The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields, Penelope Lively (Introduction)

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life--from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Historical Fiction, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her successful 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award. Her novel Swann won the Best Novel Arthur Ellis Award in 1988.

Reviews

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It has been 14 years since I have read it and I still remember clearly what it means to me:

Life is long....and in this long life you lead a series of mini-lives. In each "life" you become a different version of you. We are blessed with the chance and sometimes forced against our will to reinvent ourselves again and again until one day we are very old and find that we are living in Florida wearing polyester pantsuits. Did you ever imagine that would be you?

That person you marry at a ripe young age may become someone from your past that now seems as insignificant as an old high school boyfriend. That job we have today that's so important may be a mere blip on the radar when we are 85. Will you even remember the name of the company?

It's something I like to think about. And it works both ways. Sometimes I hope that the "life" I'm in never ends and my fear is that one day its time will be up. In other periods of my life, I remember that nothing is forever and this some day may not be remembered by me at all.

Very few books have given me such a lasting message. I plan carry it with me throughout my long lifetime.

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a sublime reading experience; one that I desperately needed in my life at the moment. I’m sure I’m getting a bit carried away, but I couldn’t help thinking that if John Williams’ Stoner had been born into the body of a woman, the result would have been Carol Shields’ Daisy Goodwill Flett. In fact, the two basically drew their first breaths around the same time - one at the end of the nineteenth century and the other just shortly after the start of the twentieth. One was born in a quiet Midwestern town and the other in a sleepy mid-Canada province. Both are inherently lonely souls.

“… she sees years and years ahead for herself. That life thus far has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing – she’s done this for so many years it’s become second nature.”

This book begins with Daisy’s birth and the loss of her mother. A feeling of abandonment haunts the entirety of her days. The way Shields tells Daisy’s story is rather curious – and a bit unique. At times it seems to be an autobiography, with Shields using the first person point of view. Then she abruptly switches back to third person and the reader has the sense he or she is reading a biography of sorts. It didn’t bother me – I simply mention it as a puzzling narrative choice. Others, including friends and family, interrupt and are given the opportunity to tell bits and pieces of Daisy’s life as well. Much of what the author urges us to contemplate is how a story is told and to what extent we should believe it. Memories are distorted. People reinvent themselves. One person’s version is different from the next.

“Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available.”

Daisy is central to the telling of this novel, but other characters are brilliantly captured too - Daisy’s father, her adoptive mother, her husbands, her three children and her two best friends. I loved reading about every single one of them. Carol Shields is a master of characterization and therefore immediately gets elevated to favorite author status. The feeling that we all truly live in a wasteland of solitude and longing permeates the entire novel. At least that’s what my sometimes melancholy nature took away from this telling of a life that is not much different from our everyday ones. In the end, there are hills and valleys to our stories, distorted remembrances and missed opportunities. When time slips away from us, what will we remember? Should we just give in and accept our often uneventful lives, or is there a way to truly live life to the fullest – and how do we go about doing that before it’s too late?

“The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals.”

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

My next read going backwards through the Pulitzer winners is The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This book also won Canada's top book award the name year and was a National Book Award finalist as well. All these awards and praise were well-merited as this is a well-written and compelling story about a woman's life from birth to death.

Daisy Goodwill is born at the turn of the century to a mother who passes away while giving birth and a father who is an accomplished stonemason in rural Canada. The themes of life/death and the metaphor of stone percolate through the entire book, starting with the title: The Stone Diaries. We hear Daisy writing her journal with decade breaks between the chapters, mostly in the 3rd person and we get a sense throughout of her feeling of dislocation in her own life. Her beginning was also her mother's ending - this event underscores the life/death motif and distorts her concept of time:
It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of season or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts sieze on the tongue, so that so say, 'Twelve years passed' is to deny the fact of biographical logic." (p. 27)

Baby Daisy is certainly helpless and is taken under the wing of her neighbor, Mrs Flett, who absconds with the baby to live with Daisy and her son Barker Flett in Ottowa. Daisy will not see her father again until the death of her "aunt" some eleven years later. In fact, each of the chapters is about a period of her life ("Birth", "Childhood"..."Death") and focuses (with many meandering diversions of course) on one key defining event.

Another theme in the book is sex and how various characters experience it. Her mother dies in the course of giving birth to her marking sex as something with potential danger. Her father is similarly distant from everyone but his precious rocks, but he has a special and eternal fascination for his dead first wife: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy and then - this seems to him particularly precious - the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair. (p. 36)

Throughout the narrative, again proposed in the form of a diary, we also peek into the minds of many people that Daisy knows during her long life, after all as she says, Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. (p. 36)

Her caretaker in Ottowa, Professor Barker Flett, is obsessed with flowers rather than stone and so the motifs of pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle (p. 42) become a pendant for the motif of stone. Stone symbolizing a more male permanence and the gravestone, flowers representing a more effiminate side and evoking life.

Some of the more evocative images in the book are the tower that Cuyler Goodwill, Daisy's father, builds for his dead wife in Canada out of stones pilferred secretly from his quarry before moving to Indianapolis and the pyramid he starts as a time machine there in Indianapolis and dies building at the end of the book. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out given the space...His voice, you might say, became the place he lived (p. 85) Despite his gift for oratory, gleaned from reading the Bible, he is never quite able to bridge the gap between himself and his daughter probably owning to the fact that he was eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least....His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricasies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.( p. 85) Perhaps, it was this same tongue that kissed the tips of his wife's hair, but which still serves as a buffer between himself and his own feelings.

Daisy inherits this inability to connect to her own feelings marrying by default an alcoholic with who she never consumes the marriage (he was always too drunk) and who she sneezes out of a window in one of the novel's more dark-comic scenes. For Daisy, love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and futhermore, she is accostumed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner. (p. 147).

