Ponderous comic sections are redeemed by flights of epigrammatic lyricism that twist cynicism into hope.
Shakespeare did a pretty good job with his plays, but Hogarth Press is putting out a series of rewrites by contemporary novelists. This is Winterson’s version of A Winter’s Tale.
Winterson says the play “has been a private text for me for more than 30 years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can’t live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something.” The play does have a thematic resemblance to Winterson’s novels (The Daylight Gate, 2013, etc.) and memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 2012), with its autocratic father, hints of incest, passionate love shading into abuse, foundlings, and redemptive innocents. Shakespeare’s telling reads like a fairy tale: a jealous king, convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend, has his baby daughter set adrift. She washes up on the coast of the friend’s kingdom, Bohemia, where a shepherd finds her. Meanwhile, the Delphic Oracle vindicates the queen, who (supposedly) drops dead, only to reappear years later as a statue who comes to life once the lost princess is allowed to marry the Bohemian prince. Winterson changes the king into a London hedge fund tycoon, the queen into a French pop star, the shepherd into a black musician in New Bohemia, Louisiana, the queen’s loyal scold of a serving woman into a Jewish executive assistant spouting Yiddish proverbs, and so on. It generally works well, but the transformation drains the story of some of its fairy-tale magic: for example, the statue business shows up only as a video game and a metaphor (“Every day she finds another carving, another statue and she imagines what it would be like if they came to life. And who trapped them in stone? She feels trapped in stone”). Winterson’s most interesting addition is to make the king-king-queen love triangle explicitly sexual: here the two men are not just best friends, but boyhood lovers.
Ponderous comic sections are redeemed by flights of epigrammatic lyricism that twist cynicism into hope.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4135-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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