Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Winter's Tale
Book Review: An enthralling mammoth, magical story!
Summary: 4 Stars
Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale is a fabulous journey of a story told in exquisite and beautiful language, with some of the best metaphors I have encountered in any novel I have yet read. What may be more pleasing is Helprin's writing style than the actual plot, which has religious overtones I was not expecting. Although the novel is cast in the backdrop of New York City, the location of countless novels and stories, Winter's Tale is more about fate, death, dying, mortality, hope, and love than about the city. What I enjoyed most was some of Helprin's writing techniques that had the stamina to last the entire novel, such as the creation of an atmosphere of constant winter. I agree with some reviewers that the ending was a bit depressing. For a novel that carried on for hundreds and hundreds of pages this beautiful, magical story, I hoped for a more significant ending. It seemed the ending came abruptly, or, perhaps for a novel of 688 pages, Helprin should have started setting the stage for his ending a bit sooner to allow for it to have a bigger impact.
The novel opens with a white horse, who takes on the symbolic meaning of a higher power. It follows the life of Peter Lake, who was brought to the shores of the United States as an infant during the great immigration. As such, he is raised not by his parents but by a group of early people settled in the marshes around New York City. The magic seems to begin He takes on a life of crime as would a typical outsider to mainstream society. Peter Lake's magical, extraordinary life begins in his first encounter with this white horse. The next point of the novel is when Peter Lake meets and falls in love with Beverly Penn and their short relationship together. From then on, we are introduced to other characters, who have relationships with the Penn family or within their immediate circle of contacts. Some of these character developments arguably may be too long and if shortened could reduce the novel by some 100 - 200 unnecessary pages. I was left wondering about Evan, Marratta, the brother of Hardesty Marratta, who featured prominently in Hardesty's introduction to the story. All the other characters ever mentioned in the novel were accounted for and I kept thinking Hardesty was going to reconnect with his selfish, inhuman brother at some point, especially near the end of the novel when all the beauty of the city seemed to be dissipating as the time of one era gave rise to another.
Overall, Winter's Tale was a joy to read and only began to seem tedious (in all its many pages) when the two city newspapers, The Sun and The Ghost, emerged. It was at this point that I also felt the political and religious views of Helprin coming through. Such views are embedded in the entire length of the novel, but become clearer and more assertive toward the end of the story. I read an interview with Helprin where he said that his novel contained no elements of magical realism, but I noted great similarities between Helprin's metaphors and those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a classic writer of the magical realism genre.
What I enjoyed most about Winter's Tale was the ability to lose myself in a mammoth, magical story that spans hundreds of years and is told by an author, who clearly has a gift for using the most extraordinary and beautiful language. What I liked least was the ending which wrapped up all the loose ends too quickly and lacked the depth that was present in the beginning and sustained throughout the middle of the novel, as well as the political and religious overtones that seemed to grow in weight towards the novel's end. Despite these minor drawbacks, Winter's Take is a great work of art and I am eager to read another of Helprin's novels and only hope it will match, if not exceed, Helprin's beautiful writing style and talent for creating a most enthralling atmosphere with only words.
Book Review: An extremely disappointing effort
Summary: 3 Stars
I had been planning on reading "Winter's Tale" for several years after hearing some friends rave about Helprin's writing. The novel is divided into four sections. The first section of the book (the romance between Beverly and Peter Lake) bore out the praise - it was beautifully written, very imaginative and affecting. The second section tells of the arrival in New York of several characters who will be important in the rest of the novel. It was OK.
The third section is bad and the fourth section - 250 pages of rambling and incoherent hyperbolic verbal diarrhea - is a disaster. Helprin seems to have completely lost self-control as work on this novel progressed. The novel descends into a hectic and pointless series of grandiloquently-described episodes in which telling a story has been entirely subsumed in verbiage.
My recommendation is that you read the first section (about 200 pages) and just put the book down. You will have had a rewarding read and sampled Helprin's often beautiful writing. Oh, this should have been such a better book than it was.