Dasiy does finally find love later - oddly with Flett's son who she stayed with in Canada after the death of his mother until she was eleven - and had three children. Her daughter Alice is the one closest to her and we get her perspective a bit more often than the other children. The birds and bees discussion on pages 165-166 was particularly well-written from Alice's perspective. Her dream during the boring, unsatisfying lovemaking of Barker about the film The Best Years of Our Lives: What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? (p. 192) is also telling of her compromises in love and sex even in middle age.

Unable to find a sexual outlet, she turns to gardening In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing - which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign. (p. 196)

After the pre-mature death of her husband, she takes over the column he wrote about gardening in the paper and finally has some individual success, however short-lived. Cut short, she loses the column due to an affair with the newspaper editor and drifts into a deep depression which her children and friends struggle to help her out of. A few years later, she moves to Florida with her remaining friends and lives the rest of her life at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club in her condo keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. (p. 268). She comes to a sad, but true realization: No one told her so much of life was spent being old (something I am personally struggling with) Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture. The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes... (p. 280). Her attachments to earth, then, remain superficial as she enters her twilight years. ...life "thus far" has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing - she's done this for so many years it's become second nature. (p. 282)

This quote was also incredibly apt: And it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves. (p. 283). This reinvention for Daisy is a necessary, painful thing done without complaint as opposed to a new exciting way of precisely reclaiming one's own life. Her pain hidden in her past, remains too difficult for her to deal with directly and thus she takes this resigned approach: The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. (p. 291)

After a visit to her grandfather in the Orkleys north of Scotland, her downhill slide becomes inevitable. She has a massive heartattack and is recovering, And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.
Never mind, it means nothing: it's only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett." (p. 314).

Her daughter Alice comes to her during this final phase when she is turning into stone: Knuckles of pearl, Already dead. Mineralized. She reminds herself that what falls into most people's lives becomes a duty they imagine: to be good, to be faithful to an idea of being good. A good daughter. A good mother. Endlessly, heroically patient. These enlargements of the self can be terrifying. (p. 326).

It remains unspoken about whether Alice decides to be more in contact with herself than her mother was, but she is the one child who is in a relatively stable marriage and having moved to England in seeming bliss and discovery.

As Daisy passes from this world, Something has occurred to her - something transparently simple, something she's always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. (p. 342).

This was a beautiful book and it is likely that I will seek out other books to read from this author even while I tried to live a bit more consciously, trying to take some of the lessons about living and aging that this book tries to teach.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breathtaking and thoroughly original novel. I'm completely in awe of the choices Shields made in the shaping of this narrative. The whole is flawlessly cohesive. The parts are poetry unto themselves.

Essentially, it's a book about loneliness, every kind of loneliness: starved, suffocating, denied, cherished, physical, existential, or simply the result of petty misunderstanding. --And it's not always clear cut. She allows for ambiguity. She allows for the reader's subjective response, whatever that might be. And then she gently guides you to a different vantage point, one you hadn't considered.

The body, through birth, sex, illness, and death is discussed...graphically...but with such grace, such reverence, such heartbreaking candor, it's actually beautiful.

This novel struck me to the core.

I love it so much, I don't even want to know what others have said about it!

[Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The type of book others rigorously want to imitate. That is, the elusive "turn of the century All American novel", with myriad glimpses at gorgeous post millennial metafiction. "The Stone Diaries" no doubt inspired other works of immeasurable brilliance like T. C. Boyle's "World's End" and Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello"--it is heartbreaking, endearing, and, best of all, quite accessible. (Although the Puig-like tricks, that is, Latin American lit. concessions, are quite distinguishable.) The symbols of marble and hard rock as counter-contrasts to flimsy flowers and biology are made... eternal, in this must-read novel. It's a true reminder of the pesky but overpowering relationship between life and death, or the ethereal and the tangible. This one deeply astonishes.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

5★
“It was something she had not expected ever to have. She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf.”

That’s Mercy Stone, who is as surprised as everyone else by being Cyler Goodwill's object of adoration. She is a large, ungainly woman whose idea of heaven is eating, cooking, and eating some more.

“Her inability to feel love has poisoned her, swallowed down along with the abasement of sugar, yeast, lard, and flour; she knows this for a fact.”

She grew up in the Stonewall Orphans’ Home where those who were from unmarried mothers were given the surname Stone.

“She was left when only a few days old, wrapped in a flannel blanket—for the June nights could be cool—and placed in the old flour barrel that sat close by the back door of the institution. These flour-barrel babies, as they came to be called, were looked after by the township, given an elementary schooling, taught a trade, and sent at fourteen or fifteen into employment—”

Her housekeeping skills were such that she continued to live there and keep the place in order. When she was 28, who should come to reset the stone in a doorway but local mason Cuyler Goodwill.

“he was moved beyond anything he had imagined by her sheer somatic presence. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders—framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity.”

By the time he’d had coffee and some of her freshly baked brown sugar slice, he was a goner. I know you didn't need to read all that, but here’s the comparison.

“. . . a man who is short of shank and narrow of shoulder, but this rather abbreviated body is not what people register. People look into Cuyler Goodwill’s small dark compacted face, wound tight like a clock, full of urgency and force, and think: here stands a man who is vividly alive.”

(The contrast between them and Cuyler's love of Mercy reminded me of Pop and Ma Larkin in The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates.)

They are the parents of Daisy, whose story this is. She tells some in first person, some in the third person. She speaks of “my mother” and then goes on to describe in detail how her mother felt while she was cooking and tasting and eating, as an omniscient narrator would.

This is a biography-cum-autobiography of a woman looking back over the 20th century at her life and family. But it is also a novel about all of these people, including conflicting views about personalities and events, as you will find in any family. We each remember things differently.

For a while, we are reading how wonderfully gifted Cuyler Goodwill is at masonry and that he becomes an acclaimed public speaker. Then later, somewhere along the way, we hear someone complaining about his waffling on and on too long all the time as if it’s common knowledge.

We're never quite sure what the truth is, but it's in there somewhere. In her afterword, the author says:

“. . . her life corresponds, more or less, with the span of the century, posing the question of where these last hundred years have delivered women, especially those women who failed to make the public record.”

