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Dec 15, 2011

smetchie rated it:

This book is small and square.

I bought it at the airport Barnes & Noble en route to my hometown for my Grandfather's funeral. It's lovely small squareness caught my eye. The description on the back which reads "An old man lies dying." made me think it was serendipity. I read the first paragraph and it was all sealed up. This is some of the most wonderful writing I've come across in quite a long time. I'm thrilled to have found it and can't wait to share it.

5 comments like (17 people liked it)

May 24, 2010

Teresa rated it:

I'd love to reread this book one day and read it straight through without stopping (something I couldn't do as I was traveling). As it was, I did immediately reread many of its beautiful and complex sentences. After I was finished the book, I thought of these sentences as a trail (perhaps that's because I did a lot of hiking on my trip!) that leads you back to where you started. I first read these sentences in pieces, stopping to think, letting my mind settle on ideas and images, until I got t More...

27 comments like (20 people liked it)

Apr 16, 2011

Gerry rated it:

The story behind Tinkers is almost more fascinating than the book. It's a debut novel, and Harding had a hard time getting it published. A very small press--Bellevue (yes, affiliated with Bellevue Medical Center, NYC--they also produce a nice literary mag that publishes only works that deal with mind/body, life/death/loss, illness issues, etc.) and they printed a very limited number of copies.

Along comes the PULITZER! In an interview Harding says he found out he won on the Pulitzer w More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2010

Barbara rated it:

Paul Harding's first book, Tinkers has totally amazed and delighted me. The fact that such a tiny novel could convey so much so well is a tribute to his literary skills. In an editorial in the Boston Globe, on April 16, 2010, it was reported how Harding was unable to find a publisher, passing the manuscript around to many houses, until a small publisher (Bellevue Literary Press)agreed to do it.Several people urged that the book be entered for the Pulitzer Prize and to waive the $50 submission fe More...

28 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2011

Sarah rated it:

I so, so recommend this...and not for narcissistic reasons. This is a book that transcends personal identity.

It's about loneliness, human frailty, fathers and sons, time and eternity. It's about so many things! If you like dense, complex writing, you should definitely read this. And, slowly. And, repeatedly.

“Tinkers is truly remarkable… It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.”—Marilynne Robins More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2010

K.D. rated it:

ELEGIAC refers either to those compositions that are like elegies or to a specific poetic meter used in Classical elegies. An elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.

A tinker was originally an itinerant tinsmith, who mended household utensils. The term "tinker" was also used in British society to refer to marginalized persons. In this sense, "tinker" may mean: Irish Traveller, a nomadic or itinerant More...

5 comments like (13 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2012

Fahad rated it:

تأملات

كتاب غريب، أمنحه نجوما ً ثلاثة رغم أنني لم أستطع إنهائه؟ هل هي غواية البوليتزر؟ ربما، ولكني على أي حال أعرف الكتب التي أكرهها جيدا ً، وهذا الكتاب رغم أني شعرت فيه بموجات ملل وفقدان للتركيز، إلا أنني شعرت في لحظات منه بالمتعة، كل هذا في 158 صفحة، قرأت منها 134 قبل أن استسلم أخيرا ً.

والغريب أني عندما عدت إلى مراجعات هذا الكتاب رأيت من يعطيه النجوم الخمسة، وكذلك من يمنحه نجمة واحدة، وهذا يعني أن الكتاب ليس سيئا ً تماما ً، وأنه قابل للقراءة من وجوه متعددة.

More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 21, 2012

Kerri rated it:

Exceedingly beautiful and undoubtedly harrowing, Harding has a gift for storytelling, and for employing some of the most authentic and haunting imagery of any author I've thus read. Rather than write a novella about why I'm considering re-reading this book moments after finishing it, I'll just leave you with two of my favorite passages:

"What looked like the end of the road was, in fact, merely a shift to the left or the right or a dip or a gradual rise. And the way the clouds m More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 29, 2009

Cindy rated it:

I sometimes felt I was on hullucinogens while reading this elegant beautifully written book. Told in the voices of three generations of one flawed family, it captured my imagination entirely. It's a tough read, you cannot get through this one quickly. I was reading certain sentnces over and over...
Wow.

4 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2010

Barbara A rated it:

Ecstatic/elegiac/epileptic/electric/ the passage of time/our bodies as reservoirs of time and memory/
the scraps with which we build our lives/the bits of of detritus with which we build edifices and stories/the inability to regain time that has been lost and fathers who have been lost to us/ the overloading of the senses and our inability to utter the transcendent, the ephermeral, the out-of-body experience.

