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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
I really tried but couldn't prioritize this book. I got a couple hundred pages in and the exciting, interesting story of the first acts just fizzled out. Proulx is one of my favourite authors and I was really rooting for this one.
A true-to-life generational history is going to jump from character to character, with some only appearing for brief flashes. But it doesn't necessarily make for a compelling tale.
A true-to-life generational history is going to jump from character to character, with some only appearing for brief flashes. But it doesn't necessarily make for a compelling tale.
beautiful & haunting, at times too in love with its own historicity... a multi-generational tale of inter-breeding & forestry, of mans' quest to dominate & to honor the land. by turns awe-inspiring & unsurprisingly devastating... but often disappointing in its predictability v
Question: When you've read 400 pages of a 700-page book, is that enough?
I started reading this book 6 weeks ago. I read about 100 pages (usually that's enough to know whether you want to continue). I wasn't sold, but I didn't want to give it up. Over the past 6 weeks, in various increments, I have been reading this book.
Here's what happened: I'd read 50 pages or so, then something else would show up that I'd rather read more, or I needed to get a book back to the library, or--I was just not into Charles Duquet. I was just hoping there would come a time when I got so hooked into it that I just plowed ahead and finished. That time never came.
Still, I read a little more than 400 pages, a book's worth of reading. I can't jump ahead and read the last 15 pages, because I won't know any of the characters. Proulx's whole saga here shifts from generation to generation. If the point is that you never know who someone's great-grandpa really was, she goes to a lot of trouble to prove it.
So--I am jumping ship, but before I do I have to say that there were times I sort of liked this book, found characters compelling, storylines interesting. Just when that happened, all of those characters would die off, and there would be a raft of new characters to get used to. I'm done.
I started reading this book 6 weeks ago. I read about 100 pages (usually that's enough to know whether you want to continue). I wasn't sold, but I didn't want to give it up. Over the past 6 weeks, in various increments, I have been reading this book.
Here's what happened: I'd read 50 pages or so, then something else would show up that I'd rather read more, or I needed to get a book back to the library, or--I was just not into Charles Duquet. I was just hoping there would come a time when I got so hooked into it that I just plowed ahead and finished. That time never came.
Still, I read a little more than 400 pages, a book's worth of reading. I can't jump ahead and read the last 15 pages, because I won't know any of the characters. Proulx's whole saga here shifts from generation to generation. If the point is that you never know who someone's great-grandpa really was, she goes to a lot of trouble to prove it.
So--I am jumping ship, but before I do I have to say that there were times I sort of liked this book, found characters compelling, storylines interesting. Just when that happened, all of those characters would die off, and there would be a raft of new characters to get used to. I'm done.
Before we start, let’s be clear about one thing: Barkskins is extravagantly, almost defiantly, flawed. For one thing, it is far too long. Nobody needs 717 pages all at once; I know it is traditional to make exceptions for War and Peace and Clarissa but I am honestly not sure that even they make the most of their unwieldy page count. Barkskins certainly doesn’t need it; it would always have been a big book, mind you, but it could easily have been 200 pages shorter. For another, that length is compounded by Proulx’s tendency to sacrifice depth to breadth, most notably in terms of her characterisation. Characters are introduced, get married, go to seek their fortune, and die choking on river water or crushed by a falling log, all within the space of five pages—not just once, but repeatedly. As the book edges closer to contemporaneity, we’re allowed to focus more on individuals (I think this may also have something to do with the upward trajectory of the average lifespan), but there’s still a lot to keep track of, not least how all of these people relate to one another. (There are two family trees provided, but, for reasons surpassing understanding, they are in the back, so unless you flick through the whole volume first, you won’t know they’re there until it’s far too late.) It is the sort of book that could not have been published without the author being a big enough name to guarantee that it’d be worth it.
And yet, unlike most such books, Barkskins is actually pretty good. Once it settles down and starts focusing for longer stretches on individual characters, we find people who are worth caring about. There is the sexually aggressive Posey, who engineers not only the death of one husband who’s no good to her, but goes on to seduce and marry James Duke, heir to the Duke logging fortune. There is her daughter Lavinia, who from the 1880s onwards runs the business more competently and ruthlessly than any of the men on its board. There is part-Mi’kmaq Jinot Sel, who travels to New Zealand with his employer and patron and is horrified by the naive paternalism shown by whitemen towards the native Maori. (This eventually gets Jinot’s employer killed, which isn’t good news for Jinot either.) Everywhere, for over three hundred years, we are met with two things: the visceral ways in which men (and women) react to forests, and the complacent conviction of whites that they know best, wherever they are, whichever indigenous nation they’re encountering.
