Urquhart, Jane

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The Book + Visit to Vimy = profound
Did I Miss Something??
Sweeps across three countries and two centuries
A journey
Elegant book by a stellar author

The Stone Carvers
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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March

ASIN: 0142003581
Release Date: 2003-11-25

Amazon.com

In her fifth novel, award-winning writer Jane Urquhart interweaves the sweeping power of big historical events with small but very moving personal stories. Klara Becker is the granddaughter of a woodcarver in German-settled southern Ontario. She has a love affair with a brooding, silent Irish lad who then goes off to fight, and die, in World War I. Meanwhile her older brother Tilman has literally snapped the ties that would have chained him to the family home, and vanished.

Of course, as in all great romantic epics, the two are destined to meet again. Tilman loses his leg in the war and experiences joyful belonging with an exuberant Italian immigrant family in industrial Hamilton, Ontario, before finally venturing home. Klara remains a spinster in her small town, sewing and working on and off for years on the figure of an abbess carved from wood. The novel culminates in the building of a huge stone monument to Canada's war dead in Vimy, France. Klara and Tilman are both compelled to visit the site of this insanely ambitious artistic obsession of real-life Canadian sculptor Walter Allward; both find that they have a personal struggle to overcome the past and learn to express love. Urquhart grasps her characters from outside and inside as precious few authors manage to do. She is, in her own way, a sculptor who carves a radiant and enduring tale from the elegant material of raw language. --Nigel Hunt

Book Description

In 1867 a good-natured Bavarian priest, is sent by God and mad King Ludwig to the wilds of North America. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and the settlers into a congregation, and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, meets his future wife. Several decades later, Joseph Becker teaches his astounding carving skills to his grandchildren. One of them, Klara, shows exceptional talent and has a surfeit of what the local nuns call "a fondness for men's work." Untamed, she falls in love with an Irish boy, Eamon O'Sullivan, only to have him leave to fight in the Great War . . .

Customer Reviews:

The Book + Visit to Vimy = profound.......2006-10-17

It's been 5 years since I read the book and longer ago that I had wanted to visit the Vimy memorial. So I read the book in the summer of 2001 and travelled to France in Oct 2001.

I found the combination of book + visit very moving and recommend both to any Canadian with an interest on what Canadians have done in the name of the country elsewhere in the world (though in WWI, the name of the "empire "would be closer to the truth). I recall the story as being a good read and the fictional story told of the carver's assistants added additional interest and meaning to what I actually saw upon arrival at Vimy (went directly there off the flight). The story can fit in, in a manner, as a surrogate for the actual sculpture's own story, which is not told in great depth.

The monument is an amazingly powerful place to me. The book sets up the visit very nicely.

Did I Miss Something??.......2005-03-21

After hearing about how great Jane Urquhart's writing is, I have to say I was really disappointed with The Stone Carvers. Primarily, I was irritated by the overall lack of depth in this book; The story, although somewhat interesting because it is historical, has little structure. Urquhart uses the old "parachute under the pilot's seat" device a bit too much, and so nothing is believable. Things just happen, and there is no reasoning behind circumstances or events. Likewise, the characters are flat, predictable, and rather stereotypical--not real people.
I found myself becoming aware of Urquhart's writing while reading The Stone Carvers, usually because I was amazed at how simple and un-insightful it was. Perhaps I missed something, or expected too much. Either way, I wish I hadn't bought this book!
Tere

Sweeps across three countries and two centuries.......2004-07-14

The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart tells the story of two long-estranged siblings and a visionary 19th Century German priest, and an obsessive sculptor by the name of Walter Allward. Klara Becker (the granddaughter of a master carver), is a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by World War I and the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman. After a number of years Klara and Tilman find themselves involved with Walter Allward's ambitious war memorial at Vimy, France. This highly recommended, deftly abridged, flawlessly recorded, CD audiobook is brilliantly narrated by Nicky Guadagni who does full justice to Jane Urquhart's panoramic novel whose stories and characters sweep across three countries and two centuries.

