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| Author: John Gimlette |
Gimlette’s journey across this harsh and awesome
landscape, the eastern extreme of the Americas, broadly
mirrors that of Dr. Eliot Curwen, his great-grandfather,
who spent a summer there as a doctor in 1893, and who
was witness to some of the most beautiful ice and cruelest
poverty in the British Empire. Using Curwen’s
extraordinarily frank journal, John Gimlette revisits
the places his great-grandfather encountered and along
the way explores his own links with this harsh, often
brutal, land.
At the heart of the book however, are the “outporters,” the
present-day inhabitants of these shores. Descended from
last-hope Irishmen, outlaws, navy deserters and fishermen
from Jersey and Dorset, these outporters are a warm,
salty, witty and exuberant breed. They often speak with
the accent and idioms of the original colonists, sometimes
Shakespearean, sometimes just plain impenetrable. Theirs
is a bizarre story; of houses (or “saltboxes”)
that can be dragged across land or floated over the
sea; of eating habits inherited from seventeenth-century
sailors (salt beef, rum pease-pudding and molasses;)
of Labradorians sealed in ice from October to June;
of fishing villages that produced a diva to sing with
Verdi; and of their own illicit, impromptu dramatics,
the Mummers.
This part-history-part-travelogue exploration of Newfoundland
and Labrador’s coast and culture by a well-established
travel writer is a glorious read to be enjoyed by both
armchair tourist, and anyone contemplating a visit to
Canada’s far-eastern shores.
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From Publishers Weekly
Gimlette's account of his journey through Newfoundland and Labrador is
more personal than his last travelogue (At the Tomb of the Inflatable
Pig, set in Paraguay); he's tracing his own history as he follows the
trail of his great-grandfather, a nineteenth century missionary doctor.
Rather than slowing the pace, the family connection increases his chances
of stumbling across weird and wonderful tableaux, and the turns of phrase
Gimlette uses to describe them are as singular and unruly as the isolated
and forgotten land he explores ("The sky was clean as a knife," for
instance). It's difficult to avoid feeling like a keen sense of the absurd
rules the northeastern reaches of North America: bear-fighting goats,
an emergency air-landing strip serving the whole world and countless ghost
towns left from the heady days when the cod fishing ruled the island;
every place Gimlette visits is stranger than the previous. He weaves his
ancestor's tale with his own travels and the region's history without
creating an overwhelming tangle, although at times his delivery is choppy
and truncated with abrupt section breaks. Usually, he eases into each
locale, finds the oddest, most garrulous inhabitant and listens to their
complaints, theories and family sagas. Readers will be fascinated by Newfoundland's
and Labrador's bizarre, often tragic pasts and equally strange presents,
and they will be glad it was the eloquent Gimlette who made the trip so
they don't have to. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
© 1997-2005 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |
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$25.00 (hardcover)
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