JUNE 2016 - AudioFile
So often novels affixed with labels like "saga" and "sweeping" and "vast in scope" can be difficult to break into—their opening chapters slow and setting-laden. Not so with Robert Petkoff's outstanding performance of Proulx's gorgeous BARKSKINS. Petkoff's delivery is mesmerizing, with distinctive voices for generations of well-developed characters, and perfect pacing and incredible accents that give an air of authenticity. Immediately the listener is immersed in a place so colorfully depicted through both the written and spoken word that the time slips past and Proulx's wild forests settle in all around. The novel is indeed a sweeping saga, but Proulx and Petkoff are the duo to make the time seem too short. A transporting listen. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Ms. Magazine
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News delivers an epic novel that begins with two impoverished Frenchmen, full of hope, who migrate to Canada in the 18th century and become indentured woodcutters, or 'barkskins.' The following 300-year history of two families spans cultures and continents, and probes North Americans’ predatory history with our now-vanishing natural world.
O The Oprah Magazine Hamilton Cain
"A masterpiece, Barkskins encompasses a breadth of themes and history rarely approached by any writer, girded by peerless research and Proulx's X-ray vision into the human heart. But the triumph of the novel lies in sentences that burst from the page, ideas that move and breathe with mission.
Columbus Dispatch
Epic . . . Violent, monumental and often breathtaking, Barkskins is a colossal achievement.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Cliff Froehlich
An epic capstone to 80-year-old Proulx’s impressive career, Barkskins surpasses even the extraordinary The Shipping News as her finest novel."
NPR Annalisa Quinn
Proulx sketches each person with vigorous, unforgettable strokes . . . read it, absorb its urgent message.
Seattle Times Helen Embry Heltzel
"Barkskins leaves no board unturned as it covers the industry that brought us plywood, cheap paper and prefab housing. [With] Proulx’s stunning stylistic gifts . . . She is a writer’s writer, and one whose deep interest in history provides the long view of how our environmental recklessness has brought us to a point of reckoning."
San Francisco Chronicle Peter Geye
Annie Proulx’s 10th book is ambitious and essential. Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy. Barkskins is awesome and urgent. And if we’re lucky enough to survive the Anthropocene we’ve seemingly wrought, then Barkskins will surely survive as the crowning achievement of Proulx’s distinguished career, but also as perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written.
Tampa Bay Times
Annie Proulx weaves [a] wealth of research, [and] brilliant imagination in [her] new novel Barkskins. Annie Proulx is a fearless writer. Like Melville's whaling and McMurtry's ranching, [Barkskins] provides a cast of colorful characters — and a means of examining their relationships to the natural world and the continent's indigenous people. [With] delicious prose . . . Barkskins has a large cast, but that's a showcase for Proulx's gift for creating lively, complex characters. Proulx's style is inimitably her own, but it echoes here with those of great influences: Dickens, Melville, Twain, Faulkner and more.
Entertainment Weekly (Grade A)
Few authors are as uniquely qualified as Annie Proulx (The Shipping News) to sustain a novel as long as Barkskins. Pages melt away as readers zoom through the decades. Proulx’s story is bigger than any one man, one death, or even one culture: It’s about the effect civilization and society have had on the land. In her magical way, Proulx leaves the reader with an impression of not only a collection of people, but our people and the country that shaped us as we shaped it. This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice.
Buffalo News Karen Brady
Annie Proulx – the magnificent American writer who brought us ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘The Shipping News’ – scores once again with the captivating ‘Barkskins.’ . . . Her prose is often glorious, her several protagonists unforgettable. Proulx taps a vein here, helping to make ‘Barkskins” one of the most exciting books I have read in years. Proulx has pulled out all the stops."
The Economist
Annie Proulx’s new work is a tribute to the world’s boreal forests, an intricately detailed narrative of geography, history and humanity that is both exhilarating and mesmerizing... [T]his is not a novel to peck at or flick through, but one to read slowly and to savour as a long and fulfilling feast.
Christian Science Monitor
‘Barkskins’ is Annie Proulx’s greatest novel yet. [Her] talent for bringing individuals alive with a single perfectly-turned line has never been sharper than in these pages. … It's a completely masterful performance, the greatest thing this great novelist has ever written.
Boston Globe Anthony Domestico
Like the best realists, Proulx can make us see the world and its inhabitants with greater clarity. Juggling so many different plotlines and characters becomes easier when you have, as Proulx does, a Dickensian gift for quick portraiture... Proulx reminds us that the world we live in was made possible by the destruction of the world that preceded it. The novel concludes with Saptisia Sel, the head of the Breitsprecher Tree Project, asking, ‘Can’t we try again? Can’t we fix what we broke?’ It’s an urgent question, perhaps the urgent question, one that we should all be asking ourselves now.
Bookpage
Enthralling. . . Proulx’s human characters are vividly conceived. Barkskins brims with a granular sense of human experience over a period of 300 years. And like many novels by excellent writers, Barkskins encourages understanding, if not empathy, for characters whose outlooks we might usually dismiss. One of the great achievements of this novel is to create a tragic personality for the environment. Proulx’s beautiful prose renders and exultant view of the life of forest worlds lost to us.