Barkskins is a lot like another book on the Baileys Prize longlist, The Sport of Kings, in that it refracts the history of an entire industry in North America through the focusing lens of a family (or two). Barkskins takes a much longer view—it starts in the 1690s and goes all the way up to 2013, where The Sport of Kings only starts in the nineteenth century—but Proulx’s and Morgan’s projects are almost identical. They ask us to see the ways in which racial prejudice is a definitive part of the American identity, and in particular of the business culture that America developed. Where Morgan focuses on the endemic racism of the South created by plantation slavery, Proulx looks much further back: the experience of black Americans is entirely absent from Barkskins, but only because she focuses on the displacement and total destruction of Native American ways of life. Though much of this is achieved through despoiling the natural habitat (I lost count of the number of times characters proclaimed that the forest needed no conservation, because it was infinite—literally too big to fall), a lot of it is also achieved through racial mixing. This starts in generation one, when Charles Duquet and René Sel both have children with Mi’kmaq women in New France (now Canada), and the effects of it continue to be felt for centuries: young men in later generations return to a dying Mi’kmaw village (yes, it’s spelled both ways) headed up by the long-lived patriarch Kuntaw. They’re mixed-race, poor, and looking for a place they can belong, but the old ways are disappearing fast, and there simply aren’t enough Mi’kmaq being born to replace the ones who are dying. It is also interesting to note that the Sels, who never attempt to hide or erase the Native parts of their heritage, develop into a dynasty of lumberjacks: they are professionals and have deep knowledge, but they are the workers. The Duquets, meanwhile—a line which at one point early on seems as though it might run out of boys, prompting Charles Duquet to adopt three from European orphanages—become the Dukes, owners of the greatest logging empire in North America. Their success exists alongside their utter rejection of any whiff of Mi’kmaq in their family’s past. (Proulx also dwells gleefully on the deep irony of a company that prides itself on family ownership and heredity being founded on adoption, a non-blood relationship.)
Proulx isn’t just interested in race fatalism, though; she uses race to comment on environmental choices. Whitemen are baffled by the Native American tendency not to develop and cultivate land, not to “improve” it; most white people genuinely see this as a sign that natives are unfit to live in the country. The Mi’kmaq, meanwhile, as well as representatives of other tribes and nations that we see, cannot understand what whitemen think they are doing: their “improvement” involves slash-and-burn cutting, huge amounts of wasted timber, erosion of topsoil leading to flash floods and landslides, and the total eradication of wildlife, which doesn’t seem much like improvement from an indigenous—or, indeed, sensible contemporary—point of view. Proulx mostly avoids the “magical Indian” stereotypes of inscrutable redmen in touch with the spirit of the forest, but she makes it quite clear that centuries of rapine and our current ecological disaster situation is due to the greed of white people. There’s a grain of hope: near the end of the book, a Duke son begins to take an interest in replanting, and develops a seedling nursery which later becomes a fully-fledged foundation that (in a nice touch) gives a grant to two young Sel descendants to study forestry and participate in a replanting project. And that grain of hope is appropriately complicated by the book’s final page; we want to believe that human ingenuity and determination can fix this problem, but we can’t fix everything.
So, final verdict time. There are awkward parts to Barkskins; quite apart from the length and the often-perfunctory investment in characters, we’re often treated to infodumps in the form of conversation which sounds stilted and silly even for a historical recreation. But overall? It’s surprisingly readable; when we do get the space to care about characters, they’re rounded and vivid; and Proulx’s staggering ambition is in large part repaid by the realism with which she corrals her themes and her loose ends. To be honest, I wouldn’t complain if it ended up on the shortlist. It’s trying to do something immense, and I think that’s worth celebrating.
And yet, unlike most such books, Barkskins is actually pretty good. Once it settles down and starts focusing for longer stretches on individual characters, we find people who are worth caring about. There is the sexually aggressive Posey, who engineers not only the death of one husband who’s no good to her, but goes on to seduce and marry James Duke, heir to the Duke logging fortune. There is her daughter Lavinia, who from the 1880s onwards runs the business more competently and ruthlessly than any of the men on its board. There is part-Mi’kmaq Jinot Sel, who travels to New Zealand with his employer and patron and is horrified by the naive paternalism shown by whitemen towards the native Maori. (This eventually gets Jinot’s employer killed, which isn’t good news for Jinot either.) Everywhere, for over three hundred years, we are met with two things: the visceral ways in which men (and women) react to forests, and the complacent conviction of whites that they know best, wherever they are, whichever indigenous nation they’re encountering.
