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The Gap of Time A Novel Hogarth Shakespeare Jeanette Winterson 9780804141352 Books

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The Gap of Time A Novel Hogarth Shakespeare Jeanette Winterson 9780804141352 Books

In the light of the way in which other readers – both here, and reviewers for newspapers – have warmed to this book, I’m somewhat reluctant to say so. But it seemed to me to be a truly dreadful novel.

The author shows considerable ingenuity in re-interpreting the settings and personae of The Winter’s Tale in a modern setting. But from there on, it was all downhill. I was committed to reading this book, as a member of a book club. Had this not been the case, I would have abandoned it. As it was, I persisted to the end, with steadily increasing loathing for the author and her characters.

What is the problem? At the heart of it is the fact that the characterization is superficial to the point of absurdity. We seem to move from one cliché to another, with the piece reading as if it had been written as the script for a graphic novel. Leon is unremittingly loathsome – yet we are supposed to think that this is someone who can aspire love and affection from those who interact with him. Elements of graphic sex are stuck into the story, in settings in which there seems to be no call for them: they are certainly not erotic, and it is not clear what their role in the narrative is. Leon’s Jewish assistant is depicted as clever and highly educated, but is made to spout copy-book Yiddish expressions, which a poor writer might put into the mouth of a stock figure from a New York or East End Jewish character from an earlier generation. Mimi, we are told, is half American, half Russian, but is written as a stock Parisian-gamin-nightclub singer figure. Her daughter’s adoptive father is African-American – but it comes as a surprise when we are told this, as it is not clear from the way in which he has been drawn.

I could go on. All that I would say is that having to stick with this was one of the worst reading experiences of my life. I am simply astounded that so many people thought that it was good, and would strongly suggest that those who try it and start to react much as did I don’t bother with it. It certainly does not get better, and there are many, many better things to do with one's time.


Tags : The Gap of Time: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare) [Jeanette Winterson] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Winter’s Tale </i>is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays.” It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast,Jeanette Winterson,The Gap of Time: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare),Hogarth,0804141355,Father and child,Forgiveness,Jealousy,Parent-child relationship;Fiction.,Shakespeare, William,Contemporary Women,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Contemporary Women,Fiction Humorous General,Fiction Literary,Fiction-Literary,FictionHumorous - General,FictionLiterary,GENERAL,General Adult,Great BritainBritish Isles,Humorous - General,Literary,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),Monograph Series, any,United States,WINTERSON, JEANETTE - PROSE & CRITICISM

The Gap of Time A Novel Hogarth Shakespeare Jeanette Winterson 9780804141352 Books Reviews

With the same charm-mixed-with-bite as "Boating for Beginners" and "The Passion", Winterson weaves a contemporary story of love, jealousy and betrayal, loosely based Shakespeare's Winters Tale. The story takes place in Louisiana and London, over the course of two generations. One of the things I love best about Jeanette Winterson's work is the style of her writing. Each sentence is compact, each descriptor brief but powerful. The novel is awash in poetic prose and quick turns, and the rhythm of the novel weaves in and out of each character's points of view. A master at the loom.
This novel is the first installment of the Hogarth Press's project of having modern novelists adapt certain Shakespearean plays. This novel adapts The Winter's Tale. While familiarity with Shakespeare's play adds to the effect of the book, a reader can still enjoy the adaptation without having read the original. I enjoyed the book so much that I have gifted copies to several friends.
I’ve followed Hogarth’s new series of rewritings of Shakespeare by eminent authors with great interest. Four have been published to date –Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (The Merchant of Venice), Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew), Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (The Tempest), and this one, Jeanette Winterson’s reworking of The Winter‘s Tale.

I gave strongly positive reviews to the other three books in the series but must give a qualified one to this. The Winter‘s Tale is not one of the plays by Shakespeare with which I am familiar but in many respects its plot is troubling, out there, outlandish yet moving. It stretches reality farther than most of the Bard’s plays, which is already saying a lot. (The life lived by most Shakespeare characters is hyperlife, not the kind of life we --ordinary mortals—live.) A king becomes convinced that his wife is pregnant by his best friend. He hands the daughter over to be abandoned (but she’s saved), his wife dies, his friend leaves him. Then years later, through an extraordinary series of coincidences, father and daughter are reunited, the mother too, and all is well in the world. (It’s too much!)

Winterson, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, is a good choice for this story. I t begs not to be treated as real but rather as a type of hyperbole, which through its virtuoso display of writing, acquires a truth value of its own –not true but not not-true. That’s the type of fiction writer Winterson is, a word worker and experimentalist, who is at ease with shifts in persona and tense and narrative line. She has situated her version of the play in modern London, time not quite certain but around now, in a new American city called New Bohemia. Leo is a magnate –driven and crude and once possessed of an idea, unable to back down. His wife Mimi is both his love and a possession but all is well –or as well as it can be when living with a man with a reduced emotional palette—until he becomes convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend and sometime lover Xeno. Then everything happens just as it does in the play out the wife, baby abandoned but rescued by a stranger, Theo gone, the magnate all alone. Years later, the past surfaces and it’s a complicated mess.

The story is hard to follow in Shakespeare, harder still with Winterson. The text hops around a lot –changes of setting, perspective, tone, the interjection of her own comments to create a not too coherent metatext. The quality of the prose is uneven, some passages sharp and brilliant, others almost Victorian Purple Prose of the worst, most clotted variety. (They’re usually describing the love affair of Perdita, the missing daughter, and Xeno’s son Zel.) I cringed when I read this sentence “Love is the unfamiliar name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame.” Sounds good, means little.

The book is almost redeemed by the final section, which brings daughter and mother together and weaves around the narrative a discussion of what the play means in its author’s world. In the space of a few pages, Winterson crafts an insightful and poetic appraisal of the play, its theme, and its impact on us.
In the light of the way in which other readers – both here, and reviewers for newspapers – have warmed to this book, I’m somewhat reluctant to say so. But it seemed to me to be a truly dreadful novel.

The author shows considerable ingenuity in re-interpreting the settings and personae of The Winter’s Tale in a modern setting. But from there on, it was all downhill. I was committed to reading this book, as a member of a book club. Had this not been the case, I would have abandoned it. As it was, I persisted to the end, with steadily increasing loathing for the author and her characters.

What is the problem? At the heart of it is the fact that the characterization is superficial to the point of absurdity. We seem to move from one cliché to another, with the piece reading as if it had been written as the script for a graphic novel. Leon is unremittingly loathsome – yet we are supposed to think that this is someone who can aspire love and affection from those who interact with him. Elements of graphic sex are stuck into the story, in settings in which there seems to be no call for them they are certainly not erotic, and it is not clear what their role in the narrative is. Leon’s Jewish assistant is depicted as clever and highly educated, but is made to spout copy-book Yiddish expressions, which a poor writer might put into the mouth of a stock figure from a New York or East End Jewish character from an earlier generation. Mimi, we are told, is half American, half Russian, but is written as a stock Parisian-gamin-nightclub singer figure. Her daughter’s adoptive father is African-American – but it comes as a surprise when we are told this, as it is not clear from the way in which he has been drawn.

I could go on. All that I would say is that having to stick with this was one of the worst reading experiences of my life. I am simply astounded that so many people thought that it was good, and would strongly suggest that those who try it and start to react much as did I don’t bother with it. It certainly does not get better, and there are many, many better things to do with one's time.