A journey.......2003-07-13

This book was the first I've read of Jane Urquhart's novels. I read reviews about it here on Amazon before I read the book, and I was worried that I would find it too long as some reviews suggested, but I loved it. I didn't find it long at all. In fact I couldn't put it down! I took it with me everywhere, even to the golf course! Ha. The descriptions of the work that went into the stone and wood carving performed in the book made me want to go out and buy a set of carving tools. Today I went out and bought two more of her books; Away and The Underpainter. I'm hoping I will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed this one.

Elegant book by a stellar author.......2003-04-27

Jane Urguhart slowly and carefully, chisel chip by chisel chip, sets powerful but delicate personal stories against the sweeping backdrop of World War I. It's the story of Klara and her brother Tilman, separated for years and living those intervening year in very different ways. Their eventual reunion is the climax on which the story turns, and you won't be disappointed as they learn together how to move beyond their pasts and (it sounds trite, but it isn't) find love.
Highest recommendation.

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A CANADIAN MASTERPIECE
Pretentious and contrived
A wonderful tale - please read this book!!!

A Map of Glass
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Stone Carvers
The Underpainter
Changing Heaven
Abide with Me: A Novel
The Secret River

ASIN: 1596922133
Release Date: 2007-03-15

Product Description

From the author of the best-selling, award-winning The Stone Carvers and The Underpainter comes a new novel that explores love, loss, and the transitory nature of place. After Jerome, a young artist on a remote island retreat, discovers Andrew Woodman s dead body frozen in the ice, he meets the elderly man s former lover, Sylvia, who is curious about the circumstances surrounding Andrew s death. Together, Jerome and Sylvia uncover both the secrets of their own pasts and the breathtaking story of Andrew s ancestors.

Customer Reviews:

A CANADIAN MASTERPIECE.......2006-05-30

Jane Urquhart's new novel, A Map of Glass, is a richly rextured and complex work of genius. Magnificent descriptive passages illuminate and delight.
This novel is deeply insightful,exceptionally thought provoking and remarkably moving.
Intelligent readers eveywhere, will be delighted by this rare literary jewel.

Pretentious and contrived.......2006-04-12

The first chapter of this book is unusual and interesting, describing a photographer, Jerome, and the photos he takes on an island near Lake Ontario. Then the story switches to the other main character, Sylvia, an autistic woman in her 40s or 50s. Both characters' stories eventually become preposterous, told in a poetic language that got on my nerves.

Everyone speaks as if they were characters in a pretentious novel. What a surprise -- they are!

I also couldn't make sense of all the "meaningful" descriptions of scenery and all the metaphors about maps. And who is Sylvia's friend, Julia? Why does this character need to be blind? Must be another metaphor I missed. We never meet Julia. As far as I could tell, she's just an excuse for revealing things about Sylvia.

Then, in the middle of the book, I encountered a 140-page "novella" about people living in the same area in the 19th century. This cursorially told tale is full of cliches including the rich family's son who impregnates the maid, and the old maid sister who has a sudden, intense ridiculous love interest. This novella is like a sketch for a real book.

Then we're back to the future, so to speak, with Jerome and Sylvia, who continue to speak in either stilted or unnatural language. Plus Jerome's too-good-to-be-true girlfriend, Mira, and Sylvia's pompous not-believable-as-a-real-person husband, Malcolm.

Come on. What is this stuff? The author does everything possible to connect up all this baloney in some meaningful way. The reader is left to guess whether Sylvia's story is true, and to accept Jerome's sudden, cathartic realizations about his childhood.

The whole thing is far from believable which, for me, is a real problem.

A wonderful tale - please read this book!!!.......2005-11-05

As always, Jane Uquhart is a master story teller. She writes like an angel. I don't want to give "too much of the plot away" but it's set in both modern day Toronto and in the 19th century. You will love it...

Average customer rating:

Different
beautiful prose, but story falls flat
Suitable for those who don't know anything about art
The Underwhelmer
Brilliantly exposes the selfishness of the artist's world

The Underpainter
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140269738

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Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novel preoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894, is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as he tries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he has forgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he once knew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching.

Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, to Ontario to Paris to New York City. And not since Patrick White's The Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of the painter in action: "I believed that I was drawing--literally drawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the ones I controlled." Amazingly, by exposing Fraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has said that she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing The Underpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanity and turns his life into a work of art.

Book Description

In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him--his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter--in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination--is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.

Customer Reviews:

Different.......2006-11-12

A difficult novel to summarize based on its plot (which spans decades), its characters (which seem to foil off each other from the extremes of humanity), or its theme of art and the relationship between an artist and his subject. The central character is a fairly successful painter living in New York creating paintings begun up north during his fifteen years of summer trips to Ontario where he would live with his model, Sara. "Sara always attempted to give me her autobiography -- whole. But I tore it apart, silenced her, tossed the parts of her narrative I felt I couldn't use, like shredded paper, into the wind. I was constructing her, after all, in my paintings. I wanted no interference with the project." Yup, he's one charming guy. If that weren't enough, at the end of each summer, he'd cart all his paintings back to his New York studio eliminating his model from his life for another year and then literally obscure the images for the final product with layers and layers of more paint. This is a fairly engaging piece with enough other characters to foil this cruelty, selfishness, or whatever else you want to call it. An interesting read even if somewhat contrived.

beautiful prose, but story falls flat.......2002-10-19

Austin, an American painter, looks back at his life, and the people whose lives are intertwined with his memories. George, the serious and thoughtful china-painter, Sara, his quiet summertime model and lover, Augusta, who was a nurse during the war, who tells him her life story in one night while sitting in a china hall.

This contained some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, and I've taken note of a dozen of the loveliest passages from the book. But as a whole, as a novel, I could barely finish. I had absolutely no sympathy for the protagonist, and the plot was unapparent to me until the last fraction of the book. As beautiful as those passages were, they weren't enough to keep me entertained through the rest of this novel. Writing style deserves 5 stars, characterization 3 stars, and plot and storyline 0.

Suitable for those who don't know anything about art.......2002-09-28

Austin Fraser is a minimalist painter and a most unlikely hero. Urquart writes this book as his autobiography towards the end of his life. He has betrayed some very loyal friends during his lifetime. He appears to have no emotions, an unfeeling man surrounded by people, places and events that evoke passion. He drains his friends in the furtherance of his art giving nothing of himself in return.

The Underwhelmer.......2002-09-21

As a painter, books about artists naturally appeal to me. But even with such a head start, "The Underpainter" became one of those novels I only finish reading by skipping from section to section, trying to catch sight of those threads of the story which still held my interest. "The Underpainter" is a fictional first-person memoir told in the voice of Austin Fraser, an elderly abstract artist looking back on his life as the 1970s draw to a close. With unusual locales such as Rochester, New York, and a Canadian mining town; with the requisite celebrity cameos, in the form of Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent; and with the potential for romantic conflict, when the same girl catches the eye of both Austin and his summertime friend George, the ingredients for a good story were probably there.

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I'm inclined to cast the blame on the supporting characters. Austin in a different setting might still have come across as cold and uncaring, but his performance might have been more interesting on a different stage. His artistic education was credibly described, and his peculiar relationships with both his mother and his father were well explored. But George Kearns comes across as such an unambitious loser that he becomes unsympathetic, a trend that accentuates steadily right up to the book's conclusion. And we learn far, far more about George's lover Augusta Moffat than we really need to know - page after page describes her childhood before she ever crossed George and Austin's path, yet while her importance to the storyline is high, her actual protagonism is quite brief. On the other hand Sara, Austin's lover of fifteen years - fifteen summers, Austin would hasten to interject - never really comes alive. We never get even the slightest hint of why their relationship lasted so long. Was he just that good looking? Was she so plain no one else was interested in her?

Jane Urquhart writes well, and in her hands Austin sometimes speaks with resonance. Ultimately, though, in my opinion this book was let down by the direction its plot took, spending far too much time on a mediocre parochial supporting cast and not enough showing us Austin's performance in the art world he is supposed to have succeeded in.

Brilliantly exposes the selfishness of the artist's world.......2002-07-12

Don't mistake "The Underpainter" for an airy fairy novel with a soft underbelly for its languid pastel coloured prose belies a diamond hard centre. In this beautifully evocative 1997 winner of the Governor General Book Award, Jane Urquhart pierces the cerebral exterior of successful modernist artist Austin Fraser to reveal a cold callous soul, whose inability to give or receive love leads to unconscious acts of cruelty to those closest to him. Only upon reflection as an old man does he acknowledge his part in their fate but he has only memories to taunt not console him. Sara, his model and lover of many years, proves to be nothing more than a handy object holding a mirror to his own soul. She doesn't really exist for him, hence when they break up, he looks back upon a relationship spanning fifteen summers, not fifteen years. Not surprisingly, the fox in Sara's garden - a metaphor for Sara's inner self - doesn't exist in his mind simply because he has never seen it. When his mentor Rockwell critiques his paintings, it turns out to be an indictment of the painter himself. Austin is furious but finally unable to deny Rockwell's judgement. Vivian, heartless and vain, is Austin's spiritual twin in the novel. They are an anathema to George and Augusta, whose lives are deeply rooted in reality. George is also an artist, but unlike Austin, doesn't despise industry but works in his father's china shop and has survived the war. Augusta is a farm girl, warm, practical and disciplined, and the perfect partner for George until Vivian, with Austin's help, re-enters their lives one evening with devastating result. "The Underpainter" brilliantly exposes the selfishness of art for art's sake. It is a chilling reminder that art unless tempered by humanity ultimately conceals more than it reveals. Jane Urquhart is a tremendous novelist. "The Underpainter" is a gorgeously written and incandescent piece of work that leaves an indelible impression long after it's read.

As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (New Canadian Library)

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As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (New Canadian Library)
Alistair Macleod
Manufacturer: New Canadian Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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Island
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ASIN: 0771098820
Release Date: 1992-06-01

Book Description

The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change.

His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.

Average customer rating:

Stay Away......From Chapters Two And Three
Intense/abnormal love stories
Wonderful language
Garcia Marquez meets Canada
Excellent novel and a huge success for Ms. Urquhart

Away: A Novel
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Stone Carvers
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ASIN: 0140249265

Book Description

A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family’s complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.

Customer Reviews:

Stay Away......From Chapters Two And Three.......2004-12-03

This novel is ultimately a disappointment because it starts off with such potential. Indeed, if Ms. Urquhart had simply made a novella out of the first chapter and entitled it A Fish On A Pool, it would be a first rate artistic achievement. Instead, she drones on in two subsequent chapters in a lyricism that eventually fails through repetition, a plot that grates through being, well, the same blasted plot repeated three times and a theme that becomes not a little over the top in its literary feminism.

This review is not the place to go into all of Ms. Urquhart's gifts and how she has wasted them after the first, astounding chapter. She has a lyrical gift that owes much to Yeats. -In fact, the words "changed utterly" occur twice in this book-which, if you are a lover of Irish poetry and, ergo, a lover of Yeats, cannot fail to strike a chord. Hint: Read his Easter 1916. There are also passages like these in the first chapter, "Dark morning birds lifted away from the earth she walked on, her words spinning in the sky then flying over the fields to the shore". The first chapter is thematically wild and entrancing and lyrically virtuosic.

But then......who knows? Maybe her publisher demanded a certain number of pages. In any event, she goes on in two flat, pat chapters about the same thing with less magic and more of an axe to grind. She flirts with feminist propaganda near the end. Only the woman can receive the enchanting gift of being "away" it would seem. And men turn out to be destroyers of themselves and/or the land around them, unless, of course, they happen to be American Indian and go by the none too subtle name of "Exodus".

Still, the book is worth it. Just stop after the first chapter while you're still enchanted and before disillusionment has set in, while you're still "away."

