book data
633 ratings, 3.64 average rating, 48 reviews
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published
August 1st 1994
(first published 2003)
by Scribner
binding
Paperback, 320 pages
literary awards
PEN/Faulkner Award (1993)
isbn
068480087X
(isbn13: 9780684800875)
description
Reproduced as graphics that preface narrative sections, the postcards in this novel -- communications between the Blood family and their son Loyal, as...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 818)
Read in December, 1997
"Don't come out my farm no more with your damn insemnation racket. We got rid the Holstins. Guess we stick with god local Jersey stock. Do it the old fashion way with a BULL.
—Minkton M. Blood"
It’s a rich, dark, often humorous, in ways painful, epic escapade.
Annie Proulx has her characters experience all kinds of biblical catastrophes. Stuck in a mine explosion with cold water up to the knees so that the feet swell up and eventually the soles of the feet co...more
—Minkton M. Blood"
It’s a rich, dark, often humorous, in ways painful, epic escapade.
Annie Proulx has her characters experience all kinds of biblical catastrophes. Stuck in a mine explosion with cold water up to the knees so that the feet swell up and eventually the soles of the feet co...more
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Proulx is fucking brilliant. The first book I read by her was Shipping News and I was blown away at how she, like ee cummings used punctuation or the lack thereof to make words hang like actual things.
I think Postcards was her first book but that she couldn't get it published until Shipping News was out and did so well. I think she wrote it in college. This makes it even more startling to me.
Postcards is raw and rough and very male. But this woman can write men, particul...more
I think Postcards was her first book but that she couldn't get it published until Shipping News was out and did so well. I think she wrote it in college. This makes it even more startling to me.
Postcards is raw and rough and very male. But this woman can write men, particul...more
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if anyone had told me that i could open a book that began with a rape and murder and by the end of the book actually empathise with the male character, i'd have called them nuts. but i did.
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Read in December, 2008
Viewed from the most obvious angle, this is bleakest novel I've read in years. At the outset, Loyal, an earnest do-it-by-the-book younger brother living on a hard-scrabble dairy farm, abruptly exiles himself to a life of wandering. Reacting in rage to this loss of much-needed help, the father shoots the cows his son has nurtured and then proceeds on a steep descent into failure and suicide. The older brother escapes to a new life as a real estate huckster in far-away climes. The daughter finds r...more
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Read in November, 2008
This was a great story of an entire family and their entire life. Annie Proulx doesn't care to linger on the horrible moment when Loyal Blood kills his wife, but rather continues on with his journey that spans up until the day he dies. There is no re-connection to the place he called home besides for the stack full of Bear Postcards he occasionally sends home that he grabbed while collapsing at a roadside diner. Instead, he wanders throughout the country taking odd jobs and living out of a tr...more
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Read in April, 2008
I'm not sure if I'm enjoying this book or not - it's so bleak and the characters all seem doomed to a horrible end - and are certainly experiencing pretty terrible middles. Nonetheless, it's really well written and my endless optimism leaves me hoping that something amazing will happen for the characters.
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Another great, tragic Proulx novel. She hits the nail on the head with human weaknesses and really tells it like it is. This is what I love about her writing--it's beautiful but very harsh at the same time.
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Love how Proulx makes every sentence count.
"But Loyal knew it wasn't anything he'd swalloed. It was touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn't Billy it wouldn't be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him, restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and solilouquies so easily transmuted to cr...more
"But Loyal knew it wasn't anything he'd swalloed. It was touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn't Billy it wouldn't be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him, restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and solilouquies so easily transmuted to cr...more
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Read in October, 2008
A hard book--not difficult to read, but the characters are hardened, their lives unforgiving, the land stark and mean. Bones jut up out of the soil and rock of this book, suddenly exposed and horrifying.
Proulx contrasts well against Kingsolver, who is all life, growth and healing, while in this book Proulx draws the living dead. Farmers who have lost everything, including limbs. A young man driven from home by guilt that wracks his entire life. Forty years of wandering the West w...more
Proulx contrasts well against Kingsolver, who is all life, growth and healing, while in this book Proulx draws the living dead. Farmers who have lost everything, including limbs. A young man driven from home by guilt that wracks his entire life. Forty years of wandering the West w...more
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Read in August, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. Not everyone who has composed a review has liked it, and I wouldn't recommend it indiscriminatly to all of my friends. It's a rough book, set in mostly post-war 1940s and 50s in rural Vermont and based around a tough farming family. It's as much about America during that time as it is about the characters.
