Postcards

Introduced to Annie Proulx from her book _Shipping News_, I eagerly snatched this book up with the same expectations and I was delivered of that and more. An outstanding story of family, blood lines, history and human strength and frailty, Annie once again strikes gold. Teased, the reader gets little glimpses of mementos, mail, postcards throughout the novel that relate in intriguing ways to the story content. Probably the biggest teaser would be the first few pages. I challenge any lover of literature to read those pages and put the novel back on the shelf. There is simply no way to resist this book when you have read this entry. My analysis of a great work of literature is my intention to reread the novel again. There are a handfull of books I know I will, as the temptation to read something fresh is always greater. This novel will never be lent out, for I will wait until it dims just the slightest in my memory, and then I will seek it out and read it again with as much anticipation as when I read it the first time. I can't wait!!

Once you read the opening sentence of 'Postcards,' you've made a blood pact to ride it through to the very end. It is a tough journey - tribulations, tragedy, loss and disillusionment. Interestingly enough, all these unfold as America progresses from the 1940s through as close to present day as the novel dares to go.Proulx is an excellent writer -- there is just no other way to say it. Her imagery is accurate and striking, her penmanship sincere and beautiful, her motivation convincing and firm. I am reminded of a modern day Thomas Hardy; indeed, she explores similar themes: man's futile struggle with nature and the land, man's painful grapple with modernization, and the inability to escape fate -- which is often the path Proulx's characters set for themselves through their actions. Proulx takes her time to develop her story, and while this may seem slow at times, she has the luxury of lushly and unabashedly unfolding her story. The attention to detail is impeccable and immaculate -- a story about loss and trudging on needs that, as if searching for an answer in every possible way.This book not only urges its readers to think the author's philosophy -- it's constantly thinking of ways to reveal itself without losing its classy and necessary subtlety. It's enigmatic at times, but take it as an invitation to explore, rather than be put off by it. It's to Proulx's credit that she's taken the exhaustingly explored nostalgic Forrest Gump-esque backdrop of a changing and progressing America to set her story against, and infused it with the possibility of disdaining the fact that our history may be the bane of our existence.

What a phenomenal novel by E. Annie Proulx. I thumbed through the pages at the bookstore, saw postcards prefacing almost every chapter, and was immediately attracted to the novel. I had no idea, though, that it was going to be this good. I have been hooked up on this book to the very end, yet this is not a happy, pretty novel. This was hard reality, ugliness and bad luck in every other page, strangely compelling chapter after chapter. I would say there was very little fiction in this book, and that's what made it so good for me. As an aside: just a few days ago, i reviewed Beach Music, by Pat Conroy, and my main criticism is that it dealt with many, many story lines that did not connect well. The end result was an 800-page mishmash of tales and situations that left me with a sense of annoyance. Postcards is a perfect example of how in barely 300 pages you can have dozens of lives and places and situations in harmony. It just takes some skill on the part of the author (one of the tricky parts of writing).These are some of the things that make this novel so excellent, in my opinion:1: Her character development is fabulous. If Loyal is not a walking example of karma, i don't know what is. How could one feel sorry for a criminal? Yet i could. And Dub, proof of how ironic life can be. Mink, born miserable. Jewell and her renaissance. Witkin and his sense of emptiness. These characters were flesh and blood, not paper. 2: Her descriptions of place are brilliant. I have never been in a dairy farm, but i feel like i have. The smells, the grime, the bitter cold, the absence of electric light. The insides of the caved mine. The desert and the heat. It was not difficult to visualize any of these places, because her detailed portrayal was so vivid and complete. 3: Her situations are remarkable. Loyal's journey throughout the country is an excellent account of life from post-war years till the late 80's. The very colorful characters and situations he encounters. The many lives he lives. If i could give more stars to this book, i would. This is a magnificent first novel by an author i will keep in mind forever.

E.Annie Proulx, the first female winner of PEN/Faulkner Award, wrote a wonderful story with Faulknerian plot and Steinbeckian characters but in such original manner and with such creative power that it takes your breath away from the first page till the last one.The Fall of the House of Blood recalls Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!' where an unrepentant sin of a person triggers the inexorable course of moral and physical decay of the whole family. Loyal Blood, a protagonist of the novel, whom his masculine ancestors bequeath with a hot temperament, killed his beloved girlfriend Billy and had to run away to evade just punishment. Travelling across the American West for forty years, changing different jobs, he sends postcards to his family without revealing his address. One can see an obvious parallel with the fate of Cain. Loyal is an innate talanted farmer, 'a tiller of the ground'. But after the horrible sexual crime his life is really under the Lord's verdict: 'When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth... And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him' (KJV:Genesis, 4;12,15). As a kind of such mark Loyal receives a strange lung allergy that prevents all his contacts with women. He runs hard but doesn't get anywhere except to a different place. Without personal remorse but with intention to forget, he becomes a new Wandering Jew; it seems that he lives several lives without the hope of merciful death. Sometimes he, being virtually a good man, resembles the Death himself: people die around him but he stays alive. As a personafication of the Death he kills trapped animals without any sense or compassion, - except one red-haired female coyote whose desperate eyes and realization of its doomed fate remind him Billy's last look. The final of the Blood's family outwardly is not so tragical as in the Faulkner's novel but its essence is just the same - no children, no purport, no hope. In the last chapter we see a half-mad offspring of a man who had bought Blood's farm - compare with the end of 'Absalom, Absalom!'Description of ordinary people's endurance of pain, hardship and adversity is excellent, the author's attention to their agonies and ecstasies recalls famous Steinbeck's books. The life of farmers was hard but it was real; modern life is a rat race, an unquenchable thirst of money, an insatiable desire for success and fame, it becomes a genuine nightmare.The structure of the novel, its form is exquisite. The author uses texts of postcards as an explanation of events and elucidation of characters and even as a short description of following episodes. The latter proves the author's literary courage: she sometimes eschews the depiction of garish incidents (such as the arson and search of culprits, pecuniary swindles in Maiami, etc.), the only vocation of run-of-the-mill writers, but she always

About three years ago, I stumbled across Postcards in an airport bookstore, and I couldn't put it down for the 3 days that I was away from home. It is the only book I have ever read by Proulx, but the images from Postcards seem to be etched in my mind. Think of a favorite movie- and the scene or image that will never go away. That's what this book offers: vivid, emotional images. It's a book that I have always wanted to recommend to someone, the kind of book that makes me wish I was reading it for a literature class so that I could talk about it with others, analyze it, and truly appreciate it. It is a beautifully written, heart-wrenching story. As I recall, an observation I had while reading Postcards was that Proulx was noticably sympathetic to her female characters - they seemed to be victims of circumstance - while her male characters were often the cause of their own undoing. This realization actually enhanced my enjoyment of the book, by making me conscious of the author and allowing a certain amount of disconnect from the characters- necessary to keep from getting too emotionally connected to these tragic characters.