There is no description I can give this book that would do it justice e More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Sep 12, 2011

Ellen rated it:

A friend recommended Tinkers and gave me an extra copy she had received from a colleague (who mailed copies of the book to everyone on his holiday gift list). Given these testimonials, and the fact that it won the Pulitzer, I thought I would love everything about this book. I really enjoyed Tinkers - it is one of the most unusual and beautiful books I have read. I read it twice (something I rarely do), and could read it again, but I don't think it is for everyone.
What I liked:
1) H More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 26, 2011

Kelanth, numquam risit ubi dracones vivunt rated it:

Premio Pulitzer? Bha. Davvero di basso livello questa storia.
Scritto in maniera altamente poetico, aulico e descrittivo, con molte metafore davvero belle, storia commovente a tratti (solo a tratti purtroppo) e... e... niente di più. Il resto non pervenuto.
Un bel piatto decorato con all'interno niente da mangiare.
Rimango sempre più convinto che intorno all'assegnazione dei premi letterari, valgono più i poteri degli editori che il valore degli autori.
Potete, se volete, perdere More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Aug 05, 2010

Lee rated it:

Other than a few stray hyperincantatory pages early on and an extended stretch of consistent story three quarters through, I found this short novel pretty damn dull. I wanted to love it, wanted to root for it, but turned on it, making guttural sounds to express dissapointment with oft-hokey, sometimes sentimental, and pretty much always excessive description of an isolated American region possibly once known as "Austere Caucasia" before its people of starch, hoarfrost, and flint settle More...

5 comments like (19 people liked it)

Aug 04, 2011

Charles rated it:

A small masterpiece, with poetic prose hung like pictures on the framework of the wandering story line, which, in turn, reflects George's varying sensorium as his death approaches. One feels the cold, the poverty, the difficulties of growing up and growing old. One feels multiple generations intermixing, sometimes historically, sometimes rhapsodically, sometimes deliriously.

The prose is complex and layered like a fine wine; with an aftertaste redolent of earth and fruit, with slig More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 03, 2011

Diane rated it:

A treasure. I just loved this. Some of the descriptive writing was such that I had to stop and reread it out loud to enjoy it more. A few reviews said it needs to be read slowly and that it does.

I was bummed to read what some other folks who didn't like this book had to say: that it didn't have any plot. Hmmmm...the musings of a dying man seems fine to me. And it really isn't just musings. I loved the stories about his father's family. It really was about fathers and sons. Do we need More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 08, 2011

Sue rated it:

This was different from most reading experiences I've had because of Harding's use of language. Using simple language in non-simple, metaphorical ways, he describes the last days of an elderly man who is dying at home--the memories of his youth, his father, the natural world he recalls, the clocks he fixed as both vocation and avocation. The clock metaphor runs through the book and the descriptions of nature are poetic. Though this is a slim volume it is dense in what it presents to the reader. More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 12, 2012

KJ rated it:

Although this won the Pulitzer in 2010, I haven't heard much else about it, which surprises me. This is a beautiful piece! The writing reminds me of Marilynne Robinson's, which means I loved it, of course.

Howard Crosby was the son of a "tinker", a peddler and a clock repairman and time is a theme the author weaves into the story well. As the author counts down the hours of Howard's life, he tinkers with our sense of timing, jumping, often without warning, from Howard's chi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 01, 2010

Melissa rated it:

If I could give this book 500 stars, I would. It was beyond description in its beauty. As soon as I finished, I wanted to reread it.

My friend Nellie who recommended it to me said, "The book is one giant quote." She was right. There was not a sentence that didn't make me ache in the best possible way.

"When the grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide the More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 21, 2012

Naomi rated it:

I traded a pink sock for this book. I found it on the folding table while doing my laundry in a hotel, and--yes--I stole it. When I returned to my room, I found I had lost a pink sock. Fair trade; I really liked that sock. This book follows George Washington Crosby on the day he dies. AS his mind wanders back over his life, so do we, traveling through his memories, his father's life, and his grandfather's life. There is a hallucinatory, dreamlike quality to the prose, fitting for the last hours More...

