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tomleetang 's review for:
Barkskins
by Annie Proulx
A monumental, ambitious novel that doesn't always work. What is undeniably amazing is how Proulx creates so many vignettes of characters, charting two family lines from the days of the early Canadian settlers all the way to the modern day.
While its overriding theme is clearly deforestation, Barkskins also looks at the displacement of Native Americans, colonialism and the burgeoning commerce of the lumber trade in the New World. It does not judge too sententiously on the whole (aside from in the rather damp squib of an ending), but grieves for the wonder of the bounty North America once contained; a bounty that is no longer known to mankind.
The way the families begin to sprawl from small seeds is a clear metaphor for the swollen mass of humanity that now fills the world, but it is the individual buds of the family tree that nurture the novel and are its greatest strength. A curious collection of characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies that are either more or less eccentric, parade through the pages, from the humble and simple woodcutter Renee, to the advent of the fiercely intelligent Lavinia, the first woman to work in the Duke family business.
As tends to happen with the passing of time innumerable people die, some of natural causes but plenty of others by violent means.
The trouble is that it's hard to keep track of what's going on from generation to generation, especially as the novel jumps between two separate (but intertwined) families. Barkskins feels like it's trying to do too many things, and even with a diagram of the family trees I could barely keep up - and that was without the encroaching complexity of the modern world which begins to choke the novel in legalese and technical terminology. By the end I was definitely becoming bored.
While its overriding theme is clearly deforestation, Barkskins also looks at the displacement of Native Americans, colonialism and the burgeoning commerce of the lumber trade in the New World. It does not judge too sententiously on the whole (aside from in the rather damp squib of an ending), but grieves for the wonder of the bounty North America once contained; a bounty that is no longer known to mankind.
The way the families begin to sprawl from small seeds is a clear metaphor for the swollen mass of humanity that now fills the world, but it is the individual buds of the family tree that nurture the novel and are its greatest strength. A curious collection of characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies that are either more or less eccentric, parade through the pages, from the humble and simple woodcutter Renee, to the advent of the fiercely intelligent Lavinia, the first woman to work in the Duke family business.
As tends to happen with the passing of time innumerable people die, some of natural causes but plenty of others by violent means.
The trouble is that it's hard to keep track of what's going on from generation to generation, especially as the novel jumps between two separate (but intertwined) families. Barkskins feels like it's trying to do too many things, and even with a diagram of the family trees I could barely keep up - and that was without the encroaching complexity of the modern world which begins to choke the novel in legalese and technical terminology. By the end I was definitely becoming bored.