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Las Almas De Piedra, Pt. 2

Buy Ecstasy Las Piedras

Mercy, Mercy Cuyler Goodwill loved you so Why did you not share your secret? I did like this somber Pulitzer Prize winner that does actually have a few laughs, and one shocker, but was somewhat annoyed each time the storyline came to an abrupt halt at a crucial juncture throughout the telling. In the end, thankfully, most of the missing puzzle pieces do unite, and Wow! What powerful last words from Daisy! Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Rate this book. La memoria de las piedras. Carol Shields. Loading interface About the author. Carol Shields 63 books followers. Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian author. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book! Community Reviews. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 30 of 2, reviews. I love this book. It has been 14 years since I have read it and I still remember clearly what it means to me: Life is long In each 'life' you become a different version of you. We are blessed with the chance and sometimes forced against our will to reinvent ourselves again and again until one day we are very old and find that we are living in Florida wearing polyester pantsuits. Did you ever imagine that would be you? That person you marry at a ripe young age may become someone from your past that now seems as insignificant as an old high school boyfriend. That job we have today that's so important may be a mere blip on the radar when we are Will you even remember the name of the company? It's something I like to think about. And it works both ways. Sometimes I hope that the 'life' I'm in never ends and my fear is that one day its time will be up. In other periods of my life, I remember that nothing is forever and this some day may not be remembered by me at all. Very few books have given me such a lasting message. I plan carry it with me throughout my long lifetime. This was a sublime reading experience; one that I desperately needed in my life at the moment. In fact, the two basically drew their first breaths around the same time - one at the end of the nineteenth century and the other just shortly after the start of the twentieth. One was born in a quiet Midwestern town and the other in a sleepy mid-Canada province. Both are inherently lonely souls. A feeling of abandonment haunts the entirety of her days. At times it seems to be an autobiography, with Shields using the first person point of view. Then she abruptly switches back to third person and the reader has the sense he or she is reading a biography of sorts. Much of what the author urges us to contemplate is how a story is told and to what extent we should believe it. Memories are distorted. People reinvent themselves. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies — birth, love, and death — are secured by whomever and whatever is available. I loved reading about every single one of them. Carol Shields is a master of characterization and therefore immediately gets elevated to favorite author status. The feeling that we all truly live in a wasteland of solitude and longing permeates the entire novel. In the end, there are hills and valleys to our stories, distorted remembrances and missed opportunities. When time slips away from us, what will we remember? We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. Michael Finocchiaro. Author 3 books 5, followers. This book also won Canada's top book award the name year and was a National Book Award finalist as well. All these awards and praise were well-merited as this is a well-written and compelling story about a woman's life from birth to death. Daisy Goodwill is born at the turn of the century to a mother who passes away while giving birth and a father who is an accomplished stonemason in rural Canada. We hear Daisy writing her journal with decade breaks between the chapters, mostly in the 3rd person and we get a sense throughout of her feeling of dislocation in her own life. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts sieze on the tongue, so that so say, 'Twelve years passed' is to deny the fact of biographical logic. Daisy will not see her father again until the death of her 'aunt' some eleven years later. In fact, each of the chapters is about a period of her life 'Birth', 'Childhood' Another theme in the book is sex and how various characters experience it. Her mother dies in the course of giving birth to her marking sex as something with potential danger. Her father is similarly distant from everyone but his precious rocks, but he has a special and eternal fascination for his dead first wife: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy and then - this seems to him particularly precious - the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair. Stone symbolizing a more male permanence and the gravestone, flowers representing a more effiminate side and evoking life. Some of the more evocative images in the book are the tower that Cuyler Goodwill, Daisy's father, builds for his dead wife in Canada out of stones pilferred secretly from his quarry before moving to Indianapolis and the pyramid he starts as a time machine there in Indianapolis and dies building at the end of the book. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out given the space His voice, you might say, became the place he lived p. His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricasies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction. Daisy inherits this inability to connect to her own feelings marrying by default an alcoholic with who she never consumes the marriage he was always too drunk and who she sneezes out of a window in one of the novel's more dark-comic scenes. For Daisy, love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and futhermore, she is accostumed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner. Dasiy does finally find love later - oddly with Flett's son who she stayed with in Canada after the death of his mother until she was eleven - and had three children. Her daughter Alice is the one closest to her and we get her perspective a bit more often than the other children. The birds and bees discussion on pages was particularly well-written from Alice's perspective. Her dream during the boring, unsatisfying lovemaking of Barker about the film The Best Years of Our Lives : What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? Unable to find a sexual outlet, she turns to gardening In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing - which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign. Cut short, she loses the column due to an affair with the newspaper editor and drifts into a deep depression which her children and friends struggle to help her out of. A few years later, she moves to Florida with her remaining friends and lives the rest of her life at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club in her condo keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. She comes to a sad, but true realization: No one told her so much of life was spent being old something I am personally struggling with Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture. The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes Her attachments to earth, then, remain superficial as she enters her twilight years. This reinvention for Daisy is a necessary, painful thing done without complaint as opposed to a new exciting way of precisely reclaiming one's own life. Her pain hidden in her past, remains too difficult for her to deal with directly and thus she takes this resigned approach: The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. She has a massive heartattack and is recovering, And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse. Never mind, it means nothing: it's only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Her daughter Alice comes to her during this final phase when she is turning into stone: Knuckles of pearl, Already dead. She reminds herself that what falls into most people's lives becomes a duty they imagine: to be good, to be faithful to an idea of being good. A good daughter. A good mother. Endlessly, heroically patient. These enlargements of the self can be terrifying. It remains unspoken about whether Alice decides to be more in contact with herself than her mother was, but she is the one child who is in a relatively stable marriage and having moved to England in seeming bliss and discovery. As Daisy passes from this world, Something has occurred to her - something transparently simple, something she's always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. This was a beautiful book and it is likely that I will seek out other books to read from this author even while I tried to live a bit more consciously, trying to take some of the lessons about living and aging that this book tries to teach. A breathtaking and thoroughly original novel. I'm completely in awe of the choices Shields made in the shaping of this narrative. The whole is flawlessly cohesive. The parts are poetry unto themselves. Essentially, it's a book about loneliness, every kind of loneliness: starved, suffocating, denied, cherished, physical, existential, or simply the result of petty misunderstanding. She allows for ambiguity. She allows for the reader's subjective response, whatever that might be. And then she gently guides you to a different vantage point, one you hadn't considered. The body, through birth, sex, illness, and death is discussed This novel struck me to the core. I love it so much, I don't even want to know what others have said about it! The type of book others rigorously want to imitate. That is, the elusive 'turn of the century All American novel', with myriad glimpses at gorgeous post millennial metafiction. Boyle's 'World's End' and Coetzee's 'Elizabeth Costello'--it is heartbreaking, endearing, and, best of all, quite accessible. Although the Puig-like tricks, that is, Latin American lit. The symbols of marble and hard rock as counter-contrasts to flimsy flowers and biology are made It's a true reminder of the pesky but overpowering relationship between life and death, or the ethereal and the tangible. This one deeply astonishes. She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf. She is a large, ungainly woman whose idea of heaven is eating, cooking, and eating some more. When she was 28, who should come to reset the stone in a doorway but local mason Cuyler Goodwill. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders—framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity. They are the parents of Daisy, whose story this is. She tells some in first person, some in the third person. This is a biography-cum-autobiography of a woman looking back over the 20th century at her life and family. But it is also a novel about all of these people, including conflicting views about personalities and events, as you will find in any family. We each remember things differently. For a while, we are reading how wonderfully gifted Cuyler Goodwill is at masonry and that he becomes an acclaimed public speaker. We're never quite sure what the truth is, but it's in there somewhere. Perhaps someone does. This is a fascinating read and a great study of human nature. There are some unlikely liaisons. These people are individuals, very much of their times, who entertain us through their whole lives. I loved this worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Julie G please restore our notifications! Wow, this novel is the perfect example of what happens when you least expect it. I knew nothing about this book, I'd never heard of it or its author, and I found the cover unappealing. And, yet, it's one of the best, most meaningful stories I've ever read. It won the Pulitzer Prize for , which is the only reason I picked it up. Then, I couldn't put it down. This is one of those life-altering novels, a big picture story, upsetting and wonderful at the same time. I can't quite recommend it enough. Dalia Nourelden. Author 1 book followers. Daisy Goodwill Flett comes into this world in a strange and tragic circumstance. The book follows her through her life to the moment of her death. You might say she has an ordinary life in many ways, and perhaps that is part of the point Shields is making, that all lives are the same because, no matter how different they are from their fellows, all lives are lonely, isolated journeys. Only one person feels or knows who you are, and that person is you. Many of Shields' characters are consumed with looking backward, dwelling in their pasts and trying to unravel the lives they have led but hardly understand. They struggle with what it is to relate to others, what it is to love or to be loved. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else - and this is what he more and more believes - just a word trying to remember another word. There is a theme of loneliness and isolation that runs through the book Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions--but still she is alone. She is alone, but not unique, among the people she encounters And much of the loneliness on view here is self-inflicted, as if the fear of connection is stronger than the need to touch the others, to be joined. Carol Shields makes one choice in writing this novel that puzzles me; that is her decision to have the opening chapter in the first person, the following chapter in both first and third person but obviously the same voice , and then to tell the rest of the story in the third person until one fleeting comment that is made first person in the final chapter. I know it is a very intentional choice, a device that is meant to achieve something major in the structure of this novel, but I have failed to comprehend its purpose, and that is going to bother me for a while. Perhaps the first person is the soul. It is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. If anyone else who has read this has a thought, I would be very interested in hearing it! The metaphor of the stone--having things carved in stone, the building of monuments, the hardening of the heart and the soul, and the impenetrable walls that divides us from one another-- runs from the beginning of this novel to its end. It winds its way like a river through every major character and recurs in names, thoughts and physical manifestations. One thing is for sure, no need to put R. I didn't like this book, but it was mostly because I didn't like the main character and her lack of personal substance. She never, ever, even once, feels any joy, passion, or grief. There is one period in her life where she appears to experience depression, but again, there is a lack of strong emotion, which really is typical of depression. A person who has three children, marries twice, and is widowed twice, usually experiences some sort of deep emotion. This flaw in her personality had me lacking empathy with her. It seems the author's basic premise is that the main character, Daisy, lacks strong emotion because she was not raised by her biological mother, who was herself an orphan, and that these things have some how caused both her and her mother to be inherently flawed. Either that or Daisy has physically inherited this dysfunction from her mother, but I lean toward the former because of some passages in the story. They lack passion and passionate expression. Daisy never hears she is loved, nor do you find love expressed by her; her mother, Mercy, never said she loved nor otherwise expressed love, although she was loved greatly and with deep passion by Daisy's father. What I did like most was the author's use of symbolism. Stones and flowers are heavily used, perhaps overly so at times. There is the building of monuments by Daisy's father of course made of stone , his life as a quarryman, Daisy's gardens, her second husband's love and knowlege of plants, names of characters, and much more. If that sort of thing excites you, you might love this book for that alone. I would also like to say I'm surprised so many reviewers found this book 'funny'. I thought it was terribly depressing. There are a few amusing passages, but I couldn't see calling the book as a whole funny. And lastly, it is strange to me that this is considered a fictional autobiography. Most of the time it is third person narrative; granted, there are points when Daisy is apparently refering to herself in the third person as Mrs. Flett or some such, which I found a bit disturbing. I suppose it helps contribute to that feeling of her lack of sense of self, the void within her life that she herself doesn't really fill - is not capable of filling. There are other times it does not feel like her voice, just narrative, and there is just a small portion of the book that is in first person. It does not feel at all like a diary, which again may be for the effect of distancing the main character from herself. Someone with this personality disorder might write a memoir in this manner and call it a diary, I suppose. And it does cover Daisy's life from beginning to end. The novel's well written, and I think the author achieved what she set out to do. Overall, just not my cup of tea. The Stone Diaries tells the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett's troubled life beginning and ending with sadness and death. There is so much to absorb about the character's in this short novel that I feel the need to read it again, and probably will at some point, but for now Anne Bogel. Author 6 books 71k followers. When I shared my book haul on Instagram, readers noticed my mistake and assured me the Pulitzer winner was well worth my time. The book details the life of Daisy Stone Goodwill, from her eventful birth in a small Manitoba town to her death in Florida eight-ish decades later. There was much to appreciate in this well-drawn chronicle of a so-called 'ordinary' life—the prose is beautiful; so many sentences shimmer—yet I never felt emotionally invested in the story. Not the of your grandchildren--sorry. Show me your great aunt Elsie who was married to that guy--no one remembers his name, but there he is in the corner of the picture, looking a bit sheepish and wearing his farming overalls. I wonder what his story is? Carol Shields has woven together a tale full of these ordinary yet captivating family members. By the end, I felt like I knew every one of her characters. It all begins with a mother of course , and we are mesmerized by the account of this particular mother: Mercy Stone Goodwill. Every character introduced has a story though, and Shields gives us just enough detail about their lives--the odd bits especially--to keep us fascinated, to bring the family photographs to life. Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced--and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. Shields has given us a novel about life: the way we think about ourselves, the way others think of us, and how we might feel about all of that. It explores what is fleeting, and what remains. And what I found so fascinating was how unreliable it all is. What is the real story? What is our real story? Will anyone ever know? Paul Bryant. This is a family saga. Or more like I knew I was supposed to feel sad. Their kid is what the book is about. Anyway she gets adopted and grows up and some other people die and get married, this and that. But really he was a jerk so she was better off. Then she married her father — hah, not really. It was a Woody Allen type situation. Look at Jerry Lee Lewis. Anyway her and Woody have some kids, everybody grows up and some people die. One of her friends shags a lot of guys, I remember that bit. People get divorced quite a lot. She writes about flowers for a local rag, this goes on for years, and when she gets let go she is like to want to shoot the head off the editor. Not that I am a proponent of gun violence. I am not. But this story could of done with a plane crash or a family massacre to keep up the interest. Or somebody doing something. I know you might be thinking well instead of reading The Stone Diaries you should of been spending your time watching Tokyo Gore Police or House of Corpses. Well, I guess you may have a point at that. Betsy Robinson. Author 11 books 1, followers. This is a slow, intricate telling of the life and death of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The glorious writing is so sensual, thick with substance, so original, wise, wise, and wise that I often had to stop to contemplate or just digest. Effortlessly Carol Shields shifts from third person to first, jumps subjects' stories, returns to the present, and sometimes even comments on the first-person protagonist, Daisy, and her ability to manipulate the truth. And finally she sticks it to any reader who is honest enough to admit her own arrogance in believing she can understand the motivations and hidden feelings of any dead beloved relative. Carol Shields is a writer's writer, and—per the Pulitzer this book won—obviously a reader's writer. Without explanation, I want to bellow: This work makes me feel sane! How sad I am that Shields is dead and can't be my friend. How glad I am she left a long legacy of books that I can now imbibe. I guess I cannot stand Pulitzer Prize winning books. I have yet to read one that I've enjoyed. I actually was disappointed that the author passed away simply because I couldn't tell her how much I disliked this book. I'm guessing the changes from first person to third person were delibrate and artsy-fartsy, but I found it annoying. I barely got through the first chapter because I was sick and tired of the constant explanations of how the character of Mercy was a large woman. I get it! She's fat! Move on!! Same thing with Barker. He's boring! Move on! Way too much description when it came to flowers as well. Too much filler and a waste of my time to read. And what is up with the fake family pictures??? After having to put up with a chapter detailing how morbidly obese Mercy Stone was, I was pretty mad that the picture provided of Mercy was not nearly as huge as I imagined. The woman in the picture was overweight, but not to the extent that I was led to believe by the text. I'm not one of those shallow people who thinks being 20 pounds overweight makes one 'obese'. This book won a Pulitizer Prize in , and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. The mix and overlap between these two subjects is fascinating, and Shields' writing is first rate, making this a pleasure to read. Though it is written as if it's an autiobiography, The Stone Diaries does not limit itself to subject matter that its protagonist could have known. Starting on the day of Daisy's birth, with her mother, Mercy, and moving both backward and forward through time, the book gives perspectives and experiences of many of the supporting characters as well, including Daisy's father, the woman who raises her, her husband, and her children. Though the speaker is sometimes not clearly identified, the moves between perspectives are far less confusing than would be expected don't worry, it doesn't read like As I Lay Dying or anything like that. The story is actually told in a way I don't think I've ever seen before, with a mix of omniscent and present narration, and constantly moving time and perspective. Shields deserves her award just for being able to pull that off successfully, nevermind the story! But the story is compelling. Daisy's life is hard and full of tragedy the childbearing death of her mother, twice widowhood, etc. Both as a human story and as a parable for the countries in which the novel takes place the U. I was impressed enough by this book that I passed it on to my mother, and I will be on the lookout for more of Carol Shields' work. I'd definitely recommend it. Sue K H. Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place. Shields, too many times to count in your beautiful book. If only I'd have read this on my Kindle, I could have highlighted the many perfectly written simple truths of the Stone Diaries. I'm not one to take the time to write passages down but, I did grab a sticky note pad to mark them for when I wrote a review. The problem is, there are way too many to choose from! Thankfully after my sticky notes are reluctantly removed and the book begrudgingly returned to the library, many of the passages can live on via Goodreads under the 'Quotes from In her part autobiography, part biography complete with a family tree and pictures, Sheilds memorializes a fictional everywoman born in who died sometime after the actual date purposely undisclosed. Our everywoman has her own set of unique circumstances, of which many are tragic. Every life has its own tragedies, and Sheild's makes you feel that hers are similar to yours or like those of someone you know. A special treat for me was how even though the story takes place mostly in Canada, there's a midwestern feel since part of it takes place in Indiana and she mentions the central IL town of Ottowa which is in the same county where I have relatives, and at one point she visits the Morton Arboretum where my Mom's ashes are spread. I figured that she must have been from around here and looked it up and she was born in Oak Park IL and moved to Canada in her early 20's when she got married. I had a hard time putting this down because the captivating prose managed to make not only this ordinary life extraordinary but every life extraordinary. I'll be reading more of Carol Shields's books. I'm so thankful for my Pulitzer reading challenge because without it I'd probably never have read this one which most certainly deserved its Pulitzer. Joy D. This book tells the story of the life of a woman of the 20th century. She is born in Canada in and lives into the s. Daisy Goodwill, born in Canada to a mother who dies in childbirth, grows up with a neighbor and her grown son before returning to live with her father at age eleven. It reads at times like a fictional autobiography, and at other times as if people close to her are contributing. She lives a rather uneventful life, punctuated by a few major decisions and events. It includes snippets of information, such as recipes and photos, that make it seem like a family album of memories. This book will appeal to those that enjoy reflective, quiet, well-written stories. Taghreed Jamal El Deen. I know this won't win me any friends among Canadian readers, but I don't like Carol Shields writing. Granted I've only read this one through to the end. A few years ago I started another one and didn't like it either so I quit about a quarter of the way in. I suspected at the time I was not a 'good' reader and that her books were over my head. I've gained some 'reader confidence' since then and learned that it's ok to not like certain styles of writing just on the basis of personal taste. Hence the freedom I feel to hate Ulysses by James Joyce without guilt, but that's a whole other story. This novel follows the life of Daisy Goodwill from her birth in her mother's kitchen in to her death in the s. It wasn't an ordinary life, if there even is such a thing. She never knew the mother who died bringing her into the world. She was raised by a neighbour until circumstances changed, requiring Daisy to go home and live with her father. At that point she is eleven years old and she and her father are complete strangers to one another. I found the gaps too long between some of the chapters. For example, the 'Childhood' chapter ends in , just as she reconnects with her father, then that chapter comes to an end and the next one 'Marriage' begins with her as a bride-to-be at 22 years of age. I think gaps like that are what prevented me from arriving at a place where I would care about the characters and how things would turn out for them. The story itself is good and the writing as well, I just couldn't get invested in any of the people in the story. I found some rather odd figures of speech in this book. They're in the right places and at the right times; my problem is that I don't understand them. There must have been fifty times throughout the book that I came to a metaphor and stopped, wondering what the heck did that mean. I love creativity, but I think this authour and I are on different wave lengths. I'll give you a few examples: 1. In talking about a professor she said 'He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. As something that should paint a clearer picture for the reader or help us understand a situation more easily, these metaphors and others in this book didn't work for me. I don't know if I'll read anymore of Carol Shields' books or not. I think I'd like to try one more, but it's way down on my priority list now. I know that a lot of people love her writing so definitely give it a try. I didn't 'get' her at all, but you might not have that problem. Would love to hear what you think. Finishing this book, I thought 'What a gloomy novel, what a futile life Shields wrote a sort of biography of Daisy Goodwill, from her remarkable birth up to her last fading moment of life, in 10 chapters, each with an interval of about 10 years. But it's not a linear story: sometimes we hear Daisy speak, sometimes an unknown narrator, at other times immediate family and friends, whether through letters or otherwise. This very variegated approach creates a dynamic and exposes the contradictions and differences between how we see ourselves, how others see us, how through life experiences we change the way we look at ourselves and others. Daisy is the link between all the characters, but Shields frequently zooms in on others and by doing so she exposes the profound changes they made in their lives and how they interacted with one another. Two insights prevail: 1. How in our lifetime we are sometimes forced to radically re-invent ourselves, to give our lives a different direction; and most people can manage this. Shields was a remarkable writer , indeed, and this book you can qualify as 'rich' in life-wisdom. In that sense it reminded me much of Penelope Lively who wrote the introduction to this book , also with the same special sensitivity to gender issues. Personally I think her final chapters are a bit too gloomy, and her sketch of Daisy as an elder rather