Perhaps as a way to make this part of the public record, or at least to seem such, the author decided to add a family tree and photographs. They certainly make Daisy's history seem real, but I don’t know who the people actually are. Perhaps someone does.

This is a fascinating read and a great study of human nature. I kept being reminded of the old saying “There’s no accounting for taste”. There are some unlikely liaisons. These people are individuals, very much of their times, who entertain us through their whole lives. I’ve not really shared anything of the story of Daisy’s life, but it’s easy enough to find.

I loved this worthy winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

[Julie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this novel is the perfect example of what happens when you least expect it.

I knew nothing about this book, I'd never heard of it or its author, and I found the cover unappealing.

And, yet, it's one of the best, most meaningful stories I've ever read.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for 1995, which is the only reason I picked it up. Then, I couldn't put it down.

This is one of those life-altering novels, a big picture story, upsetting and wonderful at the same time.

I can't quite recommend it enough.

[sAmAnE · Rating 1 out of 5]

کتاب رو نصفه رها کردم.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life. Daisy Goodwill Flett comes into this world in a strange and tragic circumstance. The book follows her through her life to the moment of her death. You might say she has an ordinary life in many ways, and perhaps that is part of the point Shields is making, that all lives are the same because, no matter how different they are from their fellows, all lives are lonely, isolated journeys. Only one person feels or knows who you are, and that person is you.

Many of Shields' characters are consumed with looking backward, dwelling in their pasts and trying to unravel the lives they have led but hardly understand. They struggle with what it is to relate to others, what it is to love or to be loved.

Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else - and this is what he more and more believes - just a word trying to remember another word.

There is a theme of loneliness and isolation that runs through the book

...a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one. Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence.

The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill’s head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions--but still she is alone.

She is alone, but not unique, among the people she encounters...for they all seem to me to be alone and struggling as well. And much of the loneliness on view here is self-inflicted, as if the fear of connection is stronger than the need to touch the others, to be joined.

Carol Shields makes one choice in writing this novel that puzzles me; that is her decision to have the opening chapter in the first person, the following chapter in both first and third person (but obviously the same voice), and then to tell the rest of the story in the third person until one fleeting comment that is made first person in the final chapter. I know it is a very intentional choice, a device that is meant to achieve something major in the structure of this novel, but I have failed to comprehend its purpose, and that is going to bother me for a while. It might just be an attempt to make us realize that even within ourselves there is an “other” that is separate, observing and virtually unknown to us. Perhaps the first person is the soul. It is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. If anyone else who has read this has a thought, I would be very interested in hearing it!

The metaphor of the stone--having things carved in stone, the building of monuments, the hardening of the heart and the soul, and the impenetrable walls that divides us from one another-- runs from the beginning of this novel to its end. It winds its way like a river through every major character and recurs in names, thoughts and physical manifestations.

One thing is for sure, no need to put R.I.P. on Daisy’s tombstone.

[Dalia Nourelden · Rating 2 out of 5]

الرواية بتتبع حياة دايزي وحياة الشخصيات المحيطة بها من بداية يوم ولادة دايزي وحتى وفاتها .

الأسلوب كويس وفكرة أن السرد يكون على لسان اكتر من شخصية عشان نعرف افكارها ومشاعرها كان حلو في بعض الاحيان واننا احيانا نشوف الشخصية من بره من خلال الكاتبة كان كويس بس في نفس الوقت ده خلى الأسلوب في بعض الاحيان جاف وبنبعد عن الشخصيات وكأننا بنقرأ اخبار مثلا ، فده كان بيفصلني تماما عن الشخصيات .
وحاجة تانية بتغيظني فكرة ان اوقات يكون سرد احداث عادية ووصف بمنتهي التفصيل و تيجي في تفاصيل تانية واحداث ممكن يبقى فيها سرد كتير ووصف لأفكار ومشاعر الشخصيات وتعدي عليها كخبر سريع جدا .
الرواية كان ممكن تبقى افضل من كده بكتير واستمتع بيها فعلا وخاصة ان الكاتبة ليها تعبيرات واسلوب حلو واجزاء كنت بحسها قريبة مني فعلا بس للأسف بعدها كانت بترجع تفصلني وبتدخل احيانا تفاصيل مملة فعلا .خاصة الجزء الاخير من الرواية كان ممل جدا .

لحد نص الرواية تقريبا كان ممكن اقيمها ب ٣ بس بعد كده فصلتني فعلا



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[Brina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer 3 for the year. Stone Diaries had not been on my radar this year. When I made the decision to read only women authors, I had to think about my Pulitzer winners for the month and save the books written by men for another time. Although I prefer nonfiction, I have always enjoyed a family saga or series of books that take place over the course of a century or longer. A quality saga or historical fiction as such can teach readers as much about the world as nonfiction can. When I saw the blurb about the Stone Diaries, I surmised that it was a book that I would want to read. The author Carol Shields comes from the Midwest and rose in the ranks to be on the board of the University of Winnipeg. Her protagonist lives into her nineties and sees how the world changes over the course of the twentieth century. Always in search of books with strong female protagonists, I selected The Stone Diaries as one of my Pulitzer winners for this month. Because I had zero expectations going in other than that the author is an academic originally from the Chicago suburbs, I left this book wowed by the literary prose and storyline that spanned four generations over the course of the 20th century.

Cuyler Goodwill was an only child who used his skill as a stone cutter to get out of his parents home in his early twenties. A chance meeting while doing contract work at a local orphanage lead him to meet his wife Mercy Stone, hence the Stone Diaries. Stones both literally and figuratively play a key role over the course of the novel. At first, it appears that the stone quarry outside of Winnipeg is what gives the characters their income, but stone and flora become as key to the narrative as the personas. Mercy Stone was a mountain of a woman who had no concept of how her body worked and as an orphan had little capacity to love, her heart of stone. Less than two years into her marriage, she goes into labor not knowing that she is pregnant, Cuyler feeling deceived by his wife. It is 1905 and a single man was not viewed as being capable of raising a child, especially a girl. The real life comparison I can give is when Theodore Roosevelt left his daughter Alice with his sister to raise following the death of his wife. Single men did not raise children at the dawn of the 20th century. The baby Daisy would be raised by her neighbor Clarentine Flett and her son Barker, a teacher in the fledgling town Winnipeg. Precocious and enjoying the outside, Daisy had no recollections of her parents, only her “Aunt” Clarentine and Barker, a man who loved Daisy from the first time he laid eyes on her.

