Paul Harding

Tinkers

Emma Bose

Re-read. I made the mistake of reading chunks of this in loud, chaotic surroundings (thanks kids). This book is like a book of poetry where every word and sentence is so purposeful. I felt like I didn’t get as much from the read this time as a result. 

Sarah Erle

Emelie

On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby's throughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.

Melody Izard

This is a novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But it reads like poetry. I want to say I love poetry. I try to follow the exact meaning; the information that is meant to be transferred to me; I try to understand the poetry – but I get lost. While I read this book I would get trapped in the words trying to decide just what my cryptic message from the author was and I would be smelling and tasting and feeling a little swimmy and I would be seeing and hearing; but I would not be understanding. I would find myself drowning in lovely passages that asked me to fashion myself a beak out of tinker’s tin and start hunting in a willy nilly fashion for bits of straw and tinsel and fuzz to build a nest. I would weight myself down with a smooth cold rock and sit shoulder high in a muddy stream while glimpsing an Indian rumored to have disappeared until I passed out from the freezing gushing water but I would not be understanding. Things came in and out of focus while I read. I knew what was going on and then just as quickly as an epileptic seizure I would lose my way. And apparently this is what happens to you when you die. 
The language is lovely. The images are at the same time soothing and tear producing. I felt like a lost searcher. It was not always a bad feeling.

"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 night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, TINKERS is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature."

Maxime van der Wal

A while ago I decided to read books which have recently won important literary awards, hoping it'd introduce me to some interesting contemporary authors. So far they've all been awful. 

This book in particular felt  very  pretentious - like its main purpose was to have as much literary merit as possible. There's no real plot, the narrative is confusing and all over the place, the characters are boring and the writing is as flowery as they come.  Tinkers  has been praised for its "poetic" prose and unconvential writing style, and while I understand some might find Harding's writing intellectual, it mostly comes across as an attempt to impress the reader. Were the long-winded descriptions of nature necessary? What did the excerpts from a (fictional?) Horologist book add to the story, besides interrupting the flow of the book? Why was there such little punctuation? 

This book requires a lot of concentration, despite its density, and I was hoping it'd be worth the effort, but it wasn't. Unless you're looking for a book to put you to sleep, this isn't worth reading.

Catherine Nicolai

I often underline favorite passages or descriptions from books as I read them. I wasn't able to do that with this book because every single word in every sentence would have been underlined. I loved everything about this book, and I don't think I've read one this good for a while now. I can't wait to see what Mr. Harding writes in the years to come.

Tinkers

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