Call number
FIC DOE
Collection
Genres
Publication
viking (1984), Edition: 6th
Description
This is the story of Sara and Richard Everton, a couple embarked on a journey of renewal. They leave a house and job in San Francisco and travel to the small Mexican village of Ibarra to reopen a copper mine, abandoned in 1910 by Richard's grandfather. They also plan to restore the family home, a crumbling reminder of the past. However, they learn that Richard is dying of leukemia.
Subjects
Media reviews
Being in Mexico and recognizing in Ms. Doerr’s stories the same fantastical combination of brightest sunlight, mangy village dogs, blazing bougainvillea, and sugar skulls atop frosted cakes made reading a kind of real-time experience. However, the book would have been equally enjoyable had I read
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it in back Rhode Island, perhaps on the cooling seashore, so captivated was I with this author who could write such spare, evocative prose and add a twist, as if to keep things from becoming too writerly. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member brenzi
Harriet Doerr finished her degree from Stanford at the age of 67 and received The National Book Award for her novel “Stones for Ibarra” in 1984 at the age of 73; talk about your late bloomer. From what I can gather, she did everything very deliberately and with painstaking effort. It’s said
The book consists of several interconnected stories revolving around the lives of Sara and Richard Everton who have returned to Mexico in 1960 to restore his grandfather’s copper mine, abandoned since the 1910 revolution. They plan to finish out their lives in the small Mexican village of Ibarra. Both are around forty but the author makes it clear that Richard has only a few more years to live as he is suffering from leukemia.
“The Everton’s left San Francisco and their house with a narrow view of the bay in order to extend the family’s Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of the sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived.” (Page 3)
The charm of this book is the interaction with the simple, both profoundly poor and yet prescient Mexican people, as they go about their daily lives. They are fatalists, for the most part and bravely accept the cards they’ve been dealt while expressing deep faith in God and the belief in magic and the spiritual world. Their stories made me ache for them, so lacking were their lives. But they all maintained a fatalistic attitude that allowed them to quietly, bravely endure.
“The Everton’s, as they walked past the church, saw the three beggars on the steps. They were counting their money and appeared content. They had not been so rich since this time last year. The coins that made their pockets sag would satisfy every requirement of the foreseeable future, if the cold let up, if they could patch their roof and their shoes. If the laurel leaf on the brow cured the headache and the string around the throat cured the cough. If they survived the night.” (Page 144)
Front and center over all the stories is the indication that Richard will not live for much longer and the overwhelming sadness when he finally succumbs. The housekeeper, Lourdes, was in the habit of leaving things in hidden locations throughout the house; things that might bring on good luck in one way or another and in going through some boxes in preparation for leaving Ibarra, Sara finds the remnants of these good luck charms:
“Behind a recipe for oyster stew she found a twice-doubled piece of pink paper. ‘What is this?’ she said aloud. The residual dust of dry leaves lay in its folds. Sara lifted one of the veined, scented skeletons. ‘Chamomile,’ she said, and knew it was from Lourdes, knew it was meant to ensure impossible things, long life, a forgiving nature, faith.” (Page 205)
In her short writing career, Doerr only produced two other books. I have read one of them “Consider This, Senora,” and found the writing to be just as spare and evocative as in her first book. How unfortunate for we readers that her talent wasn’t unearthed earlier in her life, allowing her to become a prolific writer. As for me, I will continue rereading what she did produce since it is simply sublime.
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that when writing, she wrote little more than a sentence a day, meticulously crafting each sentence with the utmost care. And when reading her novel one can’t help seeing the result of her precision. If you enjoy wallowing in the trough of graceful, poetic prose, have I got a book for you. Listed among other worthy novels on the “100 Great American Novels You’ve (Probably) Never Read,” I first read and fell in love with this book twenty years ago and wanted to see how it held up. Not to worry; still spectacular.The book consists of several interconnected stories revolving around the lives of Sara and Richard Everton who have returned to Mexico in 1960 to restore his grandfather’s copper mine, abandoned since the 1910 revolution. They plan to finish out their lives in the small Mexican village of Ibarra. Both are around forty but the author makes it clear that Richard has only a few more years to live as he is suffering from leukemia.