Years pass. Clarentine is killed. In the interim, Cuyler Goodwill erects a monument out of stone in memory of his wife. He is sought after for his work as a stone cutter and accepts a position in Bloomington, Indiana and decides that Daisy will have a better future there than in Winnipeg. Barker Flett over this time had become a renown botanist and leaves behind his family, accepting a position in Ottawa. Although separated from Daisy, his memories and love for her are sealed in his heart. I thought of the relationship between Ralph and Meggie in The Thorn Birds and could not help but smile. Cuyler goes from stone cutter to businessman. His company supplies limestone to companies erecting skyscrapers, cementing the United States’ place as a world power, including the Empire State Building. Barker collects lady slippers and also rises in his profession, becoming a pillar of Ottawa’s society. Every two months he writes a letter to Daisy and she responds. In the interim, Daisy earns a degree at Long College for Women during an era when few women attended college. Had she been born in a different era, she could have been an academic, and one could say that if that were the case, she would be Shields’ alter ego. After graduation women were expected to earn their Mrs degree or become secretaries. Daisy fell for Harold Hoad, the son of a respectable Bloomington family. The marriage did not last long due to a tragic accident. For various reasons, Daisy’s marriage begins to turn Daisy, Cuyler, and Barker’s hearts to stone. A twenty three year old widow, Daisy was ripe for the taking but uninterested in any of Bloomington’s bachelors. To get a leg up in life, she, like the author, would eventually leave the Midwest for Canada.

Daisy’s life path leads her to marry Barker Flett, he more thrilled with this prospect than she is. By age thirty two, Daisy’s heart is hardened. It’s an easy marriage to a man twenty years her senior or live life in her newly married father’s house as a spinster. Despite their advancing age, the couple manage to have three children: Alice, Warren, and Joanie. It appears that the novel is the three of them looking back at their mother’s life at her funeral, but much of the novel is told through Daisy’s point of view, with perspectives offered by those closest to her. Her husband and father pass on the same year and Daisy lives the rest of her life masking grief. It is the 1950s. Women are housewives and do not work much outside of the home. Daisy’s one love is gardening, which is emblematic of her name, and she parlays this into a job as a columnist with the pseudonym Mrs Green Thumb. Gardening and writing about it appear to be the one love of Daisy’s life. Yes, she stayed “happily” married for twenty years, but she contained baggage from not having biological parents or even parents in law. The Stone Diaries are aptly named to chronicle the family history but also to chart how all of the stones decrease their capacity to love over time. While none of the family appeared to be particularly happy, I kept reading to see if Daisy would achieve happiness in a long life that outwardly appeared well lived.

The one family member Daisy doted on is her great niece Victoria. Victoria loves her Aunt Daisy like an actual grandmother and visits her multiple times a year in Florida after Daisy moved there in her older age. At this point, Daisy’s own children witnessed a bitter woman who was difficult to live with and moved as far from her as possible. Alice is the one readers hear the most because she takes the time to correspond with her mother; however, she lives in England, a professor of Russian literature, and visiting with her mother is difficult. Joanie makes her home in the Pacific Northwest and moves all over the west, essentially a hippie. Warren has the stoniest heart of the three because he appears self-centered as an adult and hardly communicates with his mother at all. That leaves Daisy with Victoria and brags to everyone how she is studying to earn a PhD in paleobotany. Victoria appears to be the only member of the family at peace with her situation, a contrast with Daisy who still has issues with her early childhood in her older age. It is Victoria who encourages Daisy to break out of her shell and travel to Europe with her while it occurs to Victoria that Aunt Daisy would have been happier staying home; however, the trip came with discovery, and Daisy toward the end of her life achieves some happiness at seeing Victoria at peace with her own life choices, a much more peaceful soul than other members of the Flett family who generations earlier lost the capacity to love.

Carol Shields, according to reviewers, is a writer’s writer. She wrote over twenty books all full of high end literary prose. She also, they note, must be a reader’s writer because The Stone Diaries won both the Canadian General’s Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. The edition I read included an introduction by Penelope Lively, a wonderful author in her own right, who is a huge fan of Shields’ work. She has read The Stone Diaries multiple times and proclaimed it to be Shields’ opus. Shields continued to write even after becoming a respected academic. In the Goodwill/Stone/Flett family, she created a saga that explores a family devoid of love over the course of a century. Including actual historical events that occurred from the Lindbergh voyage to the Dionne quintuplets places this novel over the top. I have read a number of Pulitzers at some point and have found some better than others. Like any reader, I have my favorites. The Stone Diaries was not on my reading radar so I had few expectations going in. I left with a sense of a woman who tried her hardest to achieve happiness in her life, readers witnessing how life changes over time. From zero expectations going in, I left with The Stone Diaries vaulting into my top five Pulitzers read. I am honored to have read Shields during this women’s history month.

4.5 stars

[Suzanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like this book, but it was mostly because I didn't like the main character and her lack of personal substance. She never, ever, even once, feels any joy, passion, or grief. There is one period in her life where she appears to experience depression, but again, there is a lack of strong emotion, which really is typical of depression. A person who has three children, marries twice, and is widowed twice, usually experiences some sort of deep emotion. This flaw in her personality had me lacking empathy with her.

It seems the author's basic premise is that the main character, Daisy, lacks strong emotion because she was not raised by her biological mother, who was herself an orphan, and that these things have some how caused both her and her mother to be inherently flawed. (Either that or Daisy has physically inherited this dysfunction from her mother, but I lean toward the former because of some passages in the story.) They lack passion and passionate expression. Daisy never hears she is loved, nor do you find love expressed by her; her mother, Mercy, never said she loved nor otherwise expressed love, although she was loved greatly and with deep passion by Daisy's father.