Intense/abnormal love stories.......2003-07-25

I enjoyed the historical aspect to this book, particularly the description of the potato famine in Ireland. I read up on it a little on the Internet while going through the book and it seems Urquhart describes it accurately. The story, although partially fictitious, of D'arcy Mcgee was also interesting. I thought the obsessive love Eileen had for Aidan was over-emphasized and was dwelled upon for too long. I got the point long before she wrapped up the story. Considering we had already encountered an obsessive love through Mary in the first half of the book, it seemed somewhat redundant to go into that much detail of this obsessive type of love again through Eileen.

Wonderful language.......2002-06-26

In this acclaimed novel by Canadian writer Jane Urquhart, the story is second to the language used. Urquhart writes with such grace and mastery that one is often compelled to re-read large sections just to absorb her words.

The story is very compelling, about an Irish family who immigrate from Ulster during the Great Famine. But there have been many other books written on this topic, none of which are remotely as enjoyable to read. It is the unique strength of Urquhart's voice that makes this novel so fine.

A novel certainly for any reader interested in Irish and Irish-Canadian heritage, but also very worth reading by any who enjoy good language and style.

Garcia Marquez meets Canada.......2001-02-16

When Garcia MArquez wrote "One Hundred Years of Solitude" he found out that magic is the real event that changes the world. Urquhart uses the same premise to create a wonderful book, full of phantastic stories written in one of the most aesthetic proses I've ever read. Even though it is not very original (nothing is after Shakespeare and Cervantes), the book is ot only very readable, but also an enjoyable choice for anyone looking of a world so phantastic that seems absolutely familiar.

Excellent novel and a huge success for Ms. Urquhart.......2000-12-28

'Away' is an excellent book. The story is about a family's life and what happened to them. It seems as though each generation faces big adjustments and obstacles they must cross and/or overcome. The book is very complicated, but very intense, too. I would recommend this book to any of my friends or realtaives or to anybody.

Average customer rating:

lyrical and wise
I don't get it!

The Whirlpool
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: David R. Godine Publisher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0879238062

Book Description

Written in luminous prose, The Whirlpool is a haunting tale set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in the summer of 1889. This is the season of reckless river stunts, a time when the undertaker’s widow is busy with funerals, her days shadowed by her young son’s curious silence. Across the street in Kick’s Hotel, where Fleda and her husband, David McDougal, have temporary rooms, Fleda dreams of the place above the whirlpool where she first encountered the poet, a man who enters her life and, unwittingly, changes everything. As the summer progresses, the lives of these characters become entangled, and darker, more sinister currents gain momentum.

The Whirlpool, Jane Urquhart’s first novel, received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France and marked the brilliant debut of a major voice in Canadian fiction.

Customer Reviews:

lyrical and wise.......2004-04-22

This beautifully written book captures romantic obsession in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the three main characters: Maud, the undertaker's young widow; Fleda, the young wife of a military historian obsessed by his work, who is herself obsessed by the poetry of Robert Browning and who prefers the woods above the whirlpool of the title to a proper woman's domestic life in a house; and Patrick, the unsuccessful poet who becomes obsessed with Fleda.

Urquhart's luminous prose draws the reader in to experience the large and small frustrations and tragedies that swirl around the three in this novel set against the backdrop of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, in the summer of 1889. She has a wonderful eye for the telling detail and draws her characters with a meticulous hand, so that the reader almost comes to inhabit their world of pine forests carpeted with trilliums, mysteriously mute children, unspoken desire, and underlying everything, the river, with its falls and whirlpools and floating bodies.

This novel is not plot-driven, not one to be rushed through, though readers will keep turning pages to learn what happens to the characters; rather it is one to be savored, not only for the story but also, perhaps even more so, for the unfolding pleasures of the text itself, for the richness and perfection of Urquhart's language. It is the perfect book to read, as Fleda reads Browning, quietly in the shade of a tree.

