Word: newfoundland
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Gaff Topsails takes places on a single midsummer's day in 1947, when some fishermen smell a new iceberg, "musty yet at the same time pure, like the air in a vault that has gone undisturbed for centuries." Stranded just offshore an Irish Catholic settlement in Newfoundland, the fishermen imagine the berg as a schooner, a basilica, an image of the Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea. As the rest or the town awakens, the drunken lighthouse keeper believe it to be a ship come to rescue him from his delusional exile. A teenage girl believes it as an omen...
...zone between the land and the sea that is never dry for the lapping waves, what seems neatly defined land and water mixes, leaving enough room for interpretation to fill the novel's 450 pages. An iceberg is both shelter from a storm and a ripping force of destruction, Newfoundland waste and an Eden, the sea a blessing and curse...
...with words of ratherstartling specificity, Gaff Topsails is notalways an easy book to read. Although Kavanagh'sintimate knowledge makes for description asaccurate and illuminating as his vocabulary,imbuing this description with creative imaginationdemands a heavy toll in effort. There is a chapterdevoted exclusively to the geological history ofthe Newfoundland coast, pages replicating thedialectical banter of bored men on the open sea,and every other paragraph brings the unmistakablescent of the sea; electric, heavy, changing withthe hours and the wind...
...between the neighbors collapsed last month, the Canadians say, their Alaskan counterparts have taken far more than their share of the prized fish, threatening to put the Canadian fishermen out of work. That has stirred up some memories. "Canadians have learned bitter lessons from the unemployment that happened in Newfoundland when the cod fisheries disappeared," says TIME's Nicole Nolan in Toronto. Canadian fishermen suffered during a four year ban on all commercial cod fishing in the early nineties brought on by massive over-fishing, much of it done by large refrigerated European ships. "It had devastating consequences regionally," says...
BRATTAHLID, Greenland: Vikings: not just in Minnesota anymore. Travel writer W. Hodding Carter and 11 other hardy souls set off today on a 1,900 mile trip to retrace the voyage of Viking explorer Leif Ericsson from Greenland to present-day Newfoundland. Squeezed into a 54-foot wooden boat (called a "knarr"), expedition members will chart their course by the stars and sun and dine on the succulent Viking staples of freshly caught fish and moss and lichens to be gathered at beaches along the way. In true Viking style, crew members will rely on just six oars...