“The Everton’s left San Francisco and their house with a narrow view of the bay in order to extend the family’s Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of the sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived.” (Page 3)
The charm of this book is the interaction with the simple, both profoundly poor and yet prescient Mexican people, as they go about their daily lives. They are fatalists, for the most part and bravely accept the cards they’ve been dealt while expressing deep faith in God and the belief in magic and the spiritual world. Their stories made me ache for them, so lacking were their lives. But they all maintained a fatalistic attitude that allowed them to quietly, bravely endure.
“The Everton’s, as they walked past the church, saw the three beggars on the steps. They were counting their money and appeared content. They had not been so rich since this time last year. The coins that made their pockets sag would satisfy every requirement of the foreseeable future, if the cold let up, if they could patch their roof and their shoes. If the laurel leaf on the brow cured the headache and the string around the throat cured the cough. If they survived the night.” (Page 144)
Front and center over all the stories is the indication that Richard will not live for much longer and the overwhelming sadness when he finally succumbs. The housekeeper, Lourdes, was in the habit of leaving things in hidden locations throughout the house; things that might bring on good luck in one way or another and in going through some boxes in preparation for leaving Ibarra, Sara finds the remnants of these good luck charms:
“Behind a recipe for oyster stew she found a twice-doubled piece of pink paper. ‘What is this?’ she said aloud. The residual dust of dry leaves lay in its folds. Sara lifted one of the veined, scented skeletons. ‘Chamomile,’ she said, and knew it was from Lourdes, knew it was meant to ensure impossible things, long life, a forgiving nature, faith.” (Page 205)
In her short writing career, Doerr only produced two other books. I have read one of them “Consider This, Senora,” and found the writing to be just as spare and evocative as in her first book. How unfortunate for we readers that her talent wasn’t unearthed earlier in her life, allowing her to become a prolific writer. As for me, I will continue rereading what she did produce since it is simply sublime.
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LibraryThing member jnwelch
Harriet Doerr published her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, at the age of 73. An inspiring accomplishment. It also may help explain the charming, quiet quality of her storytelling. A young American couple, Richard and Sara Everton, decides in 1960 or so to move from California to a Mexican village
"Every day for a month Richard has reminded Sara, 'We mustn't expect too much.' And each time his wife has answered, 'No'. But the Evertons expect too much. They have experienced the terrible persuasion of a great-aunt's recollections and adopted them as their own. They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit." The grandfather's house is more rundown than they expect, the journey to find it tougher than anticipated. But they settle in quickly, and the villagers take to them. The Evertons bring jobs and respect, along with their peculiar American ways.
There's a beautiful passage in which the villagers finally find the word to describe the couple, mediodesorientado, or half-disoriented, like the joyful child who has been spun around many times and blindly strikes at the pinata, making everyone laugh.
As we learn early on, Richard has been diagnosed with a seemingly incurable disease, and may only have six years to live. The book affectionately describes their time together in Ibarra, much of it through the eyes of Sara, as she learns Spanish, becomes enmeshed in the community, and deals with her husband's condition. At the same time, he and the locals work to make the mine prosper and the community thrive. The villagers' stories supply many of the book's attractions: the priest who keeps being sent comically ill-suited assistants, the entrepreneur dedicated to setting up a taxi service between villages, the woman who helps at the house who is determined to repel sickness and bad luck through her folk knowledge, and many others.
The villagers try to help the Evertons with witchcraft and herbs, and stoically resist concepts of modern medicine. Staunchly Catholic, they, including the local priest, nonetheless accept the Evertons' agnosticism. The couple's kindness and friendliness, and positive effect on the community, outweigh their shortcomings. Sara learns lovely and increasingly creative stories from the nun teaching her Spanish, which she brings home to a disbelieving Richard. They light candles, sit by the fire, and share their day together. This is a graceful, charming book, about transplanted Americans and their effect on closely observed lives in a small Mexican village.
