- Audio CD
- Publisher: BTC Audiobooks; No edition edition (Aug 29 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 086492366X
- ISBN-13: 978-0864923660
- Product Dimensions: 13.6 x 14.2 x 2.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 177 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #252,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting history lesson,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Paperback)
The idea for this book is fascinating - Urquhart uses as the centrepiece the building of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge. The history she provides is something that every Canadian should know and is probably unaware of. She uses the war memorial as a symbol of both obsession and redemption.Urquhart very convincingly conveys the futility of war and depicts how young men go off to war for all the wrong reasons - hoping to fly an airplane, for instance. Urquhart's strenth as a writer is her ability to paint beautiful pictures with words - her description is unsurpassed. She uses symbols quite well, although at times not subtly enough. In this book, the bird imagery was a little overdone when it came to Tilman. However, she portrays the grand sweep of history while, at the same time, evoking the mood and atmosphere of a small Ontario town. The weakness in this book is the characterization - for the most part, these characters are one-dimensional and just not believable as real people. For one thing, they are too nice. It is hard to believe that Tilman, on his own since the age of 6 and losing a leg in the war, would not be more bitterly scarred than he is. Read this book for the beauty of the images and for the history lesson. If you're looking for great characters, you won't find them here. The flaw with this book is that the characters are just not deep enough to adequately deal with the grand themes of obsession and redemption.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the wait!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Hardcover)
As historical fiction, Jane Urquhart's new book "The Stone Carvers" had the same immense impact for me that Taylor Caldwell's "Dear and Glorious Physician" did many years ago. There are several good summaries of the plot above, so I won't go into that here. (I will say that the character of Tilman reminded me so much of Mary in Urquhart's "Away", though!) I've been fortunate to read lots of good Canadian literature recently such as "From Bruised Fell" by Jane Finlay-Young and "A Good House" by Bonnie Burnard. Although I was given "The Stone Carvers" as a gift in November, it was only recently, after finishing "What's Bred in the Bone" by Robertson Davies and wanting more good Canadian literature, that it felt like the time to read this. And it was. Once begun, I could not bear to put this book down each night. The characters' humanness and deeply felt emotions, like those in Urquhart's "Away", got under my skin and I could not wait to find out what happened as the story moved along. This book is intelligent in a way not many are these days, directly addressing the longings of the heart. In my estimation, you can't go wrong reading this book. After reading "Away", I had a deep longing to visit Ireland and Wales; now, having just read "The Stone Carvers", a visit to the monument at Vimy seems inevitable too. I love the quote from the review above about the redemptive nature of art - this book itself proves that to be true. Enjoy!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad,
This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Paperback)
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 that believable, but I think the author does really well at painting symbolisms for the reader to explore meanings and emotions. It isn't a gripping storyline, but makes you want to read more to see how things become resolved. I would recommend this book for romantics and those with a taste for artistic imagery. Those who are looking for a page-turner may not be happy with this one.
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