Tinkers

WINNER OF THE 2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris- newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

About the Author :
Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. He teaches at the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

Review :
Wonderful, lyrical . . . Triumphant . . . A beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition . . . Hypnotic. Brilliantly realised . . . a reminder of how rich the written language can still be Prepare to be seduced... Beguiles from the opening sentence ...This little novel is a wonder An expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering...Life-affirming and visceral in its detail. '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.' '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.' 'Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work.' Landscape is evoked by Harding in fine poetic sentences...Different voices from the past speak to each other and create an intricate patchwork quilt of memories...Through memory, time can become curiously compressed or drawn out, and one of Harding's achievements is to capture this sense of malleable time...The novel moves towards a silent climax, giving us a strong sense of memory as "atmospheres" that touch all of us. 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.