Well I downloaded this book before I had S and just started it whilst breastfeeding or holding a sleeping S. S really REALLY does not like sleeping on his own in his cot. However in the sling with me he will sleep for three hours. Soooo reading is about all I am good for at the moment.
I really enjoyed this book. What I enjoyed the most were the various styles Shields employs in each chapter to tell the story. She uses different narrators (characters within the book) and she uses different styles (some chapters are letters or lists or newspaper clippings or first person or third person, etc). Oftentimes she refers to the same event in numerous different ways with numerous 'voices' or points of view.
One of my favourite chapters is the very first. It was captivating in its descriptions of the characters and their environment. Exactly the literary skills I admire so much. I love it when a book can paint a picture of a scene so vividly without boring you to death in minutiae.
The story is of the birth, life and death of Daisy Goodwill. However it is so much more than that. The characters include her mother, father, adopted mother, adopted uncle, first husband, second husband, her children, her niece, her girlfriends. The characters are all so well formed and written, all so fallible and real. You really feel you know them and understand them. Until you read the next chapter which then presents another view of the same people or events!
And the plot changes course unexpectedly a number of times, such that I couldn't put this book down. How amazing for a family saga story to be so exciting and unpredictable?
This is definitely more a woman's book than a man's, however. I read an analysis of the book after I had finished and apparently the book is about exploring an 'ordinary woman's life' and showing it to be 'extraordinary'. The men, as we would expect of that generation (early 20th century) are fairly inept at everything (especially love making) - and only tend to realise this, if ever, late in their life when it is indeed too late. The women, by contrast, seem to 'see' themselves so much more clearly in their lives and world - sometimes they act in accordance, sometimes they don't - but they just are more aware of themselves. So an ordinary life of a woman has so much more depth than is first perceivable on the surface.
How apt that I picked this book up at this time of my life.
On the surface my life, as viewed by many, must seem like 'groundhog day'. How can there be meaning in this life of small children and domesticity? Feminism may demand that I have a greater purpose (some sort of paid work? study?) than this of traditional mother and wife. However I think feminism has given us more choice now rather than the opposite. If, as I have, you choose to stay at home to be mother and wife - it is your choice. Similarly if you choose not to, that is a choice as well. When you have choice or at least believe that you have choice, there is freedom.
Maybe in Daisy Goodwill's life she felt that she had no choice in some of her decisions. It would explain periods of unhappiness or discomfort she goes through.
Anyway, if you enjoy well written books, that keep you guessing and make you stop and reasses what you have just read and also makes you think more after you close the book - then this one might be for you!
Written in 1993 it won various awards such as 1995 Pulitzer prize. The author is mother to five children and that essayist I read believes that The Stone Diaries are somewhat autobiographical (not in facts but in thoughts/ideas). Shields, born in 1935 and died in 2003, raised her children before starting her writing and university work.
Am looking forward to my next book - it is translated from the Japanese - "Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami. "Part mystery, part fantasy with a post modern twist". Ha ha this could be my blog tagline I think!
Labels: Newborn, Reading, Stay at home mum