I don't get it!.......2003-01-05

Everyone in this novel is obsessive-compulsive, and they are SO obsessive that they compulsed me to stay behind in the trees somewhere above the whirlpool. They are all dysfunctional, and this in itself does not make for a bad novel (necessarily), but in this case it does. Their obsessions do not seem believable. The coincidence of them all knowing each other only adds to the improbability of their existing at all. Here's the cast:
A man who ignores his beautiful wife because of his combined obsession with Canadian military history, and his fantasies about Laura Secord.
His wife... who lives in a tent in the woods near the whirlpool, and does nothing but read books (mostly the poetry of Browning). Her inner life revolves around her perceived connection with the swirling waters of the whirlpool which seem to call to her... to speak to her.
Then there's the poet-voyeur who accidently observes her in her wilderness setting because he too is obsessed with the whirlpool area. He becomes addicted to her (runs off with her shorn hair), befriends her husband to learn more about her, but cannot stand to be in her presence and avoids any verbal communication with her.
The superstitious undertaker-woman who loses her husband and parental in-laws to a mysterious plague all in one day, and is now forced to raise her speechless son on her own.
The speechless son who learns to repeat disconnected single words only after meeting the voyeur fellow. (?) Exactly.
The Old River Man who lives down by the whirlpool, and whose sole occupation is to use elaborate contraptions to fish drowned human bodies out of the water in exchange for booze from the undertaker woman.

The whirlpool is an area of water on the Canadian side, downriver of Niagara Falls, where this novel is set in the summer of 1889. All of these people interact with each other at one time or other, but the connection is weak in my opinion. There does not seem to be a unifying reason that any of them should even know each other. Like parentheses surrounding the novel, the first and last chapter are about Robert Browning... and I still don't get it!

I feel that this book suffers greatly because the actions of the protagonists seem too symbolic, unrealistic, and ethereal... everything seems to mean something else. To the point that nothing means anything.
Like a really long poem that you just "don't get!"
I got the book because I love some of Urquhart's other writings, and because I love Niagara Falls. But this book was a disappointing read.

Changing Heaven
Average customer rating:

Gorgeous writing needs a bit more grounding

A haunting novel of temporal convergence...

Intelligent

beautifully written

sorry it didn't work

Changing Heaven
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: McClellan & Stewart Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Urquhart, Jane | Poets, A-Z | Poetry | Canadian | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0771086636

Book Description

Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Brontë scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost – or the memory – of Emily Brontë. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm.

Customer Reviews:

Gorgeous writing needs a bit more grounding.......2006-09-24

Jane Urquhart's second novel combines parallel stories of love and obsession with literary references to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Tintoretto's paintings.

Ann and Arthur are the Bronte and Tintoretto scholars, their love affair as doomed as that of the naive factory girl-balloonist, Arianna Ether, and her tormented teacher who died 100 years before. Ann flees to the Bronte moors to recover from her affair and write about wind. Arianna, in the company of a darkly whimsical Emily Bronte, haunts the place.

An intriguing premise and Urquhart's ("The Whirlpool") writing is almost poetry. But it doesn't go anywhere. Although the story is about elemental passions, the passion is bled off into descriptions of the elements and fanciful allusions.

A haunting novel of temporal convergence..........2003-10-29

THIS is the true sequel to Wuthering Heights. Not that Jane Urquhart intended it to be, but it so outstrips Return To Wuthering Heights by Anna L'Estrange that it cannot help but unwittingly assume that mantle.

Whereas L'Estrange's sequel is a fairly linear novel, which continues the saga through the lives of Heathcliffe and Catherine's descendants, Hareton and young Cathy, Urquhart gets inside Bronte's head and brings us the spirit of her creation, rather than the mere mechanics.

Urquhart's stunning grasp of Emily Bronte's psyche is echoed in Camille Paglia's own cracking assessment of Bronte and her work in the magnificent Sexual Personae. Here, in Paglia's analysis of Bronte's self-referential high romantic prose poem, she writes of how the Byronic Heathcliffe is both Bronte's own projected animus (put simplistically, her Jungian Inner Male component) and in the context of the story, Cathy's as well.

This metathesis, or literary transsexualization comes across in Urquhart's own brilliant re-weaving of the Brontean strands. Yet, such is the subtlety of Jane's unfoldment, that the female characters, including Emily Bronte (in spirit form, as is Arianna Ether) seem almost peripheral to the calculatedly one-dimensional, self-indulgent male characters. Such of course, is the history of patriarchy, in which women have traditionally been the Second Sex.

