it.I think it’s the quirky characters in books that appeal to me most … Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem was another I read recently with a young hero with Tourettes.

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