What I did like most was the author's use of symbolism. Stones and flowers are heavily used, perhaps overly so at times. There is the building of monuments by Daisy's father (of course made of stone), his life as a quarryman, Daisy's gardens, her second husband's love and knowlege of plants, names of characters, and much more. If that sort of thing excites you, you might love this book for that alone.

I would also like to say I'm surprised so many reviewers found this book "funny". I thought it was terribly depressing. There are a few amusing passages, but I couldn't see calling the book as a whole funny.

And lastly, it is strange to me that this is considered a fictional autobiography. Most of the time it is third person narrative; granted, there are points when Daisy is apparently refering to herself in the third person (as Mrs. Flett or some such, which I found a bit disturbing). I suppose it helps contribute to that feeling of her lack of sense of self, the void within her life that she herself doesn't really fill - is not capable of filling. There are other times it does not feel like her voice, just narrative, and there is just a small portion of the book that is in first person. It does not feel at all like a diary, which again may be for the effect of distancing the main character from herself. Someone with this personality disorder might write a memoir in this manner and call it a diary, I suppose. And it does cover Daisy's life from beginning to end.

The novel's well written, and I think the author achieved what she set out to do. Overall, just not my cup of tea.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stone Diaries tells the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett's troubled life beginning and ending with sadness and death. There is so much to absorb about the character's in this short novel that I feel the need to read it again, and probably will at some point, but for now..........

Mercy, Mercy.......Cuyler Goodwill loved you so.......Why did you not share your secret?

I did like this somber 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner that does actually have a few laughs, and one shocker, but was somewhat annoyed each time the storyline came to an abrupt halt at a crucial juncture throughout the telling. In the end, thankfully, most of the missing puzzle pieces do unite, and Wow! What powerful last words from Daisy!

I AM NOT AT PEACE (sure wish Cuyler would have told Daisy how much he loved her mother, given her more affection and Mercy's engraved 18k wedding ring as he once planned instead of burying it in the time capsule under the pyramid)

[Anne Bogel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed in the February 2022 edition of Quick Lit on Modern Mrs Darcy:

This book originally ended up on my TBR by accident: I collect orange Penguin paperbacks, and came home from my favorite library book sale years ago with not one but TWO copies of that edition! When I shared my book haul on Instagram, readers noticed my mistake and assured me the 1995 Pulitzer winner was well worth my time.

The book details the life of Daisy Stone Goodwill, from her eventful birth in a small Manitoba town to her death in Florida eight-ish decades later. There was much to appreciate in this well-drawn chronicle of a so-called "ordinary" life—the prose is beautiful; so many sentences shimmer—yet I never felt emotionally invested in the story.

I'm glad I read this, and I'm also intrigued by comments from trusted readers, who tell me that while The Stone Diaries is GOOD (I mean, I hope so because: Pulitzer), The Ceremony of Love and Happenstance are better.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m the kind of person who loves looking at people’s family albums. Not the 400 of your grandchildren--sorry. It’s not that they aren’t cute. It’s just there’s something about the past. There’s so much room there. Show me your great aunt Elsie who was married to that guy--no one remembers his name, but there he is in the corner of the picture, looking a bit sheepish and wearing his farming overalls. I wonder what his story is?

Carol Shields has woven together a tale full of these ordinary yet captivating family members. By the end, I felt like I knew every one of her characters.

It all begins with a mother (of course), and we are mesmerized by the account of this particular mother: Mercy Stone Goodwill. Every character introduced has a story though, and Shields gives us just enough detail about their lives--the odd bits especially--to keep us fascinated, to bring the family photographs to life.

We follow Mercy’s daughter Daisy through her entire, frustrating life. But in the same way a photograph taken on an overcast day shows the brightness of colors, Daisy’s somewhat dreary existence shows us vivid insights.

I loved these especially:

“…the houses of the newly married, she senses, are under a kind of enchantment, the air more tender than in other households, the voices softer, the makeshift curtains and cheap rugs brave and bright in their accommodation.”

“Your mama’s inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don’t get yourself hurt.”

“How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced--and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.”

“It surprises Grandma Flett that there is so much humor hidden in the earth’s crevasses; it’s everywhere, like a thousand species of moss.”

This is a wonderful saga. Shields has given us a novel about life: the way we think about ourselves, the way others think of us, and how we might feel about all of that. It explores what is fleeting, and what remains. And what I found so fascinating was how unreliable it all is. What is the real story? What is our real story? Will anyone ever know?

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a family saga. There’s this guy, he gets married, she's really fat, anyway she dies, it’s kind of sad. Or more like I knew I was supposed to feel sad. Their kid is what the book is about. Anyway she gets adopted and grows up and some other people die and get married, this and that. She gets married too and wouldn’t you know, he dies. It’s kind of funny, no really, it was. But really he was a jerk so she was better off. Then she married her father – hah, not really. It was a Woody Allen type situation. Nowadays I’m sure somebody from child services would have been involved but back then you could pretty much marry anybody. Look at Jerry Lee Lewis. Anyway her and Woody have some kids, everybody grows up and some people die. One of her friends shags a lot of guys, I remember that bit. 54. People get divorced quite a lot. She writes about flowers for a local rag, this goes on for years, and when she gets let go she is like to want to shoot the head off the editor. But she doesn’t, that was kind of disappointing. Not that I am a proponent of gun violence. I am not. But this story could of done with a plane crash or a family massacre to keep up the interest. Or somebody doing something. I know you might be thinking well instead of reading The Stone Diaries you should of been spending your time watching Tokyo Gore Police or House of 1000 Corpses. Well, I guess you may have a point at that.

4 stars rounded down to three because the last 3 sections sucked like a brand new vacuum cleaner

[Nranger7 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I guess I cannot stand Pulitzer Prize winning books. I have yet to read one that I've enjoyed. I actually was disappointed that the author passed away simply because I couldn't tell her how much I disliked this book.

