Tinkers
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Review
`Richly imagined, beautifully phrased, death-bed meditation on a New England life.' --Boyd Tonkin, Independent, Books of the Year
`There is a sense of Beckett's MALONE DIES, yet Harding, who writes with laconic grace and a philosophical serenity, is a gifted original. Poised and formal, yet conversational, TINKERS is about history as well as individual secrets. Most of all, this limpid little novel is a celebration of the singular ease of the finest of US writing.' --Irish Times, Books of the Year
`TINKERS is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.' --Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of GILEAD and HOME
`TINKERS is not just a novel - though it is a brilliant novel. It's an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything ... Read this book and marvel.' --Elizabeth McCracken
`TINKERS is a remarkable piece of work.' --Barry Unsworth
`A wonderful, lyrical evocation of life in the backwoods of New England ... Harding's "little novel", though modest in word count and page numbers, is anything but small ... Harding's genius is his prose, incantatory as poetry, sure in its rhythm and balance, a wonderfully confident, singsong reiteration of the mundane details of three lifetimes of struggle against the poverty and climatic ferocity of the backwoods of New England. Modest in size, TINKERS is a triumphant exercise in American pastoralism, in which no seedhead, blade of grass or pebble is unworthy of notice. Harding's response to the natural world has that sharpness of focus John Ruskin once implored from the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in their paintings. Like the Pre-Raphaelites' vision of nature, it has the same effect of irradiating the commonplace with intimations of greatness and divine grandeur...It is a beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition couched in hypnotic p!
rose.' --The Times
'Its prose is complex...suffused with brilliantly realised imagery and a reminder of how rich the written language can still be ... The book interweaves past and present; indeed it is obsessed with time and memory, and the richness and loss they bring. This is a short book, densely written. It demands concentration and amply rewards the effort.' --Independent
`Paul Harding's startling debut novel is a hypnotic rendering of a dying man's last thoughts ... A novel full of extraordinary things ... Harding's writing ... is a revelation ... Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables the reader to look at the world differently, without the things that normally encumber experience. TINKERS is a considerable achievement.' --Telegraph
By far the most captivating exploration of history, time and consciousness ... It's an expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the (bewitching) intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all: "What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?"' --Observer
`Harding has something in common with Faulkner: a passionate attachment to place - Maine, in this case, rather than Mississippi - and a sense of time folding in upon itself, often with exhilarating effects ... The Faulkneresque manner resonates as Harding slips in and out of dialogue ... Beautiful moments flash and fade ... For all its quasi-modernist pyrotechnics, this is quite a simple story ... A gifted writer ... TINKERS is worth any reader's time. It's an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past.' --Jay Parini, Guardian
`A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering ... Life-affirming and visceral in its detail.' --Daily Mail
`[TINKERS] gains its traction from its form and style, its continually expanding view. Its models are Whitman's rhapsodic long line and Hawthorne's fascination with ancestral guilt and expiation ... The novel has been set free to spiral inwards, untrammelled by chronology ... Harding's real concern is with memory, and the journeys the mind can take even when the body has almost no life left ... The novel's circular time scheme and telescoping reminiscences contain tantalising echoes and patterns ... TINKERS takes an uncompromising look at the complex emotional geometry that exists between parents and children ... As a metaphor for the essential unknowability of parents, spouses, children, the terrible sense of disconnection that can dawn even after years of apparently uneventful family life, this can hardly be bettered.' --London Review of Books
`Prepare to be seduced ... Sometimes a novel beguiles from the opening sentence. Paul Harding's seductive Pulitzer-winning debut does precisely that in a rare narrative of laconic grace and philosophical practicality ... This little novel is a wonder; its tone, poised between the conversational and the formal, is quietly insistent ... Not only has Harding written a life story re-created through a series of dream-like flashbacks; he also demonstrates the exciting possibilities of narrative through his use of time shifts, wordplay, voices and changing viewpoints. His choice of words is emphatic, precise and physical ... The grace of it appears so effortless; it is easy to overlook the technical skill, the shimmering movements and the use of clockwork mechanisms as a device. The story and the stories within it flow like water over stones ... Something sacred and strange and wise beyond belief, beyond mere understanding itself, sustains Harding's tale of one man's death travels deep into the mystery of life and living.' --Irish Times
`The arcane-yet-timeless language he uses is so unique that it defies description ... A remarkable discovery ... TINKERS is so lyrical, so effortlessly, unassumingly musical that it's practically begging to be read out loud. Harding manages to cram more poetry into his most seemingly functional, throwaway sentences than most poets manage in several slim volumes and I, for one, can't wait for the audiobook version of TINKERS to hit the shops ... TINKERS consists of key moments in the lives of its protagonists rendered with searing intensity, interspersed with snatches of poetry and extracts from a (fictitious) clockmaker's manual ... The resulting heap of broken images is one that TS Elliot would have recognised ... A slippery, pleasingly oblique book.' --The Scotsman
`Immaculate, clever, clinical and alarmingly precise ... The book is packed with the kind of imagery that fuels serious American fiction.' --Time Out
