The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
One of my student's parents suggested I read this book wich won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1995. The opening sequence is a rather powerful one that you're not likely to forget. It describes the unusual birth of the main character, Daisy, whose life is told through the eyes of various characters in her life. Daisy herself narrates much of the first part of the story. The book is divided into ten chapters of Daisy's life from Birth, Childhood, and Marriage, through Ease, Illness and Decline, and then Death. The story takes place in Canada, but I don't think setting is critical to the plot. At first I was put off by the freqent change of narrator as the story progressed, then I began to admire the way Shields was able to manipulate the point of view without the reader becoming confused. You could tell how much time had passed by who was telling the story. None of the narrators repeat the same story; they each cause the story to move forward. There is a genealogy tree at the beginnig of the book that helps the reader keep track of how all the characters are related.
A feature of this book that I admired was the complex sentence structure of Shields' writing. With her multiple clause sentences, set off with parenthetical information in dashes, she could easily compete with the Victorian writers of the 19th century. A typical example of Shields' writing: "It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal--otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again--but the act of recording requires that she remove her gloves, rummage through her bag for her pen and for the notebook itself." (p. 151) Here's another packed sentence: "She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light." (p. 76) Despite the change in narrators throughout the story, Shields maintains similar complex sentence structure for each voice throughout the novel.
A feature of this book that I admired was the complex sentence structure of Shields' writing. With her multiple clause sentences, set off with parenthetical information in dashes, she could easily compete with the Victorian writers of the 19th century. A typical example of Shields' writing: "It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal--otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again--but the act of recording requires that she remove her gloves, rummage through her bag for her pen and for the notebook itself." (p. 151) Here's another packed sentence: "She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light." (p. 76) Despite the change in narrators throughout the story, Shields maintains similar complex sentence structure for each voice throughout the novel.
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