Prizes and Awards: Giller Prize Shortlist
2002
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
"A life is full of isolated events," writes Carol Shields near the end of Unless, "but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define... words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, therefore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet." Shield's explanation for her novel's title lends meaning to this multilayered narrative in which a mother's grief over a daughter's break with the family revises her feminist outlook and pushes her craft as a writer in a new direction.
The oldest daughter of 44-year-old Reta Winters suddenly, inexplicably, drops out of college and ends up on a Toronto street corner panhandling, with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "goodness." The quiet comforts of Reta's small-town life and the constancy of her feminist perspective sustain her hope that her daughter will snap out of this, whatever "this" is. Threaded into her family's crisis is her ongoing internal elegy on the exclusion of women from the literary canon, which she transposes to mean her daughter's exclusion from humanity. Reta wonders if her daughter has discovered, as she herself did years before, that the world is "an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors," and has chosen to pursue the one thing that doesn't require power or a voice: goodness.
In her own writing, Reta reaffirms her own sense of self, as well as her sense of humor. As her theoretical reflections on modern womanhood play counterpoint to her unwavering sense of creating a home and keeping her family together, Reta's smarts and fears form a wonderfully coherent narrative--a life worth reading about. With Unless, the inaugural title in HarperCollins's Fourth Estate imprint, Shields (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries) once again asserts her place in the canon. --Emily Russin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone's amazement, a fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,' or so it was described in Publishers Weekly. That cheeky self-description sums up the protagonist of Shields's latest, the precocious, compassionate and feisty Reta Winters, an accomplished author who suddenly finds her literary success meaningless when the oldest of her three daughters, Norah, drops out of college to live on the streets of Toronto with a placard labeled Goodness hung around her neck. Shields takes an elliptical approach to Winters's dilemma, slowly exploring the possible reasons why a bright, attractive young woman would simply give up and drop out. As Shields makes her way through Winters's literary career, her marriage and the difficulties she and her daughter face in being taken seriously as women in the modern era, she employs an ingenious conceit by tracking Winters's emotions as she tries to write a sequel to her light romantic novel while helping a fellow writer, a Holocaust survivor, work on her memoirs. As Norah's plight deepens and the nature of her decision begins to surface, the romantic novel turns dark and serious, and Winters faces a rewrite when her long-time editor dies and his pedantic successor tries to introduce a sexist plot twist. Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel. The icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who, in doing nothing... has claimed everything. The result is a landmark book that constitutes yet another noteworthy addition to Shields's impressive body of work.
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.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful work of subtlety,
By Magnolia Flutter (Vancouver, CAN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Unless (Paperback)
Unless is beautifully written. It may be too subtle for many people (see reviews claiming it to be tedious), but if you look into her finely woven story, there are many layers of overlapping meaning. If you are not a feminist, Shields may seem to assume too much. Yet I find her feminism to be right on the mark, humble and poignant.She points out the irony of writing about a woman who is writing about a woman writing. But going through the story, she teaches a clinic on how to write a story. I found it captivating and have read it repeatedly and recommended it to all the women in my life. Shields also embraces the accusation that she writes about the small moments and small lives. This book was much more memorable than the Stone Diaries which was also fascinating.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rambles,
By
This review is from: Unless (Paperback)
I agree with the reviewer, Carrad's, statement, "Moaning for pages and pages and pages about how female authors and characters have been marginalized for centuries does not justify the artistic failure inherent in marginalizing all the male characters in the book, who are poorly-realized cardboard cutouts." The main character Reta is pretty presumptious about why her daughter has withdrawn from society and yet in the end the reason is something very different. Although I can see the realtionship and symbolism. But it seems that Shields uses this novel to ramble on about woman's plight of being powerless and other political musings. It just ends up being a very disconnected and uninteresting novel.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unless...An Exploration of Our Worst Fear,
By
This review is from: Unless: A Novel (Hardcover)
Carol Shields writes of a mother's worst fear....a child who detaches from society to live on the street. Throughout the journey, the mother microscopically examines her past and present in an attempt to understand why her daughter would do this.Anyone who has ever had to face a loss like this could identify with Carol Shield's portrayal of a life that has gone awry. Carol touches on many nerves and many issues in this beautifully written novel.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