`There is a sense of Beckett's MALONE DIES, yet Harding, who writes with laconic grace and a philosophical serenity, is a gifted original. Poised and formal, yet conversational, TINKERS is about history as well as individual secrets. Most of all, this limpid little novel is a celebration of the singular ease of the finest of US writing.' --Irish Times, Books of the Year
`TINKERS is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.' --Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of GILEAD and HOME
`TINKERS is not just a novel - though it is a brilliant novel. It's an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything ... Read this book and marvel.' --Elizabeth McCracken
`TINKERS is a remarkable piece of work.' --Barry Unsworth
`A wonderful, lyrical evocation of life in the backwoods of New England ... Harding's "little novel", though modest in word count and page numbers, is anything but small ... Harding's genius is his prose, incantatory as poetry, sure in its rhythm and balance, a wonderfully confident, singsong reiteration of the mundane details of three lifetimes of struggle against the poverty and climatic ferocity of the backwoods of New England. Modest in size, TINKERS is a triumphant exercise in American pastoralism, in which no seedhead, blade of grass or pebble is unworthy of notice. Harding's response to the natural world has that sharpness of focus John Ruskin once implored from the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in their paintings. Like the Pre-Raphaelites' vision of nature, it has the same effect of irradiating the commonplace with intimations of greatness and divine grandeur...It is a beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition couched in hypnotic p!
rose.' --The Times
'Its prose is complex...suffused with brilliantly realised imagery and a reminder of how rich the written language can still be ... The book interweaves past and present; indeed it is obsessed with time and memory, and the richness and loss they bring. This is a short book, densely written. It demands concentration and amply rewards the effort.' --Independent
`Paul Harding's startling debut novel is a hypnotic rendering of a dying man's last thoughts ... A novel full of extraordinary things ... Harding's writing ... is a revelation ... Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables the reader to look at the world differently, without the things that normally encumber experience. TINKERS is a considerable achievement.' --Telegraph
By far the most captivating exploration of history, time and consciousness ... It's an expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the (bewitching) intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all: "What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?"' --Observer
`Harding has something in common with Faulkner: a passionate attachment to place - Maine, in this case, rather than Mississippi - and a sense of time folding in upon itself, often with exhilarating effects ... The Faulkneresque manner resonates as Harding slips in and out of dialogue ... Beautiful moments flash and fade ... For all its quasi-modernist pyrotechnics, this is quite a simple story ... A gifted writer ... TINKERS is worth any reader's time. It's an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past.' --Jay Parini, Guardian
`A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering ... Life-affirming and visceral in its detail.' --Daily Mail
`[TINKERS] gains its traction from its form and style, its continually expanding view. Its models are Whitman's rhapsodic long line and Hawthorne's fascination with ancestral guilt and expiation ... The novel has been set free to spiral inwards, untrammelled by chronology ... Harding's real concern is with memory, and the journeys the mind can take even when the body has almost no life left ... The novel's circular time scheme and telescoping reminiscences contain tantalising echoes and patterns ... TINKERS takes an uncompromising look at the complex emotional geometry that exists between parents and children ... As a metaphor for the essential unknowability of parents, spouses, children, the terrible sense of disconnection that can dawn even after years of apparently uneventful family life, this can hardly be bettered.' --London Review of Books
`Prepare to be seduced ... Sometimes a novel beguiles from the opening sentence. Paul Harding's seductive Pulitzer-winning debut does precisely that in a rare narrative of laconic grace and philosophical practicality ... This little novel is a wonder; its tone, poised between the conversational and the formal, is quietly insistent ... Not only has Harding written a life story re-created through a series of dream-like flashbacks; he also demonstrates the exciting possibilities of narrative through his use of time shifts, wordplay, voices and changing viewpoints. His choice of words is emphatic, precise and physical ... The grace of it appears so effortless; it is easy to overlook the technical skill, the shimmering movements and the use of clockwork mechanisms as a device. The story and the stories within it flow like water over stones ... Something sacred and strange and wise beyond belief, beyond mere understanding itself, sustains Harding's tale of one man's death travels deep into the mystery of life and living.' --Irish Times
`The arcane-yet-timeless language he uses is so unique that it defies description ... A remarkable discovery ... TINKERS is so lyrical, so effortlessly, unassumingly musical that it's practically begging to be read out loud. Harding manages to cram more poetry into his most seemingly functional, throwaway sentences than most poets manage in several slim volumes and I, for one, can't wait for the audiobook version of TINKERS to hit the shops ... TINKERS consists of key moments in the lives of its protagonists rendered with searing intensity, interspersed with snatches of poetry and extracts from a (fictitious) clockmaker's manual ... The resulting heap of broken images is one that TS Elliot would have recognised ... A slippery, pleasingly oblique book.' --The Scotsman
`Immaculate, clever, clinical and alarmingly precise ... The book is packed with the kind of imagery that fuels serious American fiction.' --Time Out
Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Before I begin this review, I'd like to acknowledge that I am almost certainly wrong. A book that has won so many plaudits, including the Pulitzer Prize, must be a great book. Readers more intelligent than me will probably consider me a philistine or a fool, most likely both. However, my mixed reaction to reading Tinkers is at odds with the universal praise that has been heaped on this short novel.
