REFLECTIONS: The Book Club Reflection: 'The Shipping News' by Annie Proulx

Our Worth is in the eyes of others.

Annie Proulx
rhymes with true
and her book:
'The Shipping News'
"What is it all about?"
I didn't have a clue.

After the first 27 pages,
I wondered:
" What kind of man
is the main character
Quoyle?"
Tall but soft.
A failure
to loneliness,
of normal appearance,
yet yearned
to be
gregarious.
" Which of us
does not?"

For his Father
he was just
a 'lout'.
His brother
called him names
and kicked him.
Thought
he was given
to wrong family
yet
their physical features
were the same.
" Do you feel sorry for him?"
Or you want to turn your face
away
in disgust
on his inability to fight them,
to raise above them.
" When you think
about
your own family,
how easy
is it to get away?"

I read more
and stopped
on the page 48.
Quoyle,
large and white,
was stumbling along,
going nowhere,
He found his first friend,
an all-night talker,
married a girl,
his first love,
she felt,
he is pulling her under.
She was pushing him over.
The armour of indiference
in which
he protected his marriage
was frail.
Quoyle believed
in silent suffering.
The greater the love - the sharper the pain.
" How many of us wish
for a fresh start,
and yet
we are too comfortable,
we want to believe
that
in the end
it will be allright."

His wife was killed
on the page 56.
He has two daughters,
Bunny and Sunshine,
and his auntie moves in.
The strong-willed woman
talks about their homeland:
" As you get older,
you find
the place,
where you started out,
pulls at you,
stronger and stronger."
They come to live
to the old place
of the Quoyles,
half ruined,
isolated,
the walls and doors
pumiced by stony lives
of dead generations.
Quoyle has the familiar feeling
that things were going wrong.
" How many times
you felt that
whatever you hoped for
never happened?"

On the page 135,
he learns about
his auntie's past.
He finds a new
love interest
and offers her
a ride.
His eldest daughter,
Bunny
is sensitive in a way
the rest of us aren't.
Tuned into things
we don't get.
She is a bit strange,
sometimes
and Quoyle worries about that.
" We are all different though
we may pretend otherwise.
We are all strange inside.
We learn how to disguise
our differences as we grow up.
Do you sometimes feel
that something original,
our true self,
we left behind
as we moved throughout our lives?"

On the page 144
Quoyle is thirty-six years old
and this is the first time
anybody ever said
he'd done it right.
" How desperately
do we need recognition
from others,
our own selfworth
is in other people eyes."

On the page 172
he found his pirate's
ancient family past.
He strained his eyes
until they stung
and saw nothing.
Uneasiness came over him,
that crawling dread of things unseen.
" What is more scary
than the ghastly unknown,
you hear the rut of the shore,
the waves breaking on the stone
invisible in the gloom of fog
or darkness of the night.
The ghastly thoughts
of unknown ancestors
will always haunt us."

The story ends on the page 248.
All the complex wires of life
were stripped out
and he could see
the structure of life.
Nothing but rock and sea,
the tiny figures of humans and animals
against them
for a brief time.
" How often
in dusk
of our existence
we realize
how unsignificant we are
on a big scale of life,
just tiny ants
scattering around
in a dust
for a piece of crust."

Quoyle was given a chance
to prove himself.
He learns about boats, cod fishing,
knots,
seal flipper pie
and love without pain.
He finds his way.
with the help
of the Demon Lover, the Stout-hearted aunt, Maids in the Meadow
and the Tall and Quiet Woman.
"The Book Club meeting
came to the end.
We looked at each other
with silent question in our eyes
hoping, wishing
that if/when
we stumble along
we also find someone
to help us up
and find the way out."

Annie Proulx
rhymes with true
I know now
what is her book
about.
"There will always be
a way out
as long as we find
new purposes
in our lives."