Book Review: Beverly Penn by The Waterboys
Summary: 5 Stars
This will probably be of limited interest to most of you but I just discovered an odd link between 2 artists whose work I admire: Mark Helprin, the author of this great novel Winter's Tale and The Waterboys, the talented rock group led by the great singer / songwriter Mike Scott. On the expanded 2 cd reissue of their acclaimed mid 80's album This Is The Sea there is a song called Beverly Penn, about a main character in Winter's Tale. It turns out that this is a truly wonderful song, a great tribute from one artist to another. Here are the lyrics to Beverly Penn:
Girl sleeping on a mansion roof
under a wintery sky
wrapped she is in furs and sable
starlight in her eye
and what is the name of this creature?
where did she live and when?
who was it and why was it
that Peter Lake loved Beverly Penn
Four O'Clock on a marble morning
water pouring on her skin
in fever her life bursts open
and a hurricane blows in
when high from the dreams of this creature
a thief on a horse descends
it was dawn and it was December
and Peter Lake loved Beverly Penn
It was all of a windy day
and the sky was full of crows
when her lovely soul ascended
she just close her heart and rose
and whither the soul of this creature?
tell me the story again
of scarves and songs and the skin of space
and how Peter Lake loved Beverly Penn
I would dive in a freezing river
set fire to a hundred men
if I could for just one time
love somebody the way that he loved Beverly Penn
Here are my thoughts on the book itself. It would probably make my all time top 10 list and I believe I have read almost 2000 books in my life. I've read Winter's Tale 4 or 5 times and have enjoyed it more each time than the last. I could see how it is not for everyone. If you are not moved by Helprin's prose poetry than this will be a long slog. If you sample some of the writing here and enjoy it I believe there is a way to read this book for maximum enjoyment. First off - Let the book take you. Don't have a preconceived notion of what you want from it. It is not a linear story about a particular set of characters. Characters and storylines disappear abruptly and sometimes permanently. Don't expect immensely satisfying conclusions. It is more about the journey than the destination. Lastly I would suggest that you read this book slowly. I almost always finish even long books in under 2 weeks but this one should be savored and read in small doses. 2 or 3 months is not a long time for this novel. It has an other-worldly beauty that is very rare.
Book Review: Brain Drain or Brain Exercise?
Summary: 2 Stars
Bizarre, maniacal, tedious, a thesaurus for writing about cold and snow. Every time I sat down with this book another adjective burst into my mind. Then I thought surely the author must be adhd; he moves around so much. It's like wack-a-mole trying to find or follow a character, or what is so very well disguised as a plot. The jumps between reality and what may or may not be reality invoke visions of LSD flashback. And what the heck is the cloud wall? Only of a sudden halfway thru the book does it become a worm hole for jumping thru time. This book is very much a jigsaw puzzle of lovely thoughts, mad ramblings, fear, fantasy, improbability and absurdity.
Then there's phrases of such infinite beauty and depth of soul that you have to pause just to absorb them and then to wallow in them:
"Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots. The reeds and grasses on the hot mounds and in the ditches turned green with envy and begged to go along (which is why they waved when the train went by)."
The summary on the flyleaf leads you to believe that this is a tale of Peter Lake's love that is strong enough to last forever & to defeat even death. Don't you believe it. It's a tale of New York and it's occupants including very nasty little people who seem to reproduce themselves like the creatures in the movie Gremlins. Way in the back of the tale are the three men with super powers who are responsible for the building of the world's greatest bridges and, in the end, the destruction of the world the bridge is meant to serve.
Too many wrong turns by characters. What woman wouldn't use the poultice sitting in her carpetbag that she knows would save her grandchild? Why would the horse wait 14 months working at a mill wheel when he had the power to break away whenever he wished. Why would the little bad guys go to upstate New York and massacre an entire village? And why did they cut off their short tails at the end of the book? Was there any purpose at all in the salver that Hardesty inherits? If he found the just city in Coheeries, why didn't he stay there?
I tried, indeed I tried very hard to lose myself in the imagination of this author's fairy tale. But I failed, maybe it's the mathematician in me or the goatish structure my psyche demands. There are sections in which the plot seems to take off and the tension builds so quickly that you can hardly put the book down. Then there are so many passages that are truly bizzarro that you just want to throw it across the room. At the end of the day, I'm glad I read this book, but I sure wouldn't do it again.
Book Review: Couldn't get past fifty pages
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought "Winter's Tale" at a used book store here in Brooklyn swayed by the praise I'd heard over the years. When I asked the youngish girl at the counter her opinion, she said she loved it but it wasn't to everyones liking. Boy, was she right. I got through fifty pages and just couldn't go on. As other reviewers have indicated, "Winter's Tale" reminded me of "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Having read and enjoyed Marquez's work twice, I would judge "Winter's Tale" more harshly as being almost derivative of that very book just set in NYC. As a native of New Jersey (Linden, next to the Bayonne prominently featured in the beginning) and a transplant to NYC, in no way did my limited read speak to me of the City I know in fact and fiction. The characters are devoid of life, the plot set ups preposterous and the prose like some shiny bauble. Obviously, many others readers, based on their glowing reviews, feel quite differently. So, put my bad review down to a matter of taste and, for me, a rare book that I could not even finish.