Winter's Tale by Mark Halprin

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake— orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and besieged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.

Amazon.com description

This book is epic in vision, ambition and size (673 pages of relatively small type in my edition). And a few days ago I very much doubted that I would hit my target of reading a book a week, but I finished it today, having spent all of yesterday reading. I did read the Lord of the Rings in two days (and all through one night), so I suppose finishing Winter's Tale wasn't a complete surprise. Whether I would have finished this book without the challenge is questionable. I might have given up, which would have been a shame as the book is worth the effort, I am grateful to my challenge for keeping me reading.

The book ranges in time from the late 19th century to the eve of the 21st. It is set in a fantasy New York, heaving with the poor dying in their hovels and gangs of thugs, overseen by hugely powerful newspapers and their magnates, full of energy, hope and despair. As someone who has never been to New York and who is unlikely to go, I felt that I missed a lot of the book's richness. There is a rave review from the New York Times review link here which gives you a New Yorker's take on the book.


The description in Goodreads and on Amazon (above) is misleading. Peter Lake may be the main character of the book, but he disappears for the central part of it, and the love story with Beverly although enchanting is actually a minor part of the book. With Peter Lake removed from the story, the focus shifts to a larger cast of characters. Don't expect subtle characterisation in this book. With the exception of Peter Lake and the elderly newspaper owner Harry Penn, Halprin's characters are symbols, vehicles for forces of love, truth etc. The good are good, the evil are evil and there isn't that much of a focus on the latter.

In some ways New York is the central character in the novel, whilst the storyline is the pursuit of the ideal city. "To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through . . . gates far more difficult to find than gates of stone, for they are test mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice.'' One gate is that of ''acceptance of responsibility,'' another is that of ''the desire to explore,'' still another that of ''devotion to beauty,'' and the last is the gate of ''selfless love.'' Does the ideal come at the end of the novel?

 This book has been lauded as a great feat of magic realism, and compared to the wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to differ - it is not as great as Marquez's masterpiece and I don't think there was a lot of realism in the book to make it a great magic realism book.

I found the book overly verbose. Like one of his characters the author uses all sorts of unusual words, which I found got in the way of understanding rather than illuminating. Halprin applies layer upon layer of description to the point where it was possible to skip several pages without missing any of the story. At first I really enjoyed his descriptions, but after a while found them tedious and at times not even very good. 

It is nevertheless an impressive book, full of wonderful images, thoughts and imagination. The book reminded me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and like Pullman's book had me loving it in parts and leaving me nevertheless unsatisfied.

by Zoe Brooks

Books added to the list

The list of books is growing and the range of authors is growing with it.

New titles include: 

• The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link
• The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
• The Silver Cloud Cafe by Alfredi Vea
• The Scholar of Moab by Steven L Peck
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
• The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
• Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Holes by Louis Sacher
• Cloud Street by Tim Winton
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
• Skellig by David Almond
• The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link
• The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
• The Silver Cloud Cafe by Alfredi Vea
• The Scholar of Moab by Steven L Peck
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
• The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
• Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Holes by Louis Sacher
• Cloud Street by Tim Winton
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
• Skellig by David Almond
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman

A haunting and emotionally satisfying novel from a much-loved and critically acclaimed author, which weaves fairy tale and gritty realism together to dazzlingly effect.

‘The Story Sisters’ charts the lives of three sisters – Elv, Claire and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. Inhabiting their world are a charismatic man who cannot tell the truth, a neighbor who is not who he appears to be, a clumsy boy in Paris who falls in love and stays there, a detective who finds his heart’s desire, and a demon who will not let go.

What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray? How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others? How deep can love go, and how far can it take you?

At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, ‘The Story Sisters’ sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them.

Amazon Description

Please note this review contains spoilers

They say don't judge a book by its cover, but we all do, I certainly do. The cover would have put me off. As a mature woman I would have looked at the girl with young man behind her and thought "not for me." I probably wouldn't have noticed the moths. So I very much doubt that I would have read this book had it not been for this challenge, but I did and I'm glad I did. When this challenge is over I will read more Alice Hoffman. I'm not sure why, but I didn't fully engage with this book until about halfway through, when suddenly I could not put the book down.

The book is a modern fairytale, not a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale but a Grimm brothers' tale full of darkness, shadows and evil demons. Two of the three Story sisters share a terrible secret. One day the youngest Claire is grabbed by a man and dragged into a car, her oldest sister Elv saves Claire but is taken herself and kept prisoner for hours. When Elv returns she makes Claire promise not to talk about it. The book is about that event and the girls failure to talk about it.

The book is partly about stories. Elv creates a fantasy world to cope with the evil that she has encountered, but the fantasy is more real to her than normality. She draws her sisters into that world, creating a language which the sisters share and exclude their mother and the rest of the adults. Rebelling, cynical and hurting Elv spirals down into drugs and crime.  Lorry, a young heroine addict and crook, enchants Elv with weird stories about his past. Elv is convicted of trying to con an old woman. The second sister escapes into books. The girls' grandmother and her friend Mrs Cohen also believe in the presence of demons.   