Let's start with the overwhelming positive - there are many parts of the book for which the prose is beautiful, really beautiful, with a texture that few writers can match. From the lightness of touch in Howard's daily appreciation of nature to the visceral description of the epileptic fit on Christmas day; for these passages alone it is worth reading the book.
My main gripe with this book is that, in places, it feels incredibly `loose'. For every beautiful passage there is another which only confuses. In these it feels as if the book has been written with the primary aim of being poetic, rather than communicating a message to the reader. Whilst not in itself the worst of literary crimes, for a book to be truly great it should do both, preferably achieving the latter with skilful use of the former. Too often it feels like a collection of well written exercises, without sufficient glue to hold them together as a single novel. At its worst it felt unstructured and, well, a bit messy. Perhaps I'm a bit dim, but most of the themes didn't work for me, and I can't help feel that a couple of steps away from poetry and towards fiction would make the book more complete without diminishing any of the beauty.
The book's eulogisers have a number of defences from which they can counter my concerns; it is a book about a hallucinating dying man; poetic licence; that the lack of exactitude is a metaphor for death itself; etc etc. However, all of these fail to pass muster. Similarly poetic books manage to feel tighter, with more direct themes, more meaning and a more complete finished article than this (`The Quickening Maze' by Adam Foulds and `The Sea' by John Banville are two that come to mind).
In conclusion, the line between genius and the emperor's new clothes is a fine one, but the ability to only write beautiful prose does not necessarily mean the book is a masterpiece.
Let's start with the overwhelming positive - there are many parts of the book for which the prose is beautiful, really beautiful, with a texture that few writers can match. From the lightness of touch in Howard's daily appreciation of nature to the visceral description of the epileptic fit on Christmas day; for these passages alone it is worth reading the book.
My main gripe with this book is that, in places, it feels incredibly `loose'. For every beautiful passage there is another which only confuses. In these it feels as if the book has been written with the primary aim of being poetic, rather than communicating a message to the reader. Whilst not in itself the worst of literary crimes, for a book to be truly great it should do both, preferably achieving the latter with skilful use of the former. Too often it feels like a collection of well written exercises, without sufficient glue to hold them together as a single novel. At its worst it felt unstructured and, well, a bit messy. Perhaps I'm a bit dim, but most of the themes didn't work for me, and I can't help feel that a couple of steps away from poetry and towards fiction would make the book more complete without diminishing any of the beauty.
The book's eulogisers have a number of defences from which they can counter my concerns; it is a book about a hallucinating dying man; poetic licence; that the lack of exactitude is a metaphor for death itself; etc etc. However, all of these fail to pass muster. Similarly poetic books manage to feel tighter, with more direct themes, more meaning and a more complete finished article than this (`The Quickening Maze' by Adam Foulds and `The Sea' by John Banville are two that come to mind).
In conclusion, the line between genius and the emperor's new clothes is a fine one, but the ability to only write beautiful prose does not necessarily mean the book is a masterpiece.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
To pass the time waiting at yet another airport gate, I took the book TINKERS by Paul Harding with me. His debut novel, it was published in January 2009 and has 192 pages, a small book indeed, but a forceful, spellbinding and impressive one, a book leading to contemplation and soul-searching. The story tells about a tinker, Howard, a man mending broken pots and pans, a man standing for a vanished lifestyle, when time appeared to run at a slower pace and yet the days were full.