I'm guessing the changes from first person to third person were delibrate and artsy-fartsy, but I found it annoying. I barely got through the first chapter because I was sick and tired of the constant explanations of how the character of Mercy was a large woman. (I get it! She's fat! Move on!!) Same thing with Barker. (He's boring! I get it! Move on!) Way too much description when it came to flowers as well. Too much filler and a waste of my time to read.

And what is up with the fake family pictures??? After having to put up with a chapter detailing how morbidly obese Mercy Stone was, I was pretty mad that the picture provided of Mercy was not nearly as huge as I imagined. The woman in the picture was overweight, but not to the extent that I was led to believe by the text. Sorry...I'm not one of those shallow people who thinks being 20 pounds overweight makes one "obese".

[Heba]

مذكرات الحجر سيرة ذاتية لامرأة تدعى " دايزي غودويل" تسرد فصول حياتها بدءاً من مشهد ولادتها حيث تلك اللحظة النى شهدت حتمية الموت لوالدتها وايذاناً بميلادها ، منذ صغرها تفقتد شيئاً ما ، غامضاً تجهل كنهه ، يلتف وشاح التيه حول حياتها ، عصية على نفسها وعلى الآخرين...
كأنما حياتها أمليت عليها ، ومع أن القدر اهداها فرصة العمل حيث تكتب مقالاً اسبوعياً عن كيفية العناية بالنباتات والحدائق، إلا أنه عندما اوكلت المهمة لشخص آخر سقطت فريسة للاكتئاب ولم تبدي أى محاولة لمواصلة مسيرة الحياة..
كم أخبرتها بأن هذا فصلٌ مروعٌ في حياتها ، يمكنها تجاوزه ، وبأن هنالك فصل آخر بانتظارها ، اعرفي وجهتك وانطلقي ..." ..ولكن للأسف لم تُعيرني اهتماماً...
لا احتمل المرأة التي تستسلم للوهن وتتخلى عن مكامن قوتها...😏
وبالرغم من أن العمل يزخر بتفاصيل الحياة اليومية الصغيرة إلا انني لم التق بأى موقف يكشف عن مواجهة معترك الحياة...
اخيراُ ..السيرة الذاتية ل" دايزي" كما لو كانت حجراً مُرقشاً ترقد مستلقية على سطحه بتلات أزهار جافة متيبسة لا حياة فيها....

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a slow, intricate telling of the life and death of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The glorious writing is so sensual, thick with substance, so original, wise, wise, and wise that I often had to stop to contemplate or just digest. Effortlessly Carol Shields shifts from third person to first, jumps subjects' stories, returns to the present, and sometimes even comments on the first-person protagonist, Daisy, and her ability to manipulate the truth. And finally she sticks it to any reader who is honest enough to admit her own arrogance in believing she can understand the motivations and hidden feelings of any dead beloved relative.

Carol Shields is a writer's writer, and—per the Pulitzer this book won—obviously a reader's writer.

Without explanation, I want to bellow: This work makes me feel sane!

How sad I am that Shields is dead and can't be my friend. How glad I am she left a long legacy of books that I can now imbibe.

[Vaso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Πόσα γεγονότα μπορεί να χωρέσει μια ζωή?
Τι είναι η ζωή μας αν όχι στιγμές και γεγονότα μέσα στο χρόνο?
Πόσο διαφορετική είναι η ζωή μας με τα δικά μας μάτια και πόσο με τα μάτια των άλλων?
Η ζωή της Ντέιζι ξεκίνησε με πόνο και απώλεια αλλά εξελίχθηκε πολύ διαφορετικά. Μεγάλωσε, σπούδασε, παντρεύτηκε, ερωτεύθηκε, έγινε μητέρα, νοικοκυρά, εργαζόμενη...έζησε μια καλή ζωή.
Στα πέτρινα ημερολόγια λοιπόν, η Carol Shields μας μιλά για τη ζωή, για τη μητρότητα, τον πόνο και την απώλεια μέσα από τους διάφορους χαρακτήρες που υπάρχουν στη ζωή της Ντέιζι. Καθένας από αυτούς μας δείχνει και κάτι άλλο. Με εναλλαγές ανάμεσα σε πρωτοπρόσωπη και τριττοπρόσωπη αφήγηση, καταφέρνει να μας γνωρίσει όλους τους χαρακτήρες χωρίς να κουράσει καθόλου.
Η ζωή μιας γυναίκας, της όποιας γυναίκας...της κάθε γυναίκας...

"Οι άνθρωποι φαντάζονται τη μνήμη σαν το ήρεμο δέλτα ενός ποταμού, σαν νερά γαλήνια. Αλλά οι αναμνήσεις που έχω εγώ από τον εαυτό μου, μοιάζουν πιο πολύ με λίμνη φουρτουνιασμένη.τα κύματα της πέφτουν με δύναμη πάνω σ'αυτό που είμαι τώρα, πάνω στο πρόσωπο που έχω γίνει. Ένα πρόσωπο καλό κι ευγενικό. Ένα πρόσωπο που σκέφτεται τους άλλους."

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the story of the life of a woman of the 20th century. She is born in Canada in 1905 and lives into the 1990s. Daisy Goodwill, born in Canada to a mother who dies in childbirth, grows up with a neighbor and her grown son before returning to live with her father at age eleven. It reads at times like a fictional autobiography, and at other times as if people close to her are contributing. She lives a rather uneventful life, punctuated by a few major decisions and events.

It is a tribute to the author that she can make a rather “ordinary” life into something that keeps the reader’s interest. It includes snippets of information, such as recipes and photos, that make it seem like a family album of memories. This book will appeal to those that enjoy reflective, quiet, well-written stories.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won a Pulitizer Prize in 1995, and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the 1980s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. The mix and overlap between these two subjects is fascinating, and Shields' writing is first rate, making this a pleasure to read.