shocking. But perhaps I'm closing my eyes to reality here? John Dishwasher John Dishwasher. Author 2 books 52 followers. This book pits the incomprehensibility of life against our irrepressible thirst to make sense of it. Shields shows various ways in which life is mysterious. And she mirrors those with various methods we use to give these mysteries order. The order we create only touches the surface of the mysteries, however, not their depth. But ordering that heritage helps us to grapple with the mystery of our origins. Likewise, psychology is not our mind. It only orders aspects of our mind for study and discussion. This helps us, though, to wrap our thoughts around the astonishing mystery of our own awareness. Ultimately though, Shields shows that the great mysteries of life escape us. Encouragingly, she does allow one place where we seem to reconcile this conflict. She suggests that if we can find our singular vocation, an occupation that touches our own personal mystery, deeply, we can wrestle that mystery into the order of our daily efforts. Other than this, it seems, there is only one last place where we transcend this conflict -- death. Besides this heavy duty commentary on the human condition, Shields also draws a portrait of the 20th Century in this book. She uses the changing position of women in society to show how the century evolved in the West. Her conclusion presents the modern Western woman as standing all alone, a sort of orphan, without a source. While the modern woman is more or less at the beginning of her journey in terms of autonomy, and so without as many examples for encouragement. Her protagonist is tragically alone, but brave in her solitude. BAM Post-menopausal grandma for Harris. Perhaps it is because they give me glimpses about what my grandmother's and mother's lives might have been like. The Stone Diaries now takes its place among these favorites. And these holes perhaps represent the huge, gaping hole in Daisy's life that should have been filled with her mother's love. She was such an obese woman that she didn't even realize she was pregnant. And poor baby Daisy was laid on a cold stone table, alone in the world for her first breaths. Daisy stays with them until Clarentine's death when Daisy is eleven. Her father, a virtual stranger, finally takes charge of her then and they move to Indiana to start a new life together. A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? Shields' writing can be blunt, sometimes funny, often poignant: 'Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words 'I love you, Daisy' uttered aloud such a simple phrase , and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit and leisure to ponder the injustice of this. It has been lauded as one of the only books encompassing one's life from birth to death in the fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The book is divided into ten chapters, each chapter representing a decade in the life of Daisy from her birth in in Manitoba, Canada to her death in the 's in Sarasota, Florida, basically the sweep of the twentieth century. I read the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition in celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its publication. And this edition had a wonderful introduction by Penelope Lively where she points out that stone is the foundation of the narrative, the dolomitic limestone quarries of Manitoba. Lively points out that the best fiction surprises and withholds as she points out that each time she reads The Stone Diaries, she sees it differently. It seems that I am a bit of an outlier with my reaction to the book. There are many glowing reviews about the beauty and allure of The Stone Diaries. However, my review is not one of them. While there were some parts that I found very rich in its prose, for the most part I struggled with the book. It's ironic that I read this book while I was reading Sex and the City. The two novels are as disparate as different planets. One book is a about an ordinary housewife struggling with life's little trials, the other, a place peppered with big names and obscene money, fur coats and Lear jets. This book is phenomenal. It's probably the best book I've read in the last year. And it's funny to think about because there is no person, or plot twist, or moment that makes it memorable. Each and every page is special because the perspective of this woman is so true, so sensitive, so illuminating. Somehow even a minuscule event in this woman's life becomes important--great even. This book is truly about the journey. Is it possible to capture the complete course of a life, whether looking from the outside or telling it from the inside? What is set in stone and what is fleeting? But The Stone Diaries is neither. The facts are these. Raised by a neighbor, Daisy later moves to Indiana with her stonecutter father, Cuyler. After a disastrously short first marriage, Daisy returns to Canada to marry Barker Flett. Their three children and Ottawa garden become her life. As though this paltry slice of time deserves such a name. Accident, not history, has called us together, and what an assembly we make. What confusion, what a clamor of inadequacy and portent. Talk of bias, gaps and unreliability undermines the narrative: Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. As in Moon Tiger , one of my absolute favorites, the author explores how events and memories turn into artifacts. Experiencing the novel again after 14 years, I was impressed by the experimentation but ultimately somewhat detached from the story. It was admiration rather than love; I enjoyed earlier chapters more than the last few. Buried in Print and I have reread — or, in my case for half of them, read for the first time — six Shields novels together in It has been so rewarding to observe how her themes recur and interlock. Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck. More reviews and ratings. Join the discussion. Can't find what you're looking for? Help center.

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