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The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

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The stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father.

Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm.

Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, the seven stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood map the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child.

168 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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About the author

Alistair MacLeod

35 books218 followers
When MacLeod was ten his family moved to a farm in Dunvegan, Inverness County on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. After completing high school, MacLeod attended teacher's college in Truro and then taught school. He studied at St. Francis Xavier University between 1957 and 1960 and graduated with a BA and B.Ed. He then went on to receive his MA in 1961 from the University of New Brunswick and his PhD in 1968 from the University of Notre Dame. A specialist in British literature of the nineteenth century, MacLeod taught English for three years at Indiana University before accepting a post in 1969 at the University of Windsor as professor of English and creative writing. During the summer, his family resided in Cape Breton, where he spent part of his time "writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island."
-Wikipedia

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5 stars
484 (54%)
4 stars
269 (30%)
3 stars
112 (12%)
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19 (2%)
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6 (<1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
Profile Image for Austin.
201 reviews5 followers
October 13, 2022
I wish I could give this book more than five stars. It's the best book of short stories I've read this year, by far. This is old school writing, where the author takes his time and establishes a mood and an atmosphere you can almost feel, taste, and touch. All the stories take place in the stark scenery of Cape Breton, which is on the Nova Scotia coast, and all the characters are miners, lighthouse keepers, fishermen, and farmers; all battling the harsh environment of the land they love and struggling with the elements, their families, and their destinies. Many of the stories are deeply moving in the way that watching the seasons change is moving. When you disengage from the present, zoom out on life and witness the small tragedies and quiet joys of others just scrambling to survive, it gives you a calm perspective on your own struggles, and this is what MacLeod accomplishes with these eleven short stories. It's almost as if he's showing the reader that ordinary people, beset by vicissitudes, can be seen as stouthearted and courageous.

"In Alistair MacLeod's short stories one encounters the narrator as son, brother, husband, but above all witness; embarked upon a life's enterprise of forging not the conscience of his race, but being the means by which its conscience is expressed." -Joyce Carol Oates
Profile Image for Smcalli1.
10 reviews1 follower
September 17, 2008
In my mind, Alistair MacLeod is one of today's best writers. He doesn't try to grab you with flashy techniques or weird storyline twists or profound social comment. Rather, he's a storyteller, pure and simple. This is a collection of some of his rare short stories that chronicle the lives of people in his native Nova Scotia. They are beautifully crafted and moving in their simplicity. If you enjoy a quiet, yet moving story, well told, I recommend anything written by Alistair MacLeod.
Profile Image for Jeść treść.
305 reviews639 followers
January 2, 2022
Alistair MacLeod zebrał wszystkich przy stole, rozdał wszystkim po kubku parującej herbaty, sam odpalił papierosa i zaczął opowiadać. A opowiada wspaniale.
"Utracony dar słonej krwi" to kolejna książka wydawnictwa Wiatr od Morza, która zachwyciła mnie w ten sam prosty, ktoś powiedziałby że wręcz surowy, sposób.
I gdziekolwiek byście jej nie czytali, zawsze będziecie nad morzem.
Profile Image for Jakub.
752 reviews71 followers
February 12, 2021
There is kind of raw power in these stories, the coarse beauty of the land it depicts. These are stories of the changing times and unchanging people, of their toil and the sway their legacy holds over them. MacLeod has a way with words which transports the reader right in the thick of the places he describes.
41 reviews
September 16, 2020
Made me want to move back home to the maritimes and get murdered by the ocean or some sort of family curse
723 reviews9 followers
August 8, 2021
Sad life short stories. The writing was wonderful the stories just a too much like life.
Profile Image for Sergio.
1,173 reviews84 followers
July 25, 2020
Un gruppo di racconti che svela, con una scrittura poetica e intimista, la vita difficile soprattutto per le estreme condizioni ambientali, delle famiglie che popolano Cape Breton, nella nuova Scozia, Canada. Racconti spesso basati su vecchi ricordi, sulla perdita delle antiche tradizioni gaeliche, sull'amore che lega questi abitanti al loro paese, alla loro terra, al loro mare. Un libro intriso di malinconia e di intimismo, a tratti molto emozionante.
Profile Image for Casey.
599 reviews46 followers
August 10, 2016
"No one has ever said that life is to be easy, only that it is to be lived." Alistair MacLeod casually drops this observation in the final story "The Road to Rankin's Point." First, the reader is struck by its simplicity, next by its profundity, and lastly by the possibility that it is neither simple nor profound, but rather merely a summation. Whether of life or anthology, the question of attribution I shall leave in your hands.

