Like so many favourite books from the distant past, this is one I hadn’t read since the first time, so didn’t remember much of the story (and in fact was confusing it in my memory with The Stone Angel). Like with A Prayer for Owen Meany, I decided to read it again to refresh the details. It was a good as I remembered, if still not my favourite Shields novel (that honour remains with The Republic of Love).
The diaries of the title are the various and varied versions of the life story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, born in 1905 in Tyndall, MB, to an expert stone mason and his corpulent wife, who dies giving birth. Daisy’s life is a strange blend of charmed and sad. She never wants for anything, except perhaps love and affection, and her interior life is portrayed as mostly empty. However, this latter may be because she never truly speaks for herself in this novel – it is always someone else (including the author) telling her story.
This is a novel of details. Daisy’s long life spans the 20th century, right up to the early 1990s, coinciding with the novel’s completion. In that way, it is a terrific historical novel, portraying the successive nine decades as a backdrop to Daisy’s life. There is no great tragedy in her life (apart from the appalling death of her first husband), and most of her losses and sadness can be linked to a strange incuriosity – she just never asks about anything, and so the reader learns more about her life through these “diaries” than she ever knew herself.
A few highlights:
- From the section set in 1927, this reflection on Canada is almost contemporary:
“The newspaper-reading public of America, so preoccupied with its own vital and combustible ethos, can scarcely be expected to take an interest in the snail-like growth of its polite northerly neighbor, however immense, with its crotchety old king…and the relatively low temperature of its melting pot. Canada is a country where nothing seems to ever happen.”
- I recall being at a reading by Carol Sheilds in ~1995, where she was asked if she’d ever made a mistake in a novel. She said there was one in The Stone Diaries:
“The wide pie-shaped lot was landscaped…with the result that his prone body was obscured from the view of passing motorists…”
The error: the character is lying on his back, looking up at the sky. If he were prone, he would be face down. The correct word would be supine. My copy includes the word prone, and I do wonder if later editions included a correction.
This is an excellent book, with a unique way of telling the story, presenting the life of an ordinary (and likely otherwise uninteresting) woman in an extraordinary way. And that is the message: even the most mundane life is full of fascinating details worthy of telling.
Fate: I’ll keep this with my collection of Shields books.
8 – a female author
28 – old favourite
33 – Canadian
34 – Prize winner
rclr 
Leave a comment