Weaving back and forth from the past to the present, it is also the story about another man, the late tinker's son George, who is slowly dying, in the house he built and amidst his family and all his lovingly repaired antique clocks, his entire life achievements if you will. The book deals with the relationship between a father and a son, and although Harding writes in great prose about the subject of the last days of life and impending death, it is truly a comforting book, somehow giving the reader solace by knowing what a rich and fulfilled life the main characters enjoyed. A moving and spiritual story.
13 April 2010. With his book TINKERS Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction today.
Weaving back and forth from the past to the present, it is also the story about another man, the late tinker's son George, who is slowly dying, in the house he built and amidst his family and all his lovingly repaired antique clocks, his entire life achievements if you will. The book deals with the relationship between a father and a son, and although Harding writes in great prose about the subject of the last days of life and impending death, it is truly a comforting book, somehow giving the reader solace by knowing what a rich and fulfilled life the main characters enjoyed. A moving and spiritual story.
13 April 2010. With his book TINKERS Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction today.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A first novel published without fanfare that wins the Pulitzer Prize - can it really be that good?
The answer is a resounding Yes.
George Crosby is coming to the end of his long life. As he lays dying the essence of that life is revealed to us, in particular his relationship with his father Howard, a tinker in rural new England in the 1920s. The scene is set for an exploration of family relationships, personal growth and social change.
This is a moving book of many moods and styles. There are sections of great old-fashioned plot-driven story telling and subtle explorations of character. There are also some demanding passages of philosophical thinking and beautifully poetic descriptions of the natural world. Such is the power and precision of Harding's prose that he manages to reveal in short novel what it might take a lesser writer hundreds of pages to reveal. Recommended.
The answer is a resounding Yes.
George Crosby is coming to the end of his long life. As he lays dying the essence of that life is revealed to us, in particular his relationship with his father Howard, a tinker in rural new England in the 1920s. The scene is set for an exploration of family relationships, personal growth and social change.
This is a moving book of many moods and styles. There are sections of great old-fashioned plot-driven story telling and subtle explorations of character. There are also some demanding passages of philosophical thinking and beautifully poetic descriptions of the natural world. Such is the power and precision of Harding's prose that he manages to reveal in short novel what it might take a lesser writer hundreds of pages to reveal. Recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
My favourite book of recent years
For me, the way a story is written is more important than the main storyline - in much the same way as Van Gogh's paintings of (just) sunflowers can hold the attention. Read more
Published 2 months ago by BrynG
Oh dear, another lemon
Tinkers is at once a promising first novel and simultaneously a disjointed and unfulfilling read.
Old man dying in bed, very little humour, I feel it's all been done... Read more
Old man dying in bed, very little humour, I feel it's all been done... Read more
Published 4 months ago by a nice guy who likes reading
Another Prize-Winner Than Did Nothng For Me
Ranganathan's third law of librarianship coined the phrase "every book its reader," which is something I had to keep reminding myself as I read this slender Pulitzer-winning novel. Read more
Published 9 months ago by A. Ross
Rythmic style
The lyrical style of this book is excellent and as an experiment in the beauty and power of words it works. Read more
Published 10 months ago by D. J. Andrews
When style gets in the way of substance
Telling the story of an old man's dying memories including the hard life of his own father, a tinker in New England, "Tinkers" is never going to be a barrel of laughs. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Ripple
tinkers
I enjoyed this book but it is definately not a laugh a minute. The plot is a little confusing in places so choose a time when you can concentrate. Read more
Published 12 months ago by sarah adams
A Wonderful Debut
Given that Tinkers by Paul Harding runs only for 191 pages, it is a hugely ambitious novel and a tour de force that Harding broadly succeeds in what appears to be his aim. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Herman Norford
Complex and Literary
"Tinkers" is a short novel that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the first debut novel coming from a small publishing company to do so in over a quarter of a century. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Dr. Bojan Tunguz
Don't judge a book by a Booker prize.
Sometimes I find that a book which is a winner of a few serious awards disappoints me as a reader. "Tinkers" is a prime example of this. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Lola
Vaguely unsatisfying
READ SOME INTERESTING BLURB ON THIS NOVEL AND THOUGHT THE BASIC PREMISE WAS AN INTERESTING ONE. DIDN'T LIVE UP TO MY EXPECTATIONS DESPITE THE UNDENIABLE POWER AND QUALITY OF... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Mrs. Catherine Mcginn
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