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I really loved the transformation part. How Quoyle started connecting with the people in this small coastal town. His friendship with Dennis, friction and loyalty at his office with colleagues, all was described in a lively manner. Beside that language was really beautiful. Or maybe a butterfly which is also an insect, a fact that cannot have escaped an author as addicted as Annie is to using every English word in the dictionary whether or not it is relevant to the meaning she is trying to impart.

I think one weakness is that the mother of the girls is too horrible, and the manner of her departure from their lives stretched my credulity somewhat. Ultimately, it's at least as much about (re)birth and healing as death and doom. One character slowly realises it may be possible to recover from a broken relationship: "was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once?" Knots are the most obvious one. Each chapter opens with a quotation pertinent to what it contains, and many are from Ashley Book of Knots, which Proulx found second-hand, and gave her the inspiration and structure she sought. Knots feature in the plot metaphorically (in terms of being bound or adrift), in a more literal and superstitious sense. Rope can be wound and knotted to make good a wound or separation. We also learn that Quoyle's name means "coil of rope", and I suppose he is pretty tightly coiled for the first half of the book.

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If I were as clever and witty as some of my GR friends (you know who you are), I would have written this review in the style of the book. Parents die, wife dies, aunt shows up out of nowhere and whisks the whole aimless uninteresting lot of them off to a dreary remote end-of-nowhere town in Newfoundland. Cover beauty is coveted and exploited; provides keys to all the right doors, but it is our inner selves, our own moral code that is the true compass to the coveted life of beauty, peace, happiness and love.

In a way he could not explain she seized his attention; because she seemed sprung from wet stones, the stench of fish and tide." Not very snappy, no style, and still too long," said Partridge, "but going in the right direction. Get the idea? Get the sense of what's news? What you want in the lead? Here, see what you can do. Put some spin on it." Quoyle tried to say congratulations, ended up shaking and shaking Partridge's hand, couldn't let go. The book is riddled with pain, rejection, estrangement and mentions of abusive relationships (never graphic); many are haunted by ghosts of past events and relationships gone wrong. But although it is sometimes bleak, it is rarely depressing, and sometimes it's funny. Even close and fond relationships often have an element of awkwardness and distance; for instance, Quoyle always refers to "the aunt", rather than "my aunt". Even after living with her for a while, "It came to him he knew nearly nothing of the aunt's life. And hadn't missed the knowledge." The writing is very different and interesting. While they are in their small town in New York, the sentences are terse, choppy – very few articles and no conjunctions. Tight, compressed sentences that reflected their tight, compressed existence.Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled. Aspects of the town and its characters remind me of David Lynch's 1980s TV series "Twin Peaks": strange characters, often with impairments of mind, body or emotions, slightly strange names, odd superstitions, and dark secrets (murder, incest, rape, insurance fraud). Proulx describes Quoyle as "a great damp loaf of a body." What kind of man is Quoyle? How does Proulx's sublime, comic style make you feel about him? Horrible, near-grotesque people. People you would never want to know, or date. Food I would never touch, outside of starvation.

Newfoundland is more than the setting for this story, it is a dreary yet engaging character onto itself. Does the cold weather and the rough life add to your enjoyment of the book?

I was enthralled with the people I met while reading and when this family saga ended - of loves lost and found; of careers begun, stalled, and begun again; of friendships and warmth and caring; of dark times and sad times and cruel times and joyful times – when it all came to an end, I felt I would give anything for a few more (like 10 or 20) chapters, even though the ending is perfect. October 28) A deeply uninteresting, unlikeable boy grows up to be a deeply uninteresting, unlikable man. He marries a nasty piece of work (who is also deeply unlikable) and spits out two children that are exactly the children one goes out of one’s way to avoid at shopping centres. It happens in Newfoundland, a place of water, moisture, and rottenness, of words that travel long distances, a place for people who know everything about boats, cliffs and icebergs. As Quoyle arrives in Newfoundland, he hears much of his family's past. In fact, there is an old relative, "some kind of fork kin," still alive in Newfoundland. Why does Quoyle avoid Nolan -- seem angry at the old man from the start? Is the reason as simple as Quoyle denying where he came from, especially after learning the details of his father's relationship with the aunt? On the horizon icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased."