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This story on the County Mutual Aid Transportation meeting? A month ago they were ready to start van service in four towns if Bugle Hollow came in. You say here that they met last night, then, way down at the end you mention sort of as a minor detail, that Bugle Hollow decided not to join. You know how many old people, no cars, people can't afford a car or a second car, commuters, been waiting for that goddamn van to pull up? Now it's not going to happen. News, Quoyle, news. Better get your mojo working." A minute later added in a different voice that he was doing Greek-style marinated fish and red peppers on skewers Friday night and did Quoyle want to come over? This story follows a family from New York to Newfoundland where Quoyle’s family is from originally. His Aunt travels with the family and is looking forward to a new start with Quoyle and his two daughters in the place she had left behind nearly 50 years before. Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled. From this youngest son's failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cells -- failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure. The story follows Quoyle, a hulk of a man, who’s life begins with dysfunction and tragedy. He is a man adrift in upstate New York, deadened from abuse and ill treatment. The only positive thing he receives from his early life and broken marriage to an unfaithful and dreadful wife, is two daughters. An Aunt, Angis Hamm, convinces Quoyle to return to his ancestral home in Newfoundland where he finds work on the local newspaper. This is where the story really finds solid ground with Proulx deftly describing the local culture, language, and harsh climate of Newfoundland.

This book is revolutionary in it's use of language. She punctuates inventively and her punctuation "style" gives her sentences a strange movement. The book moves, it actually moves, as you read it. In such a harsh environment, "The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast"

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This was one of the first twenty books I added to my to-read shelf here on Goodreads nearly eight years ago. Along the way, I somehow acquired not just one but two copies of this Pulitzer prize winning novel. Either my memory of what I own failed me, or I really wanted to read this. In any case, it was high time I grabbed one of those copies from my bookshelf! Besides, it’s so well loved, I was sure to be wild about it as well. I’m sorry to say that something went wrong here, friends. While I did respect Proulx’s work, I’m not able to write a gushing review of it! I’m kind of stumped to explain exactly what happened.

Ultimately, it's at least as much about (re)birth and healing as death and doom. One character slowly realises it may be possible to recover from a broken relationship: "was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once?" In an important passage, Quoyle's colleague Billy gives him a metaphor for the schema for a man's life: "Ar, that? Let's see. Used to say there were four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman." (p. 182). While I have a hard time relating that to my own experience, it definitely correlates directly to Quoyle. The Tall and Quiet Woman is clearly the wonderful Wavey (!) and the story of she and Quoyle is another wonderful highlight to this charming book.By the way it's built, Quoyle is reminiscent of prince Mishkin - " good " in the most essential sense of the word, foreign to any pettiness. Just that Dostoïevski's " idiot" had, unlike Quoyle - a less struggling past.

Punch sighed, feigned a weighty decision. "Put you on the municipal beat to help out Al Catalog. He'll break you in. Get your assignments from him." Why we're going, the raw materials," Partridge said. "Wine, ripe tomatillos, alligator pears." He poured fumé blanc, then told Quoyle that really it was for love, not vegetables. Or maybe a butterfly which is also an insect, a fact that cannot have escaped an author as addicted as Annie is to using every English word in the dictionary whether or not it is relevant to the meaning she is trying to impart.Pine Eye Planning Commission member Janice Foxley resigned during an angry late-night Tuesday meeting. "I'm not going to sit here and watch the poor people of this town get sold down the river," Foxley said.