The Iambics of Newfoundland is a fabulous read. Think Bruce Chatwin, Adam Gopnik, Rachel Carson, Chekhov's trip to Sakhalin, or even Annie Dillard, who endorses the book herself. Finch has revised, revealed, deepened and broadened what I thought I knew of my own birthplace, and, consequently, the greater picture of the country I live in.
..... a deeply affecting, transformative collection of one man's best attempts to know a place for what it is. The Iambics of Newfoundland should be shelved with the best travel literature available to us; it's an essay on how time alters according to local context; on modernity and what we gamble with to attain it; on curiosity and generosity being any traveller's best map book.
The miracle Robert Finch has performed is to have unmoored Newfoundland from its current Canadian context, lifted it up and listened to it, thereby drawing out its depth and disasters, its quiddity and universality. It stands, in this book, as a place every bit as fascinating and irrepressible as Patagonia, the Gobi Desert, Paris or Nepal. We should thank Robert Finch. Less
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