Shipping News

In her novel The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx brings to life a Newfoundland fishing town and a small group of its inhabitants - a more-or-less failed journalist and the three women in his life - his two daughters and his aunt. The four of them have decided to retake their ancestral home, and the action of the plot derives from this attempt - both literal and psychological - to reclaim history. The story that results is certainly not a happy one, even the ending seems to be happy.

With this novel, Proulx seems to be providing us with a reworking of that axiom we have all heard: You cannot go home again. Home may be the place that that have to take you in when you have to go there, but you will have forgotten how to speak the language, and the food will no longer satisfy...
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