Better late.....

Just recently, I stumbled across a movie I had seen before, but had not thought much of, The Shipping News.  And of course, like everything else in my life, I Googled it. I had no idea it was based on a book by E. Annie Proulx.  A book, no less, that won the Faulkner/PEN, National Book award, and the Pulitzer.  Must be pretty good.  Inspired by such an amazing film, I headed for my trusty local Used Bookshop.  Though they did not have The Shipping News, they did have Accordion Crimes, a book that, in an interview with The Paris Review (remember, I Googled), Proulx said  "...is probably the best book I've written.  I like the big sweep of it..." (Cox, Christopher. "Annie Proulx: The Art of Fiction, No. 188." The Paris Review. Spring 2009).  I grabbed it.  I had read only an interview but I knew that this was someone to respect and whose books I knew I would mark up. And would you believe, the next day I would find The Shipping News at the Goodwill?  Oh yes, it was meant to be. While only on page 9, I have marked up, circled, underlined, and notated  the poor thing so that it is permanently mine and Annie and I are friends.  Here are some of my favorite passages-meaty and wordy and I love it.

"A great damp loaf of a body.  At six he weighed eighty pounds.  At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh.  Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair runched back.  Features as bunched as kissed fingertips.  Eyes the color of plastic.  The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face."

"The small decisions of local authority seemed to him the deep workings of life.  In a profession that tutored its practitioners in the baseness of human nature, that revealed the corroded metal of civilization, Quoyle constructed a personal illusion and smoking jealously he imagined rational compromise."