Though it is written as if it's an autiobiography, The Stone Diaries does not limit itself to subject matter that its protagonist could have known. Starting on the day of Daisy's birth, with her mother, Mercy, and moving both backward and forward through time, the book gives perspectives and experiences of many of the supporting characters as well, including Daisy's father, the woman who raises her, her husband, and her children. Though the speaker is sometimes not clearly identified, the moves between perspectives are far less confusing than would be expected (don't worry, it doesn't read like As I Lay Dying or anything like that). The story is actually told in a way I don't think I've ever seen before, with a mix of omniscent and present narration, and constantly moving time and perspective. Shields deserves her award just for being able to pull that off successfully, nevermind the story!

But the story is compelling. Daisy's life is hard and full of tragedy (the childbearing death of her mother, twice widowhood, etc.), but the tragedy takes backseat the both Daisy's and the other characters' knack for reinvention of themselves when circumstances change. Both as a human story and as a parable for the countries in which the novel takes place (the U.S. and Canada), these reinventions work very well.

I was impressed enough by this book that I passed it on to my mother, and I will be on the lookout for more of Carol Shields' work. I'd definitely recommend it.

[Dianne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know this won't win me any friends among Canadian readers, but I don't like Carol Shields writing. Granted I've only read this one through to the end. A few years ago I started another one and didn't like it either so I quit about a quarter of the way in. I suspected at the time I was not a "good" reader and that her books were over my head. I've gained some "reader confidence" since then and learned that it's ok to not like certain styles of writing just on the basis of personal taste. Hence the freedom I feel to hate Ulysses by James Joyce without guilt, but that's a whole other story.

This novel follows the life of Daisy Goodwill from her birth in her mother's kitchen in 1905 to her death in the 1990s. It wasn't an ordinary life, if there even is such a thing. She never knew the mother who died bringing her into the world. She was raised by a neighbour until circumstances changed, requiring Daisy to go home and live with her father. At that point she is eleven years old and she and her father are complete strangers to one another. Each chapter is titled for a specific stage of her life: Birth, Childhood, Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Illness and Decline, and Death.

I found the gaps too long between some of the chapters. For example, the "Childhood" chapter ends in 1916, just as she reconnects with her father, then that chapter comes to an end and the next one "Marriage" begins with her as a bride-to-be at 22 years of age. I think gaps like that are what prevented me from arriving at a place where I would care about the characters and how things would turn out for them. The story itself is good and the writing as well, I just couldn't get invested in any of the people in the story.

I found some rather odd figures of speech in this book. They're in the right places and at the right times; my problem is that I don't understand them. There must have been fifty times throughout the book that I came to a metaphor and stopped, wondering what the heck did that mean. I love creativity, but I think this authour and I are on different wave lengths. I'll give you a few examples:

1. In talking about a professor she said "He rides straight up the walls of his sentences."
2. "For Abram Skutari......religion is an open window as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window"
3. "...the word 'woe' made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word"
4. "...if she says 'So you two gals are out on the town, huh?' then aunt Daisy will say, shaping her mouth into soft ovals of confederacy...."
5. "Vanity refuses to die, pushing the blandness of everyday life into little pleats, pockets, knobs of electric candy."

I could think through some of these and figure out what she might have meant, (the word "woe" is bug-like though I don't know how it's blind, and maybe I have some idea what "a soft oval of confederacy" looks like) but I can't come up with any connection between "the blandness of every day life" and "electric candy" (electric candy?). As something that should paint a clearer picture for the reader or help us understand a situation more easily, these metaphors and others in this book didn't work for me.

I don't know if I'll read anymore of Carol Shields' books or not. I think I'd like to try one more, but it's way down on my priority list now. I know that a lot of people love her writing so definitely give it a try. I didn't "get" her at all, but you might not have that problem. Would love to hear what you think.

[Sue K H · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.” 

Why yes Ms. Shields, too many times to count in your beautiful book.   If only I'd have read this on my Kindle,  I could have highlighted the many perfectly written simple truths of the Stone Diaries.  I'm not one to take the time to write passages down but,  I did grab a sticky note pad to mark them for when I wrote a review.  The problem is, there are way too many to choose from!  Thankfully after my sticky notes are reluctantly removed and the book begrudgingly returned to the library, many of the passages can live on via Goodreads under the "Quotes from..." section which is sometimes lacking but contains most of the ones I marked in this case.  

In her part autobiography, part biography complete with a family tree and pictures, Sheilds memorializes a fictional everywoman born in 1905 who died sometime after 1985  (the actual date purposely undisclosed).  Our everywoman has her own set of unique circumstances, of which many are tragic.  Every life has its own tragedies, and Sheild's makes you feel that hers are similar to yours or like those of someone you know.   

 A special treat for me was how even though the story takes place mostly in Canada, there's a midwestern feel since part of it takes place in Indiana and she mentions the central IL town of Ottowa which is in the same county where I have relatives, and at one point she visits the Morton Arboretum where my Mom's ashes are spread.   I figured that she must have been from around here and looked it up and she was born in Oak Park IL and moved to Canada in her early 20's when she got married.  

I had a hard time putting this down because the captivating prose managed to make not only this ordinary life extraordinary but every life extraordinary.   I'll be reading more of Carol Shields's books.  I'm so thankful for my Pulitzer reading challenge because without it I'd probably never have read this one which most certainly deserved its Pulitzer.   

[Taghreed Jamal El Deen · Rating 3 out of 5]

الكتاب رقم 180 وبه أكون قد أتممت تحدي الغودريدز لهذا العام،
ورقم 2000 ضمن قراءاتي عموماً.

8/12/2022

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing this book, I thought "What a gloomy novel, what a futile life ...". Shields wrote a sort of biography of Daisy Goodwill, from her remarkable birth up to her last fading moment of life, in 10 chapters, each with an interval of about 10 years. But it's not a linear story: sometimes we hear Daisy speak, sometimes an unknown narrator, at other times immediate family and friends, whether through letters or otherwise. This very variegated approach creates a dynamic and exposes the contradictions and differences between how we see ourselves, how others see us, how through life experiences we change the way we look at ourselves and others. Daisy is the link between all the characters, but Shields frequently zooms in on others and by doing so she exposes the profound changes they made in their lives and how they interacted with one another.

