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The Stone Carvers (Paperback)

by Jane Urquhart (Author)

4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Emblem Editions; 1 edition (Mar 5 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0771086857
ISBN-13: 978-0771086854
Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 431 g

Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #78,144 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories:
#5 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Canadian > Poetry > Poets, A-Z > Urquhart, Jane
#5 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Canadian > Poets, A-Z > Urquhart, Jane

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Product Description

From Amazon.com

In her fifth novel, award-winning writer Jane Urquhart interweaves the sweeping power of big historical events with small but very moving personal stories. Klara Becker is the granddaughter of a woodcarver in German-settled southern Ontario. She has a love affair with a brooding, silent Irish lad who then goes off to fight, and die, in World War I. Meanwhile her older brother Tilman has literally snapped the ties that would have chained him to the family home, and vanished.

Of course, as in all great romantic epics, the two are destined to meet again. Tilman loses his leg in the war and experiences joyful belonging with an exuberant Italian immigrant family in industrial Hamilton, Ontario, before finally venturing home. Klara remains a spinster in her small town, sewing and working on and off for years on the figure of an abbess carved from wood. The novel culminates in the building of a huge stone monument to Canada's war dead in Vimy, France. Klara and Tilman are both compelled to visit the site of this insanely ambitious artistic obsession of real-life Canadian sculptor Walter Allward; both find that they have a personal struggle to overcome the past and learn to express love. Urquhart grasps her characters from outside and inside as precious few authors manage to do. She is, in her own way, a sculptor who carves a radiant and enduring tale from the elegant material of raw language. --Nigel Hunt --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The bell-llike clarity of its prose initially masks the eloquent pathos of this Canadian bestseller by Urquhart (The Underpainter), which examines WWI through the experiences of siblings Klara Becker, whose first love, Eamon, enlists and never returns, and Tilman Becker, who loses one of his legs in the battle at Vimy Ridge in France. Their largely separate stories along with the evolution of Shoneval, their Ontario farming village form the core of this moving novel and converge in the 1930s, when the sister and brother travel to France to participate in the creation of Walter Allward's Vimy Memorial honoring some 11,000 Canadians missing in action after the Great War. Klara and Tilman share a knowledge of woodcarving, a legacy of their grandfather, a Shoneval pioneer. They end up putting their talents to work in the construction of the memorial and, in the process, rebuild their own damaged lives. The panorama of WWI serves as a powerful backdrop for Klara and Tilman's finely drawn, heartfelt stories and gives Urquhart the canvas on which to depict mature, sophisticated themes. Urquhart charts the collapse of the pastoral ideal an agrarian prewar Canada lured into the conflicts of Europe, losing a generation of young men as a result but her bigger theme is the possibility of redemption, achieved with great struggle, through love and through art. These are familiar premises, but Urquhart's deft, poetic prose and psychological acuity make this a stirring look at one of the signal events of the 20th century.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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4.3 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweeps across three countries and two centuries, Jul 14 2004

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Audio CD)

The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart tells the story of two long-estranged siblings and a visionary 19th Century German priest, and an obsessive sculptor by the name of Walter Allward. Klara Becker (the granddaughter of a master carver), is a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by World War I and the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman. After a number of years Klara and Tilman find themselves involved with Walter Allward's ambitious war memorial at Vimy, France. This highly recommended, deftly abridged, flawlessly recorded, CD audiobook is brilliantly narrated by Nicky Guadagni who does full justice to Jane Urquhart's panoramic novel whose stories and characters sweep across three countries and two centuries.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great Canadian novel, Oct 28 2002

By A Customer

I really enjoyed reading this book. It brought back memories of my family's experience as immigrants to Canada and the culture we brought with us as artists and art lovers. The story of Vimy Ridge was extraordinary and in my opinioin was one of the most significant parts of the book. Most Canadians know little if anything about this WW1 historic event. This book would be an excellent read for all high school English and History students. As an artist I found the text revealing and meaningful.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Obsession and redemption, Feb 20 2009

By	Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Klara Becker decided to live like a spinster. Although still young, she doesn't expect any more from life: tending the animals on her inherited farm, sewing clothes for the villagers to earn a little extra money, and burying the memories of love and loss, until... She is unquestionably Jane Urquhart's heroine in this wonderfully rich and absorbing novel about deep emotions, drive and determination. Set in the nineteen thirties, against the continuing aftermath of the most devastating historical event of the early twentieth century, World War I, the author by concentrating on intimate portraits of her protagonists brings to life the personal challenges ordinary people faced during these difficult times.

