- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Macmillan; 1st Edition edition (Sep 5 1974)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0333156951
- ISBN-13: 978-0333156957
- Shipping Weight: 789 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #369,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Perhaps the best known and most loved of all Margaret Laurence's novels, The Diviners was also her last novel and the final entry in her Manawaka sequence. Laurence, who saw The Diviners as her own fictional autobiography, tells the story of 48-year-old Morag Gunn as she struggles to finish another novel. As she works, she reminisces about her life. It's her story but it's also the story of the men and women who have fostered her, for good and bad: her parents, who died when she was five; her eccentric stepfather and his reclusive wife; her overbearing and repressive husband, who tried to smother her dreams to write; and the sensuous but unreliable Native lover who inspires her, with whom she bears a daughter and with whom she is never happy.
The Diviners is Laurence at her most inventive. She incorporates flashbacks, personal reminiscences, imaginary conversations, and philosophical meditations, shifting between narrative and digression to give readers a sense of Morag's thought processes. The novel also incorporates the themes that mattered most to Laurence: racial and gender equality, the validity of the Canadian literary experience, and the importance of artistic expression in society. The Diviners, which brought Laurence her second Governor General's Award in 1974, is a rich and striking novel, a fitting finale for Laurence's portrait of Manawaka. --Jeffrey Canton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
“A pleasure to read!…Richly textured, beautifully written.”
–The New Yorker
“Leaves us breathless and cheering.”
–Montreal Gazette
From the Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
–The New Yorker
“Leaves us breathless and cheering.”
–Montreal Gazette
From the Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read the entire Manawaka cycle--it speaks to all women,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Diviners (Paperback)
The Manawaka cycle consists of the following books: "A Bird in the House", "A Jest of God", "The Fire Dwellers" "Stone Angel", and "The Diviners". It is truly a portayal the cycle of life for women. I discovered Margaret Laurence while living in a log cabin in Canada at the height of my feminist awakening in the 1970's. Although steeped in far more radical authors such as Betty Friedan and Virginia Woolf, Laurence's Manawaka series touched me as no others, perhaps because I identified with each and every woman of her books. The startling part was that none of their lives looked anything like mine--not in the slightest. And yet I felt as if I were each character and came away with a bit more insight into myself. I loved the way she chose women who were unlike each other, but all of whom had contact with each other in some way. One was a main character in one book and a minor one in another book. One was a young girl, another a middle-aged woman, and yet another a dying elderly woman. One was the wealthy daughter of a town leader, the other the daughter of the garbage collector. And each woman learned something about herself and her life through the drama of the story. Laurence's solutions for each woman were far from simplistic, but each woman came to some resolution in her life. To read only one misses the eloquence of the series, the portrait of rural Manitoba and of people who inhabit the imaginary town of Manawaka. I wish that the series were published in one volume so that readers did not risk entering the characters from only one person's perpective. I have not read the books since the 1970's and yet hold them very dear. I am now inspired to reread them from the perspective of a 53-year-old. I have little doubt that they will only be that much more intensely felt. Perhaps I will write another review after my rereading of them. It is understandable that high school students might be unmoved by her books and I agree with the reviewer who suggested they might not be appropriate for mandatory high school reading. They require a bit more life experience than most adolescents have, but I venture to guess that her message is universally understood by women of all ages who are introspective. I think a good introduction of Laurence for youths might be "A Bird in the House", about a child's perspective on a death in the family. I cannot think of any books that have had a greater influence on my adult life as a woman. I hope that the entire series is republished.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Captivating,
By
This review is from: The Diviners (Paperback)
An amazing read. The characters are so well developed that you feel the change in the characters as time progresses, and as they grow older. Morag will stay with me for a long time. Very compelling, and moving. Its real, its human.
4.0 out of 5 stars
a Canadian classic,
By I ain't no porn writer (author, "Crippled Dreams") - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Diviners (Paperback)
There are some spicy sex scenes, but it's hard to believe that this novel was called pornography when it was first published in 1974. Margaret Laurence got all kinds of praise and hate mail because of it, as well as disapproval from members of her congregation and people who knew her back home for writing "such stuff". This story is a young prairie girl's search for real love, and in Morag Gunn we have the perfectly well-drawn believable figure of the independent young woman who defeats the odds and achieves the life she wants thanks to her strength of courage and perseverance. (...)
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