Tinkers
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An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools,
… More »An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, TINKERS is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
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Family gathers around an old man dying---he is taking stock of his life and remembering his own father's life, as he comes in and out of consciousness. A clock theme runs through story as the old mans life ticks away. Beautifully written-- luscious, really--a poetic quality to it -- the art of a few well chosen words. Introspective and beautifully sad. Not for everyone. I loved this book.
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Add a CommentThis is a truly beautiful book. At times the language takes one's breath away. What an achievement for Paul Harding's first novel.
It is about a man dying. Honestly that is it. It is pages and pages of description of his sloooow death. I thought I might suffer the same fate while reading it.
Family gathers around an old man dying---he is taking stock of his life and remembering his own father's life, as he comes in and out of consciousness. A clock theme runs through story as the old mans life ticks away. Beautifully written-- luscious, really--a poetic quality to it -- the art of a few well chosen words. Introspective and beautifully sad. Not for everyone. I loved this book.
Tinkers by Paul Harding tinker |ˈti ng kər| noun 1 (esp. in former times) a person who travels from place to place mending metal utensils as a way of making a living. • a person who makes minor mechanical repairs, esp. on a variety of appliances and apparatuses, usually for a living. • Brit., chiefly derogatory a gypsy or other person living in an itinerant community. 2 an act of attempting to repair something. This is Paul Harding's first novel and the winner of the Pulitzer prize. George Washington Crosby repairs clocks. He is over 70 and is surrounded by his family at home dying of cancer and hallucinating-- lost between reality, memories and dreams. While the clock ticks, he meets in his limbo state his father Howard, a tinker with epilepsy. We see some events of his family life when George was one of the four children. We also get glimpses of his grandfather, a church minister that developed Alzheimer's disease, with some scenes of Howard as a child himself. With astounding beauty Harding describes and gives us snippets of his family life and the New England countryside, while interposing notes of a clock repair manual George had owned, in order to put together a story of life, illness and death. The narrative doesn't follow a linear path and might be hard to follow at times. This novel is a short and ambitious with abundant lyrical language, lacking a more developed plot to achieve its perfect balance. The beauty of the language, almost musical, is deserving of high recognition and does move us to question our own mortality and reflect on our own families and lives.
Poetic, yes. Mr. Harding sure knows how to write a pretty paragraph. However, it's at the expensive of advancing the storyline. I found the novel terribly slow and couldn't connect/relate to the main character.
poetic..for fans of Toni Morrison.