The Gift of Stories – Imagination and Landscape in Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones
Keywords:
Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones, storytelling, landscape, geocriticismAbstract
Jim Crace is known for his compelling, parable-like stories written in rhythmic prose and for his distinctive diction, which combines poetic figurativeness with the precision of exact description. As a writer with an exceptional sense of observed detail, Crace’s narrative power lies in his ability to render places, especially various kinds of landscapes, which, in spite of their wholly fictitious character, evoke a strong feeling of plausibility and familiarity. Nevertheless, his imaginary milieux are never devoid of human experience and his stories examine the close interconnectedness between his protagonists and the places they occupy or move through. Crace likes to depict what the critics have termed “communities in transition”, i.e. groups of people who need to face up to an imminent socio-economic change and adapt to the newly emerging circumstances, which is why his fictional landscapes always reflect the protagonists’ disturbed psyches as they project into them the anxieties and frustrations that result from the process of revising and restoring the essentials of their shattered identities. The Gift of Stones (1988) not only explores such a transition, but also elaborates on the significance of making up stories in human life. This paper demonstrates how the novel’s physical environments intertwine not only with the main protagonist’s mental world but, above all, with his talent for imaginative storytelling.
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