The psychology in the book is excellent. I particularly liked the way the character of Elv is drawn. We are sympathetic to her, like Claire we are in on the secret of why she is the way she is, and yet the author does not refrain from showing how nasty Elv can be, vicious towards her sister Meg, even willing even to steal from her own mother. Claire too pays a price for what happened. She blames herself for not being the one taken, for not saving Elv from the reform school, for the car crash that kills her other sister. Meg is the least well-drawn of the three sisters.

The Story Sisters is to my mind a good example of magic realism. There is a school of thought that magic realism is a fiction form created about and/or by the oppressed. It is used in this book to explore the consequences of abuse.

by Zoe Brooks

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess: Qara Köz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, as two worlds are brought together by one woman attempting to command her own destiny...

But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess?

Amazon description

Review

I have not read very much Rushdie and I was not sure what I would make of this book. Going by the reviews it seems to divide opinion, but I loved it.

The book is like an incredible tapestry, rich in imagery, history (it comes with a long bibliography), descriptions, themes and characters. Although a work of historical fiction, as Rushdie has said: "non-historians think of history as being a collection of facts, whereas actually it's not -- it's a collection of theories about the past. We revise our view of the past all the time, depending on our own present concerns."  
As rationalist westerners we see history through our realism focused eyes. But the worlds that Rushdie draws - the Mughal court and Renaissance Florence - believed in magic, enchantment and religion. It is therefore only right that a book set in such a world should share those belief structures. Accurate historical fiction is magic realism and that is what Rushdie writes brilliantly, for example the Great Mughal, Akbar, has a fantasy wife, who exists not only in the mind of Akbar but also on Rushdie's pages as an independent character.

Of all the characters the best drawn is Akbar, who is a mass of contradictions, a bloody tyrant who meditates on the role of kingship, religion and identity. The yellow-haired Italian stranger is less well drawn with good reason because we are viewing him through Akbar's eyes and Akbar cannot tell whether the stranger's story is true or not and he and we never know. We are shown at the beginning of the book how ruthless the stranger can be in pursuing his own interests. Rushdie has been criticised by some readers as being anti-women in this book, defining women by their sexuality, as whores or sexual enchantresses. Although a feminist and a liker of strong women characters this aspect of the book did not bother me. Rushdie is accurately depicting the world of the Mughals and Renaissance Italy and the place of women in it. The enchantress of the title uses her sexual beauty and force of will to bind men to her. The book closes with her saying to Akbar, "And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours." And Akbar thinking "Until you're not, my Love. Until You're not" for the Enchantress had always moved on from one man to another as their power to protect her fails. The power of men is shown throughout the book to be fragile and short, even Akbar's great palace is brought to dust. Perhaps, one wonders, the only power that survives is that of the illusion of the perfect woman.

by Zoe Brooks

The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser

Twelve fabulous stories from 'the most inventive, wistful, sexy, and wryly comic writer of our time' (Washington Post), his first book since Martin Dressler. Unmistakably Millhauser, these stories range from the imaginative to the phantasmagoric, and all inhabit a strange world, part American, part European, wholly fantastic. From the terrifying opening tale of the knife-thrower, the consummate entertainer pushing his audience to collusion in the ultimate thrill to a fictional meditation on the far from innocent nightlife of teenage girls, these vividly told stories demonstrate once again why Steven Millhauser is one of the most acclaimed, and certainly one of the most distinctive, American writers of the age.   Amazon description

Review

Millhauser's short stories fall in to two types: the dreamlike more poetic stories focused on individuals and often written in the first person and the more formal almost objective accounts of subtle alternative history. The stories often start out in an apparently normal mundane world before moving into the magical alternative realities, drawing the reader with them.

There are certain themes that run through the stories. His characters seem to be trying to escape the world, flying above it on a carpet or balloon, going underground into the tunnels under a town or into a theme parks. In a way this is paralled by our experience as readers. Indeed the theme of art/artifice gradually becoming larger, perhaps better than life but at the same time becoming disturbing appears in several of the stories. Other stories deal with adolescence as magical/dreamlike, alien to the adult world.

My favourite story was The Sisterhood of the Night in which the adults are worried by what they perceive as a secret society of teenage girls, who gather at night but seem to say and do nothing. At first one is fascinated by what the girls are up to, but after a while one suddenly realises that the action in the story is in the increasingly paranoid reactions of the adults. How easily it could slip into a witchhunt. We too have been guilty of speculating.

I am in awe at Steven Millhauser's stylistic mastery. He uses the first person point of view with great ease, even though he has little time in a short story to establish the voice. His descriptions are wonderful: poetic at times, exact at others.  I particularly admire the subtle way he shifts the ground under the reader until suddenly, just like the audience in the title story, you are no longer sure what you are seeing.

by Zoe Brooks