Two insights prevail: 1. How in our lifetime we are sometimes forced to radically re-invent ourselves, to give our lives a different direction; and most people can manage this. 2. every life is basically a life of its own, and in that sense really lonely (in each chapter the word "loneliness" appears, as a pivotal characteristic of life); all characters (including fathers, wives, daughters, sons ...) live their lives just next to each other, almost exclusively from their own egocentric point of view.

Shields was a remarkable writer (1935-2003), indeed, and this book you can qualify as "rich" in life-wisdom. In that sense it reminded me much of Penelope Lively (who wrote the introduction to this book), also with the same special sensitivity to gender issues. Personally I think her final chapters are a bit too gloomy, and her sketch of Daisy as an elder rather shocking. But perhaps I'm closing my eyes to reality here ? (rating 3.5 stars)

[John Dishwasher John Dishwasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book pits the incomprehensibility of life against our irrepressible thirst to make sense of it. Shields shows various ways in which life is mysterious. And she mirrors those with various methods we use to give these mysteries order. The order we create only touches the surface of the mysteries, however, not their depth. For example, one’s genealogy is not one’s heritage. It is only a representation of one’s heritage, an ordering of it. But ordering that heritage helps us to grapple with the mystery of our origins. Likewise, psychology is not our mind. It only orders aspects of our mind for study and discussion. This helps us, though, to wrap our thoughts around the astonishing mystery of our own awareness. Ultimately though, Shields shows that the great mysteries of life escape us.

Encouragingly, she does allow one place where we seem to reconcile this conflict. She suggests that if we can find our singular vocation, an occupation that touches our own personal mystery, deeply, we can wrestle that mystery into the order of our daily efforts. Other than this, it seems, there is only one last place where we transcend this conflict -- death.

Besides this heavy duty commentary on the human condition, Shields also draws a portrait of the 20th Century in this book. She uses the changing position of women in society to show how the century evolved in the West. Her conclusion presents the modern Western woman as standing all alone, a sort of orphan, without a source. I’ve never considered the fact that men have millennia of examples of their gender to draw on for support while forging into the future. While the modern woman is more or less at the beginning of her journey in terms of autonomy, and so without as many examples for encouragement. This observation of Shields’ was enlightening to me. Her protagonist is tragically alone, but brave in her solitude.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 5 out of 5]

#2016-usa-geography-challenge: INDIANA
#2016-aty-reading-challenge--week-15: a book set in the past (100 years ago)

I seem to have an affinity for novels about women's lives set in the past century. Perhaps it is because they give me glimpses about what my grandmother's and mother's lives might have been like. Some of my favorites include So Big and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The Stone Diaries now takes its place among these favorites. It is written as part autobiography/part biography by an omniscient narrator, about the life and times of Daisy Goodwill Flett, who was born in 1905 and died in 199_. "Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams." And this telling of Daisy's life as daughter, wife, mother, is full of holes, gaps in the narrative, letters that present only one side, etc. And these holes perhaps represent the huge, gaping hole in Daisy's life that should have been filled with her mother's love.

For Daisy's mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill, died giving birth to Daisy. She was such an obese woman that she didn't even realize she was pregnant. And poor baby Daisy was laid on a cold stone table, alone in the world for her first breaths. "Remember this poor child is motherless, and there's not one thing worse in this world than being motherless." Her father is too distraught over the loss of his beloved wife to care for the infant so Daisy is raised by the neighbor lady, Clarentine, who abruptly deserts her husband and moves to Winnipeg to live with her son, Barker, a professor. Daisy stays with them until Clarentine's death when Daisy is eleven. Her father, a virtual stranger, finally takes charge of her then and they move to Indiana to start a new life together.

"And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge?" This novel does a masterly job of revealing all through bits and pieces, through impressions.

Shields' writing can be blunt, sometimes funny, often poignant: "Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words 'I love you, Daisy' uttered aloud (such a simple phrase), and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit (and leisure) to ponder the injustice of this." My kind of book!

[Lorna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. It has been lauded as one of the only books encompassing one's life from birth to death in the fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The book is divided into ten chapters, each chapter representing a decade in the life of Daisy from her birth in 1905 in Manitoba, Canada to her death in the 1990's in Sarasota, Florida, basically the sweep of the twentieth century. I read the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition in celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its publication. And this edition had a wonderful introduction by Penelope Lively where she points out that stone is the foundation of the narrative, the dolomitic limestone quarries of Manitoba. Ms. Lively points out that the best fiction surprises and withholds as she points out that each time she reads The Stone Diaries, she sees it differently.

It seems that I am a bit of an outlier with my reaction to the book. There are many glowing reviews about the beauty and allure of The Stone Diaries. However, my review is not one of them. While there were some parts that I found very rich in its prose, for the most part I struggled with the book.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up

I’m a voracious Canadian reader, so I’m not sure how I managed to miss this multi-award-winning Canadian novel, published over 30 years ago, until now. No matter, I’ve happily rectified that oversight. Daisy Goodwill, our protagonist, is born in 1905 and lives into her 90s, so her life basically spans the 20th century and gives something of an everywoman’s viewpoint of that turbulent century. But she’s also vividly particular, uniquely herself—Shields brings to life a full, living character. Daisy is an ordinary woman and does the things expected of the women of her time—she marries, has children, makes a home and raises a family—but she has a quietly questing spirit and wants to find something for herself. She makes a beautiful garden and becomes a much-consulted local expert, knowledge which eventually leads her to become the local newspaper’s gardening columnist, a career that gives her great pride and satisfaction, and then heartbreak and despair when it’s taken from her. Life trundles on, though. There’s a spot of attempted roots-unearthing in Scotland (though most remains a mystery) and eventually retirement in Florida, everything gently unfolding until the end. Very satisfying.