Barkskins is a lot like another book on the Baileys Prize longlist, The Sport of Kings, in that it refracts the history of an entire industry in North America through the focusing lens of a family (or two). Barkskins takes a much longer view—it starts in the 1690s and goes all the way up to 2013, where The Sport of Kings only starts in the nineteenth century—but Proulx’s and Morgan’s projects are almost identical. They ask us to see the ways in which racial prejudice is a definitive part of the American identity, and in particular of the business culture that America developed. Where Morgan focuses on the endemic racism of the South created by plantation slavery, Proulx looks much further back: the experience of black Americans is entirely absent from Barkskins, but only because she focuses on the displacement and total destruction of Native American ways of life. Though much of this is achieved through despoiling the natural habitat (I lost count of the number of times characters proclaimed that the forest needed no conservation, because it was infinite—literally too big to fall), a lot of it is also achieved through racial mixing. This starts in generation one, when Charles Duquet and René Sel both have children with Mi’kmaq women in New France (now Canada), and the effects of it continue to be felt for centuries: young men in later generations return to a dying Mi’kmaw village (yes, it’s spelled both ways) headed up by the long-lived patriarch Kuntaw. They’re mixed-race, poor, and looking for a place they can belong, but the old ways are disappearing fast, and there simply aren’t enough Mi’kmaq being born to replace the ones who are dying. It is also interesting to note that the Sels, who never attempt to hide or erase the Native parts of their heritage, develop into a dynasty of lumberjacks: they are professionals and have deep knowledge, but they are the workers. The Duquets, meanwhile—a line which at one point early on seems as though it might run out of boys, prompting Charles Duquet to adopt three from European orphanages—become the Dukes, owners of the greatest logging empire in North America. Their success exists alongside their utter rejection of any whiff of Mi’kmaq in their family’s past. (Proulx also dwells gleefully on the deep irony of a company that prides itself on family ownership and heredity being founded on adoption, a non-blood relationship.)
Proulx isn’t just interested in race fatalism, though; she uses race to comment on environmental choices. Whitemen are baffled by the Native American tendency not to develop and cultivate land, not to “improve” it; most white people genuinely see this as a sign that natives are unfit to live in the country. The Mi’kmaq, meanwhile, as well as representatives of other tribes and nations that we see, cannot understand what whitemen think they are doing: their “improvement” involves slash-and-burn cutting, huge amounts of wasted timber, erosion of topsoil leading to flash floods and landslides, and the total eradication of wildlife, which doesn’t seem much like improvement from an indigenous—or, indeed, sensible contemporary—point of view. Proulx mostly avoids the “magical Indian” stereotypes of inscrutable redmen in touch with the spirit of the forest, but she makes it quite clear that centuries of rapine and our current ecological disaster situation is due to the greed of white people. There’s a grain of hope: near the end of the book, a Duke son begins to take an interest in replanting, and develops a seedling nursery which later becomes a fully-fledged foundation that (in a nice touch) gives a grant to two young Sel descendants to study forestry and participate in a replanting project. And that grain of hope is appropriately complicated by the book’s final page; we want to believe that human ingenuity and determination can fix this problem, but we can’t fix everything.
So, final verdict time. There are awkward parts to Barkskins; quite apart from the length and the often-perfunctory investment in characters, we’re often treated to infodumps in the form of conversation which sounds stilted and silly even for a historical recreation. But overall? It’s surprisingly readable; when we do get the space to care about characters, they’re rounded and vivid; and Proulx’s staggering ambition is in large part repaid by the realism with which she corrals her themes and her loose ends. To be honest, I wouldn’t complain if it ended up on the shortlist. It’s trying to do something immense, and I think that’s worth celebrating.
This 717-page historical novel that spans 300 years in Canada and the northern United States certainly is ambitious. It's also overly written. It needed a good editor. The story could have been told in at least 75 fewer pages, perhaps more. Don't get me wrong. Ms. Proulx is an excellent writer. And while details make the story, she often gets too bogged down in details. The first 100-200 pages drag. The next 200-300 sing and move quickly as the reader becomes interested in the characters she has created. But the final 200 pages read as an afterthought, traversing the entire 20th Century up until present day after spending hundreds of pages in the 1600s to 1800s. The final chapter is where Ms. Proulx makes her last point, even though she constantly has bashed the reader over the head with the opinion that deforestation ruined the New World. While she may be correct, she could have made that point in fewer than 717 pages. I would not recommend this book but if you are a Proulx fan, you may like it. To tell the truth, she's written better novels in her rich and stories past.
It was good but too long. It could have lost 200 pages at least and would have been better. Opened my mind to a piece of history I'd never known about. I didn't realise how much trees contributed to the early history of N. America.
favorite part of this book: the trees
least favorite: destruction of the trees
a long winded story of environmental destruction, climate change, capitalism, and misogony
least favorite: destruction of the trees
a long winded story of environmental destruction, climate change, capitalism, and misogony
Not what I expected. Historical fiction spanning almost 300 years. It was difficult to follow. I had to keep checking the family trees at the end of the story. There were times that I just skimmed pages.
I have been listening to the audio book (about 26 hours total, currently in 7 hours) and I think I am going to abandon. No character has grabbed my heart. There isn't a plot except for plodding through history of how things come to be very slowly. There isn't anything making me want to listen to the next chapter, all the characters are just floating around aimlessly. Blergh.
This was long: 26 hours long. And I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. It wasn't uninteresting. But it didn't need to be 26 hours long. It could have been way more interesting had it either been an expose into the lumber industry or a biography of the families in the industry. Doing both meant neither was done to my satisfaction. So I feel like I just listened to someone tell me their family history for multiple generations with a few anecdotes thrown in for each before moving on to the next. Not quite satisfying enough for such a long book.