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and re-open the mining operation abandoned by the husband's family during the 1910 revolution. They mortgage their house, and cash in, leverage and borrow to the fullest extent, despite the fears of family and friends."Every day for a month Richard has reminded Sara, 'We mustn't expect too much.' And each time his wife has answered, 'No'. But the Evertons expect too much. They have experienced the terrible persuasion of a great-aunt's recollections and adopted them as their own. They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit." The grandfather's house is more rundown than they expect, the journey to find it tougher than anticipated. But they settle in quickly, and the villagers take to them. The Evertons bring jobs and respect, along with their peculiar American ways.
There's a beautiful passage in which the villagers finally find the word to describe the couple, mediodesorientado, or half-disoriented, like the joyful child who has been spun around many times and blindly strikes at the pinata, making everyone laugh.
As we learn early on, Richard has been diagnosed with a seemingly incurable disease, and may only have six years to live. The book affectionately describes their time together in Ibarra, much of it through the eyes of Sara, as she learns Spanish, becomes enmeshed in the community, and deals with her husband's condition. At the same time, he and the locals work to make the mine prosper and the community thrive. The villagers' stories supply many of the book's attractions: the priest who keeps being sent comically ill-suited assistants, the entrepreneur dedicated to setting up a taxi service between villages, the woman who helps at the house who is determined to repel sickness and bad luck through her folk knowledge, and many others.
The villagers try to help the Evertons with witchcraft and herbs, and stoically resist concepts of modern medicine. Staunchly Catholic, they, including the local priest, nonetheless accept the Evertons' agnosticism. The couple's kindness and friendliness, and positive effect on the community, outweigh their shortcomings. Sara learns lovely and increasingly creative stories from the nun teaching her Spanish, which she brings home to a disbelieving Richard. They light candles, sit by the fire, and share their day together. This is a graceful, charming book, about transplanted Americans and their effect on closely observed lives in a small Mexican village.
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LibraryThing member Periodista
Beautiful. The linked stories accumulate--that is, they gather force. There are these finely wrought individual stories of village Mexicans--usually stories of death, loss, early death, unnecessary death, striving, hope, grinding poverty. But the undercurrent is the narrator's husband's death
I don't find it so startling that a 70-something woman wrote these as her first book. Or that she was coaxed into it while completing a long-delayed B.A. What amazes me is that she didn't even keep diaries during her years in Mexico. Maybe she was writing letters?
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sentence due to leukemia. She never wants to discuss it with him, as if that will stave it off. Her husband's attitude is closer to that of the villagers: death is right around the corner.I don't find it so startling that a 70-something woman wrote these as her first book. Or that she was coaxed into it while completing a long-delayed B.A. What amazes me is that she didn't even keep diaries during her years in Mexico. Maybe she was writing letters?
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LibraryThing member bordercollie
A marvelously-constructed novel in which individual unrelated stories of Mexican villagers delicately carry the over-arching story of the life and death of the American mine-owners; sparingly and beautifully written. American Book Award winner.
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
This is on the list by Karl Bridges called "100 Great American Novels You've (Porbably) Never Read" and is the 11th novel on that list I've read I am very glad I found the list else I never would have known of the book. It is astoundingly well-written in luminous prose, as it tells of Richard and
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Sara Everton moving to Mexico to operate Richard's grandfather's abandoned mine. While it is sad I found myself tremendously moved by the climactic ending, wrenchingly portraying Sara's return to the house in Ibarra. Show Less
LibraryThing member katherinebarrus
A dear friend gave me this book for Christmas and I am so glad. It is wonderfully told. Doerr evokes Mexico and its people in such a warm and touching way. Several ideas struck me as I read. First, that memories are like corks left out of bottles; they expand and no longer fit. Stones as a way to
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remember a person is a wonderful image. And the stories in each chapter are evocative and bittersweet and although each can be read as an isolated incident, Doerr weaves them together seamlessly. A great read! Show Less
LibraryThing member RobinDawson
Just a beautiful little gem of a book. Unique. Each chapter is like a little novella, each with a different set of characters, different scenes, events in Ibarra. Doerr weaves these pieces together to create a picture of this isolated, struggling Mexican village and to tell the story of the
The prose is spare, the mood is both tender and melancholy. Intimations of mortality flash throughout. I found the opening paragraph of each chapter was often striking, as Doerr introduced a new scene, setting or characters. For example:
In Ibarra half a year is no more than a shard chipped from the rock face of eternity.
