Título: The shipping news
Autor: Annie Proulx
Sinopse: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). As 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. 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.
Contexto da obra
Quando a classificação é mais ampla, o contexto do livro costuma depender ainda mais de autoria, tema e edição. “The shipping news”, de Annie Proulx, publicado pela editora Scribner, em 2001 e com 337 páginas, integra a categoria Livros Variados. Por isso, autoria, edição e tema acabam tendo ainda mais peso na forma de apresentar o livro.
Editora: Scribner
Páginas: 337
Ano: 2001
Edição:
Linguagem: inglês
ISBN: 0743225422
ISBN13: 9780743225427
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora Scribner costumam oferecer uma experiência de leitura marcada por narrativas densas e multifacetadas, que transitam entre histórias pessoais intensas e análises históricas detalhadas. As sinopses sugerem um interesse editorial por temas que exploram conflitos humanos profundos, como a luta pela sobrevivência, o impacto da memória, e as complexidades do poder, muitas vezes ambientados em cenários realistas e contemporâneos ou em contextos históricos ricos. O tom varia entre o dramático e o reflexivo, com ritmo que ora se acelera em thrillers e espionagem, ora desacelera em relatos intimistas e ensaios que convidam à reflexão.
