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The Gift of Stones
 
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The Gift of Stones (Paperback)

by Jim Crace (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 169 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (6 Nov 1997)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 074939577X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0749395773
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.7 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 776,034 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #27 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > C > Crace, Jim

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Product Description

Review

A freely written, powerfully told tale from British prize-winning author Crace (Continent, 1987) - at once a meditation on craft and fiction, art and order, the place of storytelling and the shape of society, and an immediate, captivating, resonant piece of storytelling itself. Growing up in a small village of stoneworkers near the sea, a young boy is maimed by passing horsemen, losing an arm and his utility to his community. The village, made up of artisans and merchants, wealthy and protected from the chaos around them, owes all to "the gift of stones." Their flint blades and tools are the finest available, and the status thus conferred makes them safe and fat and self-contented. Now useless, the boy takes to wandering out of the village and down the coast, following the sight of ships at sea, farther than any villager has gone before. Returning from his first foray, he spins a tale of his adventures, fascinating his listeners, and finding his calling. Shaping truth as others shape stone, he travels out again and again, each time bringing back the raw material from which he builds his tales. Then he brings back with him a homeless widow and her daughter, and, hectoring, makes the village take them in - a new element in the closed and orderly society. Soon thereafter, trade falls off, flints go unwanted, and when the widow is found dead, it is with a bronze arrowhead buried in her back. The villagers recognize the end of their world in the coming of bronze, and, led by the storyteller, set out in search of a future. A remarkable novel, timeless and wise. (Kirkus Reviews)


Product Description

Set in the Bronze age, this is the story of the village dreamer, an apparently useless contributor to the tribal tradition of stone-cutting. Jim Grace's "Continent" won the 1986 "Guardian" Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Book-of-the-Year First Novel Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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3 star:
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Change, 23 Nov 2002
By taking a rest - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
"The Gift Of Stones", is the second novel written by Jim Crace. He tells this story through a storyteller he created from the notes of Sir Henry Penn Butler in, "Memoirs of an Excavationist circa 1927". Evidently while pursuing old stone implements they came upon the bones from a lower arm of a child. Mr. Crace has done as they did the evening of their find when they sat around their fire and spun tales of why the bones were there, and where the balance of the bones were to be found. Mr. Crace took the same bit of information and created a remarkable work that is about change. The change is this book is not unlike the changes faced today. A fundamental shift in knowledge can have dramatic and even catastrophic effects on a people. And this is the tale of, The Gift Of Stones".

At some point most have read about the implements of The Stone Age, and also the dramatic changes that were brought about by the advent of bronze. Many have perhaps learned of this change through textbooks and classes in history. Jim Crace has told the same story of change as it might have been seen through the eyes of those who were dependent upon stone for their way of life. From the mention of the bones from a child's lower arm, he recreates history as he creates a wonderful novel.

The community of stoneworkers is recreated with marvelous detail about the methods used in creating stone implements. The descriptions go far beyond the crude instruments hacked from the blows of another stone. The author illustrates the artisans these people were with a stoneworker nicknamed, "the Leaf". Here was an artisan who would keep on his workbench a leaf as produced by nature, and use it both as inspiration and an item of beauty he would seek to emulate in his work. The craftsmen in this book are treated more like skilled sculptors/artists, than the makers of crude tools.

The author creates a circle with the flight of an arrow creating the basis for his story, and yet another arrow that brings everything to an end. The second arrow is of course fashioned from bronze, and it is an arrow that can kill much more than an animal or a man. It brings complete destruction to a way of life, to what is also referred to as an age. As he has done before Jim Crace is able to take a subject that is not unfamiliar, and recast the ideas to create a read that is new and unique.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A distant past anchored in real landscapes, 12 Aug 2001
By A Customer
Perhaps reminiscent of Golding's The Inheritors, this is still an original story of a time of change. Even if that time of change is now in the distant past. I remember this book well, as the author makes you feel that the landscapes are real. The narrator's viewpoint is also clealy imagined.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A very original read, 1 Jan 1999
By A Customer
I am hooked by this authors imagination and am reading my ways through his books after being introduced to his writing via finding Quarantine.

The Gift of Stones was the second book of his that I read - very unusual setting - in the Stone Age at its cusp with the Bronze Age. You've probably seen all those TV documentaries on history - Timewatch etc -- well good as they are they are nothing compared to this novel. It tells the story of life in a Stone Age village with its traders and stone workers. A snug village, smug in its relative prosperity, which only has its isolation from the rest of the world broken by occasional raids and trades. It tells how the narrator's father becomes the village storyteller.

Crace's writing is very perceptive - " Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh - and cough- and roll her eyes? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells".

I would love to know how Jim Crace does his research ( is he listening online?) - do the techniques of today's stone mason give any indication of how the ancients worked in this medium? Do archeological studies prove illuminating? I do not know. What I do know is that his writing is riveting. This, in the unusual settings he chooses to write about, makes his books quite unique. If you are after originality you must read this one. I am reading more.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars He lost an arm to raiders
I am astonished at the range and depth of insight this writer brings to his work. In this book he writes of a stone-age colony on the cusp of the iron-age, whose skills and... Read more
Published 1 month ago by E. Shaw

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
This the story of people of the stone age. They are primitive people who live to find stone and fashion it into tools and weapons. Read more
Published on 15 Feb 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars A marvellous novel by a gifted storyteller
This is a virtuoso performance by a gifted storyteller. Crace tells a moving tale of a deformed stone-age misfit through the eyes of a girl with a neolithic vocabulary. Read more
Published on 12 Oct 1998

4.0 out of 5 stars Early work by a master craftsman
Crace's pedagogic concern with capitalism shows through the surface of his dazzling prose. His exquisite writing cannot hide his all-too-overt interest in illustrating the... Read more
Published on 23 Sep 1998

2.0 out of 5 stars Seinfeld among the flintstones.
Except for some poorly-researched and carelessly strewn late stone age details, this depressing fable could be set in the reconstruction South, the Rust-belt or a coal mining town... Read more
Published on 5 May 1998

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