Believing as they did in a relentless providence, the people of Ibarra, daily and without surprise, met their individual dooms. They accepted as inevitable the hail on ripe corn, the vultures at the heart of the starved cow, the stillborn child.
This beautiful book was published when Harriet Doerr was 75 and it won the National Book Award for best first novel in 1985. A true late bloomer!!
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Evertons, an American couple who move to Ibarra to resurrect a grandfather’s abandoned mine. The prose is spare, the mood is both tender and melancholy. Intimations of mortality flash throughout. I found the opening paragraph of each chapter was often striking, as Doerr introduced a new scene, setting or characters. For example:
In Ibarra half a year is no more than a shard chipped from the rock face of eternity.
Believing as they did in a relentless providence, the people of Ibarra, daily and without surprise, met their individual dooms. They accepted as inevitable the hail on ripe corn, the vultures at the heart of the starved cow, the stillborn child.
This beautiful book was published when Harriet Doerr was 75 and it won the National Book Award for best first novel in 1985. A true late bloomer!!
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LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Stones for Ibarra originated as a group of short stories about an American couple in a small Mexican village. The vignettes that constitute the eighteen chapters of the novel are set in the 1960's and chronicle episodes that focus on the interactions of the couple with the denizens of Ibarra,
In the first chapter, “The Evertons Out of Their Minds,” the couple go to Mexico from San Francisco, California, to reclaim their family estate and reopen a copper mine abandoned since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Not long after their arrival at the unexpectedly dilapidated house, which fails to match the faded family photos or the Evertons’s dreams, Richard is diagnosed with leukemia and given six years to live. Despite the brevity of the second chapter, “A Clear Understanding,” several months pass in which the Evertons are observed by the townspeople, who find the Americans peculiar. Interestingly the Evertons never really shed their outsider status in spite of their interest in the culture of the small community.
Richard seems emboldened by his medical diagnosis and works hard to make the mine operable, hiring many locals and becoming something of hero in a strange way. The stories that comprise the short chapters drift backward and forward in time, though when a native is asked about specifics of an incident he replies: "Senora, it is as difficult to recapture the past as it is to prefigure the future." The author meanwhile is successful in portraying the landscape, and gradually providing evidence of the kind of culture that exists in this out of the way place.
The town priest is a frequent visitor to the Everton home, and he figures in many of the vignettes of the novel. He has a variety of assistant priests, who build basketball courts, are beloved of dogs, and impregnate a woman from a neighboring village. He sponsors a town picnic and solicits donations from the nonbelieving Evertons. Other vignettes relate the sad tale of brother killing brother, the use of native remedies to protect the Everton house, Sara’s Spanish lessons with Madre Petra, and the visit of a Canadian geologist and his Lebanese engineer.
The novel is written in a thoroughly crafted prose in which each sentence is pared down and polished until only the essential remains. As a consequence, the reader seems to somehow create the text while reading it, to discover in Doerr’s spare phrases the meaning and emotion the characters themselves hesitate to reveal. The novel reveals as much about the “lost” American expatriates as it does about the Mexican natives, by shifting perspectives and allowing the reader to see each group or individual through the eyes of the other.
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connected by the passage of time between the arrival of Richard and Sara Everton and Sara’s departure six years later. The author claimed that only a small part of Stones for Ibarra was autobiographical, but the framework of the novel recalls the Doerr family’s forays to Mexico.In the first chapter, “The Evertons Out of Their Minds,” the couple go to Mexico from San Francisco, California, to reclaim their family estate and reopen a copper mine abandoned since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Not long after their arrival at the unexpectedly dilapidated house, which fails to match the faded family photos or the Evertons’s dreams, Richard is diagnosed with leukemia and given six years to live. Despite the brevity of the second chapter, “A Clear Understanding,” several months pass in which the Evertons are observed by the townspeople, who find the Americans peculiar. Interestingly the Evertons never really shed their outsider status in spite of their interest in the culture of the small community.
Richard seems emboldened by his medical diagnosis and works hard to make the mine operable, hiring many locals and becoming something of hero in a strange way. The stories that comprise the short chapters drift backward and forward in time, though when a native is asked about specifics of an incident he replies: "Senora, it is as difficult to recapture the past as it is to prefigure the future." The author meanwhile is successful in portraying the landscape, and gradually providing evidence of the kind of culture that exists in this out of the way place.