This makes you feel like you have dirt under your fingernails and cakey mud wiped across your face while you read. It forces you to understand a farm...more
This makes you feel like you have dirt under your fingernails and cakey mud wiped across your face while you read. It forces you to understand a farm...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in February, 2007
recommends it for:
vermonters
A skillfully written study on the ruthlessness of life in mid-20th century America. Beautiful at points, disjointed at others, with an ending unfortunately favored by the historian in Proulx. A gripper, tho. Any long-time resident of Vermont would find this book interesting (since the main setting is the good ole Vt. hills) and anyone who would enjoy detailed descriptions of, say, a finger-long splinter of wood spearing an eyeball, someone's minewater-sodden feet rotting to the insides of his bo...more
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Read in December, 2007
This isn't really fair, because I did not finish this book. E Annie Proulx, whom I normally really like, is not at her best here. Her descriptions, while beautiful, are too self-conscious and aware to be as fluid and gorgeous as she wants them to be. It's deeply depressing, though this is not why I didn't like it. The story meanders (not in a good way) fails to make us like or even be interested in the characters and generally makes me quite thankful that I did not grow up on a bankrupt farm...more
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Read in November, 2008
a fantastic writer but such a devastating tale
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Read in January, 2008
- Annie's got a way with words. I'm just a few chapters in, but I'm really digging her language.
- Finally done with this one. Difficult to review. I very much enjoyed Annie Proulx's wonderful language -- her turns of phrase are fresh and meander in a way that just kinda makes you follow. At the same time, I felt like "Postcards" was running low on plot.
In short: it shows promise (which was later realized in her other work), but it's not the best thing since slic...more
- Finally done with this one. Difficult to review. I very much enjoyed Annie Proulx's wonderful language -- her turns of phrase are fresh and meander in a way that just kinda makes you follow. At the same time, I felt like "Postcards" was running low on plot.
In short: it shows promise (which was later realized in her other work), but it's not the best thing since slic...more
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recommends it for:
Thomas Hardy fans
Lord, this is one of my favorite works of contemporary fiction. I first read it when I was 18, which is way too young to be dealing with the tragedy and heartache of a rural family dissolving under the circumstances of suicide and disillusion. But ah! My favorite topics of literature and when I re-read this twice in my 20s, I could not believe that Proulx could get any more masterful in handling the most frail of human emotions and conditions.
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My favourite of Proulx's books and I've read it twice. Elegiac, occasionally comical, poetic...both times I swam through the prose hoping somehow for a happy ending. Loyal is one of the most pitiful, admirable and inarticulate characters ever conceived, I wanted to pluck him out of the book and nurture him like a wingless bird. Proulx's depiction of American landscapes, nature and humanity is breathtaking.
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Read in June, 2008
This was kind of a sad tale of a broken family and what became of each of them. I really enjoyed the postcard premise, and the writing was engaging and interesting. I read the book really quickly. I really felt the characters, and was sad to see the story end.
I really should write these reviews right after reading the book. I've think I've kind of forgotten how much I liked this one.
I really should write these reviews right after reading the book. I've think I've kind of forgotten how much I liked this one.
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I had never heard of this book before, and hadn't ever read the author, but it was in a box of books I picked up when moving my mom's stuff from storage. It's the story of a farming family gradually dispersing and leaving their Vermont farm after the end of World War II and through the next decades. It's a really interesting slice of American rural history, as told through the lens of this one family.
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in February, 2006
recommends it for:
Anyone
A quirky first novel, surprisingly advanced. I am a Proulx fan, especially attacted to her Wyoming stories. She is a great observer, and doesn't hold back much, although she sympathizes with her characters who are generally a notch or two off center. She makes me sympathize with them, too, and pull for them as they wander through their own psyches and the catacombs of everyday life.
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How does Mrs. Nipple die in E. Annie Proulx's Postcards?
a. After being sliced by several nails, she develops a blood infection.
b. A rabid raccoon bites her.
c. A crate of empty milk bottles falls from a shelf in her pantry and crushes her.
d. Her husband accidentally backs a tractor over her.
More trivia...
a. After being sliced by several nails, she develops a blood infection.
b. A rabid raccoon bites her.
c. A crate of empty milk bottles falls from a shelf in her pantry and crushes her.
d. Her husband accidentally backs a tractor over her.
More trivia...
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