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Feb 17, 2012

Mmars rated it:

I had high expections for Tinkers, but finished it with mixed feelings. The biggest drawback - at times I had difficulty placing who was narrating. Had I been able to read it in one sitting this may not have been an issue. Also there were so many themes at times I often felt discombobulated. But perhaps that's the point. For what is a tinkerer but a unskilled mender of household items, and to to the Irish, a gypsy, a wanderer? One who moves from one item to the next, from one place to the next. More...

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Feb 15, 2012

Mike rated it:

I might use the term "Formulaic" for this novel, strange, I know, as the term often applies to commercial literature of the Grisham / Steele variety. However, whether the New York critics and MFA graduates like it or not, there is also a certain formula for literary novels, one that is rigorously pounded into the head of every university student of creative writing. When I saw Harding was a product of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I had a strong sense of what I was in for, and I was corr More...

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Jan 11, 2012

Webster rated it:

It's been a while since I disliked a book as much as I did this surprise winner of a 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

Paul Harding's first book, "Tinkers," is a slim, highly literary novel about the inner life of a dying man. As the book counts down to death, George Crosby remembers particularly his father, an epileptic backwoods tinker and traveling salesman, and his grandfather, a nutty Methodist minister. Like a much, much longer book I admire, David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Je More...

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Jan 01, 2012

Barner rated it:

The site tells me that none of you have read this book. My grandson asked me to read TINKERS: he wondered what I would think. I am so pleased! The novel which won a Pultizer Prize is a first book by Paul Harding, an introspective look at the lives of three men, grandfather, father and son. The novel is filled with detail ( I loved the bit about buiding a bird's next), with insightful ponderings about life and some reflection about what death is all about. Though the movel moves slowly at More...

1 comment like

Nov 30, 2011

PatriziaBi rated it:

Un figlio alla ricerca del padre. Un padre alla ricerca del figlio.
Un rapporto unico, lacerante, tenero e spigoloso.
I ricordi sono i veri protagonisti di questa storia familiare in cui ieri ed oggi si alternano perdendosi nella narrazione dei protagonisti fino a non distinguersi più.
La debolezza e la fragilità dello spirito e del corpo, la malattia, le immagini di un passato comune ai figli ed ai padri, sono ciò che esplode da queste pagine in cui Paul Harding è capace narratore p More...

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Nov 17, 2011

deejah rated it:

This book opens on George Washington Crosby laying in his living room in a hospital bed preparing to die. A very heavy topic. George sees the walls cave in around him and he starts the process of moving back and forth in time remembering and re-living seven decades of his life.

Though this is a beautifully written book - I found myself reading some sentences over and over again to get at the author's meaning. This is Paul Harding's first novel (bravo on the Pulitzer) and it was gr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 11, 2011

Jbachelder rated it:

This won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for fiction, and it's short, so I thought I'd give it a try. Told from shifting viewpoints (okay, who's talking now?) George is on his deathbed trying to make sense of his surroundings and his flashbacks. The alternate story is about his father, Howard, a seller of odds & ends and an epileptic who abandons his family when he fears his wife is going to institutionalize him. I've kind of given away the pinnacle of the story, but you won't read this for the pl More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 16, 2011

Tyler rated it:

George Washington Crosby is dying.

George is laying on a bed, which has been pulled into the living room of his New England home. He is surrounded by his sister, wife, children, and grandchildren.

In a humble living space, George's family is keeping vigil at the bedside of their dying patriarch. It is a scene that evokes Edvard Munch’s painting, “Death in a Sickroom”.

The grief and mortality in the room is palpable. As George dies, his mind slips into and out of a d More...

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Sep 11, 2011

wally rated it:

"winner of the pulitzer prize"....and the assorted blurbs from the various famous people...early on, but it looks to be a good story. some old buck and the sky is falling on him. i hate when that happens.

yeah so this is a good story, simply told, and at times there's some strange thoughts passed that you ought to give a whirl to...or not. whatever the case may be.

this old guy lies dying in his house, hallucinates, remembers things...things from say like the 20s, More...

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Aug 29, 2011

Arlene rated it:

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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 More...

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Aug 26, 2011

B. rated it:

a beautiful, mesmerizing book that comes as close as any to catching the essential nature of the relationship between fathers and sons, the experience of how the past lives on in the present, and the struggle to cross the infinite divide between ourselves and those who made us who we are. There's really so many more layers to be found in this book though, as the prose often bleeds into poetry and it's so easy to wander off into your own impressions and memories that you lose your way in the stor More...

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