MacLeod's writing floored me. His competency and use of language is authentic, sound, and beautiful. All of these stories possess a singular driving will, yet share the common taste of salt, earth, blood, and loss. I highly recommend reading this for the writing. The stories are good, some are great, but it is the writing that suspends time and unmoors the reader from earthly bonds.

The setting? A stony wind-torn Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. Snow, ice, an indifferent sea, loss, lighthouse keepers, miners, farmers, and fishermen pervade these stories. Life, death, and the inevitability of change are constant companions. So too is the repeating theme of semen, both that of man and animal. I suspect it is to offset the stroke of the Reaper's scythe, but I found the constant references to ejaculation a bit forced and at times, awkward. It never crossed into lewdness, but it does flirt with a redundancy that I imagine is intentional. And if so, I felt the volume of ejaculate was unnecessary.

The two stories that stood out the most to me:
* "In the Fall" (This story made me cry)
* "To Everything there is A Season"


Edited to add:
I just now noticed, after having written and posted my review, that another reviewer used the quotation with which I began my review. I find it amusing that we both clung to this quote.
Profile Image for Marvin Goodman.
77 reviews4 followers
September 3, 2014
I found this in the way that lots of us semi-literate plodders find books, from an obituary. Before his death in April, 2014, I had not previously been aware of MacLeod or his work. The praise that accompanied his obituary sent me to Amazon, and the only one of his books available (at the time) in Kindle format.

Almost immediately, I found myself recalling E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News" as I immersed myself in the stark, bleak environment of MacLeod's North Atlantic coast. I particularly enjoy being there with them, in their stories, and even found myself nostalgically recalling an Alistair MacLean adventure novel set nearby.

I thoroughly enjoyed a few of the stories in this collection, but wonder now if I was damaged too much by the opening story, which disturbed and depressed me. I don't mind being depressed by a story, but I feel like I might be a sucker for some level of redemption, and the stories here have little of that. In "The Shipping News," Quoyle eventually found happiness, so maybe I was subconsciously expecting that for the characters in these stories, but they were repeatedly denied.

Now, that's a personal preference thing, and I wouldn't impose that on my friends who might love to be left disappointed that the unicorns didn't show up to carry the hero away. The characters here were interesting and well developed, and there was some true artistry in some of the descriptive writing, most particularly in the story "The Road to Rankin's Point."
Profile Image for Debbie.
896 reviews25 followers
October 22, 2018
Oh, I love to read original editions from the library stacks and see how an established - indeed, revered - Canadian writer was viewed before (s)he was known!

From the blurb of this first edition:
An exciting new discovery in Canadian fiction . . .
Born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Alistair MacLeod grew up in the coal-mining areas of Alberta and the farming areas of Dunvegan and Inverness, Nova Scotia.
Educated at St. Francis Xavier University, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame University, he has worked as a school teacher, miner, logger and, most recently, as Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His short stories have appeared in magazines and journals . . . The present volume is the first full-length collection devoted to his work.

Back cover: To an outsider the stories in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood seem to belong to Cape Breton because they are stubborn, reflective, melancholy, and overflowing with the energies of family life. There are seven stories in the book; it took seven years to write them: a good part of the life of a young writer. But with this superb collection, as anyone will know who reads it, Al MacLeod’s career is just beginning. (My note, one story is set in Newfoundland and another concerns a family from Kentucky living in Indiana.)