Boston Globe John Freeman
Extraordinary. . . Barkskins is the masterpiece Proulx was meant to write.
The New Republic Jeffrey Zuckerman
Dazzling. . . Proulx’s characters are vivid, insistent, captivating. . . nary a page goes by without a few exquisitely observed historical details. The temptation to consider Barkskins under the rubric of a Great American Novel is difficult to resist, given its scope. But Proulx’s ambitions seem to be keyed differently. Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Morrison’s Beloved—all of these books might be doomed in their respective attempts to somehow encompass the United States in its full complexity, but they at least focus on that burgeoning and manifold nation. Proulx, in contrast, establishes in Barkskins a narrative so grand in spatial and temporal scope, so broad in theme, that it cannot conceivably be strictly American. Her pitch-perfect sentences, instead, encompass the entire Western world, and its ever-growing concern with ecological and environmental change.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sandra Levis
Towering. . . With gorgeous imagery, clean prose and remarkable sensitivity, [Barkskins is] as powerful and important as any literary work produced on this continent in the three centuries spanned by the story. “Barkskins” is “The Giving Tree” for grown-ups.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Jim Carmin
Stunning, monumental... a moving opus of evolving Western environmental values in novel form.
Chicago Tribune
Fans of Annie Proulx have waited 14 years for a new novel from her. This summer, she has rewarded them. Her eye for detail offers readers glimpses into a world that is almost unimaginable. Proulx's novel will leave readers with new perspectives on a familiar history. It will also, perhaps, make some readers pause, this summer, during a summer stroll perhaps, and consider the manmade environment — the roads, the sidewalks, the homes, the cellphone towers, the flowerbeds — amid the tall, long-lived trees.
Elle
Annie Proulx’s stunning new Barkskins is a bracing, full-tilt ride through 300 years of U.S. and Canadian history. With Barkskins, she blows out the horizons. The novel has a satisfying global sweep, with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading. Barkskins is a tour de force [and] was worth the wait.
The Washington Post Ron Charles
Barkskins is an awesome monument of a book, a spectacular survey of America’s forests dramatized by a cast of well-hewn characters.Such is the magnetism of Proulx’s narrative that there’s no resisting her thundering cascade of stories. A vast woods you’ll want to get lost in. . . Barkskins is a towering new work of environmental fiction.
Starred Review Booklist
Proulx’s signature passion and concern for nature as well as her unnerving forensic fascination with all the harm that can befall the human body charge this rigorously researched, intrepidly imagined, complexly plotted, and vigorously written multigenerational epic. [With an] extensive and compelling cast, Proulx’s commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick replete with ardently exacting details about tree cutting from Canada and Maine to Michigan, California, and New Zealand, with dramatic cross-cultural relationships and with the peculiar madness catalyzed by nature’s glory. Here, too, are episodes of profound suffering and loss, ambition and conviction, courage and love. With a forthcoming National Geographic Channel series expanding its reach, Proulx’s commanding, perspective-altering epic will be momentous.
Buzzfeed
"A masterpiece."
Outside Magazine Anthony Doerr
Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of Proulx’s prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished wildwoods, where you get to stand ‘tiny and amazed in the kingdom of pines.’ This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn’t bear exquisite witness to our species’s insatiable appetite for consumption, nothing can.
Good Housekeeping
[It’s] a tale too beautiful to miss, excellent for long afternoons spent swaying in a hammock.
USA Today Charles Finch
“Barkskins is masterful, full of an urgent, tense lyricism, its plotting beautifully unexpected, its biographical narratives flowing into one another like the seasons. Ambitious. . . A marvel. . .[Barkskins] is a long novel worth your time.
Wall Street Journal Sam Sacks
Monumental. [With] prose of directness, clarity, rhythmic power and oaken solidity. . . Barkskins is a potently imagined chronicle of mankind’s dealings with the North American forests."
Library Journal
01/01/2016
CD: S. & S. Audio. LITERARYIt's hardly surprising to see the author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning The Shipping News turn out something so grand. Proulx starts off in the late 1600s with illiterate woodsmen Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, who abandon northern France for New France. Rene marries a Native healer, Duquet eventually travels worldwide as he launches a prosperous logging company, and the narrative weaves together the descendants of both men, plus those of their friends and enemies, as it shows how immeasurably hard life was at the time.
JUNE 2016 - AudioFile
So often novels affixed with labels like "saga" and "sweeping" and "vast in scope" can be difficult to break into—their opening chapters slow and setting-laden. Not so with Robert Petkoff's outstanding performance of Proulx's gorgeous BARKSKINS. Petkoff's delivery is mesmerizing, with distinctive voices for generations of well-developed characters, and perfect pacing and incredible accents that give an air of authenticity. Immediately the listener is immersed in a place so colorfully depicted through both the written and spoken word that the time slips past and Proulx's wild forests settle in all around. The novel is indeed a sweeping saga, but Proulx and Petkoff are the duo to make the time seem too short. A transporting listen. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