The town priest is a frequent visitor to the Everton home, and he figures in many of the vignettes of the novel. He has a variety of assistant priests, who build basketball courts, are beloved of dogs, and impregnate a woman from a neighboring village. He sponsors a town picnic and solicits donations from the nonbelieving Evertons. Other vignettes relate the sad tale of brother killing brother, the use of native remedies to protect the Everton house, Sara’s Spanish lessons with Madre Petra, and the visit of a Canadian geologist and his Lebanese engineer.
The novel is written in a thoroughly crafted prose in which each sentence is pared down and polished until only the essential remains. As a consequence, the reader seems to somehow create the text while reading it, to discover in Doerr’s spare phrases the meaning and emotion the characters themselves hesitate to reveal. The novel reveals as much about the “lost” American expatriates as it does about the Mexican natives, by shifting perspectives and allowing the reader to see each group or individual through the eyes of the other.
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LibraryThing member BookConcierge
3.5***
At the outset of the novel Richard and Sara Everton arrive in the remote mountain of Ibarra, Mexico. The state is never specified but I believe this fictitious town is in the state of Michoacan. They have sold their home in California and most of their belongings to move to Ibarra so that
What were they thinking? This is not a quaint, lovely town, it’s a dusty, dying village with impoverished and little-educated residents, and little to no infrastructure. Yes, they have plumbing and electricity, such as it is. But they must travel several hours to a larger city to place a phone call. At least they speak Spanish … sort of.
But the Evertons are committed to this plan. They work hard to re-establish the mine, hire a housekeeper, cook, gardener, and security for the front gate. Begin to hire and train workers for the mine, buy local furnishings for the house, and make a life here. They don’t really understand the local culture, but they are at least open to learning.
I found this very atmospheric. I loved the descriptions of the various festivals and local traditions, the unique blend of native religious beliefs with Catholicism, and of herbal medicine administered by a curandera vs “modern” treatments by a university-educated physician.
There are several subplots involving the residents of the town, including a love-triangle between two brothers and a fetching young girl, a procession of young priests brought in to assist the resident pastor, and a series of doctors, mostly fresh out of school, whose life’s ambitions were clearly NOT to live in remote Ibarra.
The book was made into a TV movie in 1988, starring Glenn Close and Keith Carradine as Sarah and Richard Everton. I’ve never seen it.
At the outset of the novel Richard and Sara Everton arrive in the remote mountain of Ibarra, Mexico. The state is never specified but I believe this fictitious town is in the state of Michoacan. They have sold their home in California and most of their belongings to move to Ibarra so that
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they can reopen the Malaguena mine that Richard’s grandfather abandoned some fifty years previously. What were they thinking? This is not a quaint, lovely town, it’s a dusty, dying village with impoverished and little-educated residents, and little to no infrastructure. Yes, they have plumbing and electricity, such as it is. But they must travel several hours to a larger city to place a phone call. At least they speak Spanish … sort of.
But the Evertons are committed to this plan. They work hard to re-establish the mine, hire a housekeeper, cook, gardener, and security for the front gate. Begin to hire and train workers for the mine, buy local furnishings for the house, and make a life here. They don’t really understand the local culture, but they are at least open to learning.
I found this very atmospheric. I loved the descriptions of the various festivals and local traditions, the unique blend of native religious beliefs with Catholicism, and of herbal medicine administered by a curandera vs “modern” treatments by a university-educated physician.
There are several subplots involving the residents of the town, including a love-triangle between two brothers and a fetching young girl, a procession of young priests brought in to assist the resident pastor, and a series of doctors, mostly fresh out of school, whose life’s ambitions were clearly NOT to live in remote Ibarra.
The book was made into a TV movie in 1988, starring Glenn Close and Keith Carradine as Sarah and Richard Everton. I’ve never seen it.
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Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — 1984)
Commonwealth Club of California Book Awards (Silver Medal — Fiction — 1984)
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Fiction — 1984)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Fiction — 1984)
PEN Center USA Literary Award (Winner — Fiction — 1985)