The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"In 1867 Pater Archangel Gstir is sent by God to the Canadian wilds. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, is brought together with his future wife. Decades later when an architect plans a memorial to the Canadian dead in France, their grandchild Klara must use her family skills - to carve, and to create." --publishers blurb
This is a beautifully written novel that tells the story of a variety of Canadian carvers and how they intertwined with one another over time. This is the second historical novel I have read by Urquart and I plan to read more. She is a Canadian author and her stories of life in the wilds of Canada are full of interesting details and appealing characters.
The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"But how crowded and unfocused this looking back is; all these foreign fields, the battles, this china collection. Views of rocks and trees, hills and streams. I scarcely know which images are mine and which have been taken by me, fully developed, from the others, or whether there is, in the final analysis, any difference.” (p. 217)
This is a novel about a life not lived. The narrator Austin Fraser has spent his life creating art and pushing away all human connections and now he is looking back upon what he has done. He reminded me of the Buchanans in Great Gatsby.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This is a beautifully written but incredibly sad novel. The book is largely about Canadians, but the narrator is an American which gives the observations of Canada a distance they wouldn't have if the narrator was part of what he was telling us about. The sections about WWI were particularly interesting in their point-of-view. I knew that Canada fought in the war from the beginning, but hadn't really thought about it in the way Urquhart forces you to.
I am counting this toward the Canadian Book Challenge.