The novel is structured into three distinct sections, focusing in turn on Klara, her brother Tilman and the construction of the Canadian War Memorial in Vimy, northern France. Klara's character comes to life primarily through her own observations and inner reflections. The depth of her emotional being that stands in sharp contrast to her external "spinster" persona, is exquisitely evoked in Urquhart's lyrical language. The following quote gives a taste of it: "When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind?..."

In this section, the narrative moves easily between the thirties and the late eighteen eighties when Klara's grandfather, master woodcarver Joseph Becker, immigrated from Bavaria to southwestern Ontario in search for a new life. He settled in the village of Shonegal where he found work with Father Gstir's ambitious church project for his small Catholic German congregation. Shoneval remained the centre of Klara's world; wood carving the craft to be passed on through the generations. Tilman, Klara's older brother, less interested in wood carving than in following the migrating birds, leaves home at a young age. Klara, on the other hand, quietly imitated her grandfather until she was ready to embark on her own carving project. Urquhart draws on the close interaction between her heroine and her work in progress - the statue of an abbess - to reveal the different emotional stages Klara experienced. Joseph could describe the changes he saw in the abbess's face, yet only guessing the source for his granddaughter's inner upheavals.

The third section of the novel draws the different threads of the story together and moves it to a different, yet intensely compelling level. The author provides an almost intimate account of the Canadian Vimy Memorial and the last stages of the work in progress, personalizing the direct involvement of its architect, Canadian Walter Allward and of the many skilled carvers implementing his dream. Her description of the enormous Monument, built on the actual battle field, and erected in memory of the many thousands of Canadian soldiers who perished in this decisive battle, leaves no doubt as to its impact on anybody seeing it. Urquhart's lyrical language evokes the eerie atmosphere that surrounds the carvers working high up on fragile platforms on either of the white limestone pylons that form the centre of the monument. The passages describing the intricate work of stone carvers whether swinging on ropes high up or working on engraving the thousands of names of the missing are some of the most memorable of the novel. The author imagines the stone carvers' daily existence: carving from dawn to dusk; living and breathing the atmosphere of the land, still saturated with the evidence of the war. For some, like for Klara and Tilman, the work is a release from the past, a new beginning that is grounded in forgiveness, closure and redemption. Not surprisingly, Urquhart, asked about what the novel was about, responded: "it is about the redemptive nature of art". Yes, indeed.

By bringing the different threads of the novel together around the Vimy memorial, Urquhart also achieves an admirable harmonization between the intimately imagined lives of her characters and the broader historical reality. Shonegal, for example, is based on the town of Formosa, the actual Father Gstir built the enormous church up on the hill as described in the novel. The imposing Vimy Monument continues to be well known to Canadians of all generations; Walter Allward, almost forgotten since as the architect of the Monument, has been given a well-deserved tribute in Urquhart's novel. [Friederike Knabe]

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Canadian Masterpiece
Move over Margaret Atwood, I think we found a real female Canadian writer. I am thrilled to say this book is such a breath of fresh air in the Canadian war literature landscape... Read more

Published on May 14 2007 by L. Young

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad
This book is a pretty easy read, and gets quite enjoyable if you put a bit of imagination into it. I don't know if I find the main character's relationships to one another all... Read more

Published on Feb 27 2007 by Jubejube

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting history lesson
The idea for this book is fascinating - Urquhart uses as the centrepiece the building of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge. Read more

Published on Nov 8 2002

2.0 out of 5 stars The Stone Carvers
I don't read many books but I was very aware of all the hype surrounding The Stone Carvers from various media sources. Read more

Published on Sep 17 2002 by james skelding-CPC