In The Road to Rankin’s Point pg 181
“It does not matter that some things are difficult. No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.” (90-something grandmother)

Lovely, just lovely!
Profile Image for Liên.
101 reviews
Read
August 29, 2024
Marvelous prose, unaffected yet lyrical. The emotions in these stories are so beautifully layered.
On my first read, unfathomable sadness hit as the mysteries unravelled. The reread only felt vaguely melancholic, even comforting - like a grief that has mellowed into peace.
August 5, 2016
A big thank you to Charles for recommending and lending this collection. Every story stayed with me for some time. I couldn't read more than one story a day because they are so powerful.

Amazing.
446 reviews
March 11, 2019
MacLeod would write the last sentence of each story first. What do you want to leave the reader with, is the most important question. Then, this sentence would serve as a lighthouse for the rest of the story.

The stories are not much for plot, but the beauty of the language, the people and the setting keep you reading on. MacLeod's subjects are the fishermen, the coal miners, and the farmers of Cape Breton. The most common theme is the lure of the island as people grapple with staying where there is family and tradition, or striking out for a more economically secure life but losing everything else.

My favorite story is "The Boat" which features a father who fishes by day, but retires at night to read as much as he can, something his wife feels is a waste of time. She feels betrayed that her daughters all went off the college, married, and left the island. She wants everyone to remain at sea. The son decides to remain and fish with his father so long as he is alive. He finds it "much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations." Once his father is washed off deck and dies, he goes to college to pursue the life that his father always actually wanted. "And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue."

I was also especially affected by "In the Fall" in which an impoverished family is forced to sell their loyal, elderly horse to be butchered because they cannot afford to feed him that winter. Sadly, the father, who only reluctantly could accept this, is forced to bring the horse onto the truck that takes it away. I kept hoping that some spectacular idea would be hatched to save the horse. Not the case. One of the saddest stories I have ever read.

"The Road to Rankin's Point" is the other gem of the set. It concerns a family trying to convince their 96 year old grandmother to leave the isolation of her farm and go to a nursing home. Every year they come and every year she wins. This year, her strategy is to proclaim that everything is worked out, she will live with her grandson Callum to whom she has willed her farm. When all leave he informs here that he has but months to live. She dies that night. It would appear that she wandered into the night to die so that he could live his last months on the farm.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Ebenmaessiger.
338 reviews12 followers
November 7, 2022
"The Boat" - 8.75
- Nice to read a short story that teaches for the heights with some otherwise antiquated methods, namely a conscious majesty of tone, poesie of movement, and unabashed nostalgic romance, which is not the same thing as some of the other watery elegies I’ve recently read, which are at once grimier and more pedantic in their lower-class honor trawling. Here the reverie is not social, but paternal, which doesn’t make it better (it is, actually, a bit treacly at times [the secretly literary blue collar man, intent-ish on saving his children from the uneducated toil to which he’s been subjected by life is not necessarily a novel approach]), but it does make it different. STORY: Newfoundland man reflects on his fishing father, and his death off the boat when the son was piloting it. Worth noting: the seeming superfluousness of the setup, him as older man, Midwest prof reflecting, which gives immediate way to straight childhood story, never to return. Yet, the image provided, of him getting up early, not sleeping, and trudging through the cold and dark to prepare for work is a near mirror of the image he then provides of his father's restless existence and be-drudged steps out every morning out of the house.

"In the Fall" - 6.75
- An altogether less-effective tale of cold northern rurality, uncertain exactly which of its characters was the protagonist and whose emotions exactly to plunder and thematize, even if there is some strong imagery of coast and animal and bluster scattered throughout. STORY: poor farm family needs to sell its old, loyal, but broken down horse to coarse neighbor, which triggers apoplectic fit from youngest son, destroying their chicken coop and no doubt requiring the expending of whatever meager monies they’d received from the sale.
Profile Image for William.
1,144 reviews5 followers
May 18, 2024
This is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I did not love many of the stories, but somehow the book adds up to a powerful reading experience overall.

two days after finishing the book, two stories stand out in my memory. "In the fall," about the fate of a horse named Scott, is so wrenching emotionally that my wife did not read it to the end; I did and was very moved. And the final story, "The Closing Down of Summer" is a masterpiece (to me anyway) expressing MacLeod's views on life.

