4.0 out of 5 stars
An Interesting Collection of Belles Lettres, Jan 27 2011
This review is from: A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields & Blanche Howard (Hardcover)
This book was loaned to me by a friend who had recommended it over coffee a couple of months ago. All he said at the time was that as a collection of letters, it offered some very unique insights into the life and times of the Canadian writer, the late Carol Shields. As I am not a great fan of letters as a literary genre and not being overly impressed with Shields' work as a novelist, I took this voluminous book and placed it on a shelf in my study reserved for distant future reads. Well, I finally got around to reading it this week, and what a wonderful surprise! In the space of over three hundred pages covering thirty years, Shields and Howard reveal some very rich and dynamic qualities of their enduring friendship. One, they seemed to care enough about each other's writing experiences to be forever inquiring after them. Two, they came across as very humble people who enjoyed reading, writing and critiquing about some of the great adventures, mysteries and controversies of life. Three, the many letters between these two writers spilled out into their private lives in genuinely personable ways. Both liked to travel and meet famous people; both were married to self-absorbed men who still managed to find time to encourage their literary pursuits; and both suffered through the often lonely ordeal of facing death from opposite ends: one as the dying, the other as the friend. The letters ooze with moments of triumph, sorrow, fear, and creative reflection. This body of writing also provides some very intriguing insights into Canadian life in the eighties and nineties as Canadian women became more actively established as writers in the mould of Atwood, Calwood, and Munro. If these two are anything to go by, women certainly came into their own during this period by charting their own course through life. Great read!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An Epistolary Treasure Trove, April 12 2007
This review is from: A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields & Blanche Howard (Hardcover)
A Memoir of Friendship -- the thirty-year exchange of letters between two writers and two friends -- is a treasure trove for any lover of the written word, providing compelling and intimate glimpses into the inner lives of these two prominent and much loved writers, through good times...and difficult ones. I couldn't put it down.
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