“The Stone Carvers”
by Jane Urquhart
Published: March 2002
ISBN: 0771086857

(Updated: March 05, 2007.)

From the Publisher…

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

It is rare that a book does what this one did. It trickled in like a slow stream and ended up circulating through all of me.

At the beginning of the book, whenever I returned to my reading, I would have to think about which book it was that I was currently reading. I would remember the name of it. Then I would have to think about the “what” of it. As the pages went by, as the story grew, the experience of it deepened. By the end I wasn’t returning to my reading, I was searching out “la suite”, the next of it. Really… it was like a trickling stream that ended up circulating through all of me. Lovely, the experience of that.

And lovely the experience of early Canadian re/settlement, the promise of the new world, the time of honouring past, either recent or longer ago. And, ultimately, lovely the honouring of the “present” through these considerations.

I will certainly never look at a commemorative sculpture in quite the same. I will actually never look at a sculpture and not wonder what it is that it is commemorating even if not “officially”. And I will continue to wonder where and when we lost the idea of spinsterhood. And I will recommend this book with a four out of five hearts on my scale.