I'm perhaps among the few non-Canadian readers who has actually been to Cape Breton Island, and it is indeed breathtaking, to some extent like California's Rte 1 but, back then anyway (this was a long time ago) without the tourists. The landscape and the weather are two of the main characters connecting the stories. The Gaelic language is another.

Thematically, the stories are linked by the realization that life in places like Cape Breton is hard. There is a lot of bucolic writing out there, and it is generally soothing and centering. MacLeod's tales, though, are fraught with death, illness, confrontations, and even lust. Taken as a group, they are effective in reflecting human experience as a whole, and it is moving, though also depressing.

The writing is meticulous, with words in settings like gems. But I found some of the stories hard to follow because several of them incorporate elements from different points in time (sometimes divided by a great many tears) and I had difficulty connecting the parts.

This collection is certainly worth reading and a moving experience. The high ratings by goodreads readers are as close to unanimous as they ever get, and this is no accident.
Profile Image for Will.
67 reviews2 followers
October 17, 2022
"I feel myself falling back into the past now, hoping to have more and more past as I have less and less future. My twenty-six years are not enough and I would want to go farther and farther back through previous generations so that I might have more of what now seems so little. I would go back through the superstitions and the herbal remedies and the fatalistic war cries and the haunting violins and the cancer cures of cobwebs. Back through the knowledge of being and its end as understood through second sight and spectral visions and the intuitive dog and the sea bird's cry. I would go back to the priest with the magic hands. Back to the faith healer if only I had more faith. Back to anything rather than to die at the objective hands of mute, cold science."
35 reviews
March 31, 2024
I had never heard of Alistair MacLeod until Goodreads recommended one of his works based on my shelf. So I looked him up---he was a widely lauded 20th century Canadian writer who wrote two short story collections and one novel. "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" is his first collection (1976) and is not a long read (7 stories, ~180 pages). The stories are principally set in MacLeod's homeland of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, home to the Gaelic-speaking descendants of Scottish immigrants. The setting really comes alive and is what makes this book special, as do the universal themes of the deceptively simple stories.
10 reviews
August 2, 2018
"no one has ever said that life is to be easy, only that it is to be lived."
i'm not a fan of short stories but i must admit that this is very well written, with the fact that the author has the ability to make you feel the whole atmosphere of the story. it talks a lot about the theme of family as well when the characters are all away from home and it described the connections between parents and children. we are also able to feel the emotions that were being expressed in the whole story really well, which i enjoyed the whole reading journey a lot.
Profile Image for Scalar42.
52 reviews3 followers
May 23, 2023
I remember Joan Didion wrote: "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image..." In the case of Cape Breton, Alistair MacLeod has certainly left his mark. Personally, the last story has really brought back some of my most cherished memories with my great-grandmother.
Profile Image for Clare Kirwan.
292 reviews4 followers
February 12, 2023
I loved most (but not all) of these perfectly-crafted short stories from acclaimed Canadian author, Alistair Macleod. He is able to transport the reader to another world - the wild Cape Breton coast with its generations of struggling fishermen, farmers and their families. Deceptively straightforward, often poetic, sometimes shocking, and leave you with the taste of salt and blood.
82 reviews4 followers
May 20, 2017
A great collection of short stories by a masterful writer, and great example of how less can be more... Especially when each word is so well chosen. Also an evocative snapshot of the working people of the Atlantic provinces. Loved this book!
Profile Image for Lin Kat VC.
17 reviews1 follower
November 21, 2018
A collection of simple, daily, remote stories. Love of any kind, weekness, strenghts and deep moments and situations.
I wish i would have read it in english, the translation to Spanish generates certain distractions on the way..
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews

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