the shipping news and brokeback mountain

“But the subject was simply too vast and disparate, so I decided to look at one contributory part of climate change - deforestation. “I have been concerned about and interested in global climate change for the past 20 years or so and wanted to write about this momentous shift,” Proulx, 81, said in a recent email interview. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.Proulx uses those families of characters and the demise of wildly diverse forests to highlight the biggest true story of our time, climate change, and the critical roles played by the woodsman with an ax and a rapacious society. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).Īs the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph-in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs Diddy Shovel the strongman drowned Herald Prowse cane-twirling Beety Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize the much-zippered Alvin Yark silent Wavey and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair.features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.

The shipping news and brokeback mountain