1 post tagged “fiction”
I picked up Winter's Tale sometime when I was in college and although I loved the first 200 pages or so, I soon stopped because I was pressed for time and the story had moved on to other characters and I was not ready to shift. It's been a long time since college, but I picked it up from the library because a local book club was going to discuss it and in the intervening time, I've heard several great reviews of the book and became curious about what I missed. I never went to the book club meeting but I did finish the book.
There are a lot of characters in the book and several plot lines and it spans several ages, drifting between New York and the mystical Lake of the Coheeries, but the main story is about Peter Lake, an orphan with unknown family and country who grows up to be an expert mechanic and burglar, a very smart milk cart horse who runs away to seek adventure, and a beautiful piano playing, stargazing heiress. The book is part fantasy and magical realism, part science fiction, part cartoon, and part love song to the city of New York, which is a character itself, a living, breathing creature holding all the inhabitants within as part of a greater design.
It's a big ambitious, overflowing tale, which eddies about in the middle and loses focus, but I got caught up in the story - more than I wanted to be - and rushed through to the end so even now, I'm not quite sure I've absorbed it properly. The story is perhaps (a little reminiscent of Tolkien) too enamored with great men of genius and beautiful, pure, witty women and it does have passages with purple prose, but the language is for the most part lovely and the scenes colorful enough that I'm inclined to forgive it. The story and purpose does get murky so I don't think that it's of any use to describe the plot but there are scenes that lift the story up and odd moments, not entirely related to the story, where the book urges the reader to see the world with fresh eyes and understand more, and I haven't had a book make me feel that urge quite so piercingly in awhile.
There are a lot of characters in the book and several plot lines and it spans several ages, drifting between New York and the mystical Lake of the Coheeries, but the main story is about Peter Lake, an orphan with unknown family and country who grows up to be an expert mechanic and burglar, a very smart milk cart horse who runs away to seek adventure, and a beautiful piano playing, stargazing heiress. The book is part fantasy and magical realism, part science fiction, part cartoon, and part love song to the city of New York, which is a character itself, a living, breathing creature holding all the inhabitants within as part of a greater design.
It's a big ambitious, overflowing tale, which eddies about in the middle and loses focus, but I got caught up in the story - more than I wanted to be - and rushed through to the end so even now, I'm not quite sure I've absorbed it properly. The story is perhaps (a little reminiscent of Tolkien) too enamored with great men of genius and beautiful, pure, witty women and it does have passages with purple prose, but the language is for the most part lovely and the scenes colorful enough that I'm inclined to forgive it. The story and purpose does get murky so I don't think that it's of any use to describe the plot but there are scenes that lift the story up and odd moments, not entirely related to the story, where the book urges the reader to see the world with fresh eyes and understand more, and I haven't had a book make me feel that urge quite so piercingly in awhile.