The only exception to the male group thus defined is the character Hartley, who, by comparison is an almost Shamanic figure - a man in balance, who has surrendered to the wisdom of the eternal Feminine.

I believe that Jane Urquhart has captured the elemental genius of Bronte's original work, with its relatively anarchic temporal shifting and box structure, in particular Bronte's deliberate use of the singular form of 'heaven' (in a related poem), rather than 'the heavens', which would be a more common choice when writing about the weather, the sky etc. The changing heaven is the changing Heaven, and the use of weather as a metaphor in Wuthering Heights, and therefore Changing Heaven, reminds you of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, which again represented a vortex, connecting the worlds at the opposite ends of the labyrinth. Yin and Yang, Life and Death, Masculine and Feminine etc.

Yet, as Dorothy discovered, when you have truly found yourself, Oz is Kansas. She never left, she merely transformed. Similarly, the temporal convergence that finally connects the female divine Trinity in Jane's epic work is a simliar point of transcendence, and resolution.

I was so impressed by Changing Heaven that I even mentioned it at a pivotal point in my own impending modern gothic novel 'One Star Awake', and in my first work of non-fiction, Sirius Moonlight - concerning the suppression of the Feminine in patriarchal culture - such is the influence that Urquhart's mistresspiece has had on me - likewise, with Camille Paglia.

Even the inspired act of latching onto the Bronte poem's phrase 'changing heaven' and relating it to the absolute core of Wuthering Heights, is a measure of Jane Urquhart's own genius.

I simply cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough.

Intelligent.......2000-05-24

This book was brought to my attention by my editor who (like Urquhard, I think) hails from Canada. What a treat I had reading it. There were strong, feminist themes throughout the book that reminded me a little of Urquhard's collegue, Margaret Atwood (argh! I told myself I wasn't going to make this comparison...), but the work in Changing Heaven is much gentler than what I would expect to see from Atwood (whom I also enjoy).

And then there are Urquhard's landscapes. Normally, I'm an inveterate skimmer of descriptive prose, but not here. Her descriptions were just too good to miss.

Last but not least, Emily Bronte shows up toward the end of the book. How massively cool can a book get?

beautifully written.......2000-03-26

Jane Urquhart has created yet another masterpiece. this is the third Urquhart novel i've read, and this brillinat author never ceases to captivate my imagination with her beautiful, poetic prose. this is the story of several seemingly unrelated characters who grow and develop before the reader, and as you get deeper into the story, their lives are inevitably intertwined in peculiar and fascinating ways. the main characters are a turn-of-the-century baloonist; the young Emily Bronte; a woman in the midst of a troubled love-affair; and the man that connects the pieces in this intriguing puzzle. the main themes in this exquisitely written novel are the loves and passions that bring the characters to a common ground. they are all fascinating and eccentric, and reading about their lives and losses has definitely added to my knowledge and perspective of human nature. a must read for those fascinated by human nature and its aftermaths.

sorry it didn't work.......1999-01-22

I know it's a Canadian best seller, and I want to support our writers - there are some of great merit, but this book just didn't do it for me. The style was okay, and the story line imaginative, but it never quite got there. I assume it was headed for a story of romantic characters with depth, but Ms. Urquhart just never got them there. Changing Heaven - I doubt it. But if you have nothing else to read, you could kill an afternoon with it and not feel too bad about wasting the day relaxing with a book.

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Storm Glass
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: M&s/Mcclelland & Stewart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

A Map of Glass

ASIN: 0771086660

Book Description

With stunning virtuosity, the stories in Jane Urquhart’s dazzling first book of fiction unearth universal truths as they reach across countries and eras. A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.

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Away
Urquhart Jane
Manufacturer: Mcclelland & Stewart Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JIZOV8

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Im Strudel.
Jane Urquhart
Manufacturer: Berliner Taschenbuchverlag
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

All German Books | German | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 3442761352

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