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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | FIC/WINTERSON | 31482002648304 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC WINTERSON | 31481005096248 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC WIN | 32124001688712 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC WIN | 31550002115936 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC WINTERSON | 32129002084092 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION WINTERSON | 32132002786120 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | F WIN | 32135001306964 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F WINTERSON | 31990004213307 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The Winter's Tale 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, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.
In The Gap of Time , Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale , we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Even the most devout Shakespeareans have trouble with his late plays-the ones where lost children reappear, the dead live again, and, with enough coincidences and unlikely events, King Lear-level tragedy ends happily. Winterson (The Daylight Gate), however, loves The Winter's Tale so much that she's written a "cover version" of it in this, the first in Hogarth's Shakespeare series in which contemporary writers "retell" the Bard's plays. She replaces King Leontes with Leo, an arrogant English money manager; old friend King Polixenes becomes Xeno, a video-game designer. As in the play, Leo's conviction that the child his wife is carrying is not his but Xeno's results in broken hearts and ruined friendships, exile, and a daughter turned foundling, raised by a bar owner and his son in a New Orleans-like city. But Winterson doesn't just update the story: she fills in its psychological nuances. Why would Leo suddenly decide his wife is sleeping with Xeno? Winterson's backstory can't justify his actions, but it does add fascinating context. And in her version, the violence, by turns comic book and terrifying, happens onstage, not off. It's fun to see Winterson solve the play's problems, but the book's real strength is the way her language shifts between earthy and poetic and her willingness to use whatever she needs to tell the story (angels, video games, carjackings). She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
What the critics thought of Michael Aschroft and Isabel Oakeshott's biography of David Cameron, the second volume of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher and Jeanette Winterson's version of The Winter's Tale Last week's non-fiction pages were dominated by a clutch of political biographies, not least Call Me Dave by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, already infamous as "the piggy one". In the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson lamented the fact that the book had become an "instant sensation, based on one unsubstantiated and single-sourced allegation", which he went on to elaborate in some detail (in case the reader was left in any doubt, the review was also illustrated with a large photograph of the PM clutching a piglet -- see above). Lawson found it "vile" that the authors had also included a "damaging and hurtful allegation about Samantha Cameron" -- though he didn't give specific details on that one. The Observer's Chris Mullin was slightly better disposed towards the Tory donor: "Despite the nonsense about the pig's head, this is a biography almost entirely free of malice ... Lord Ashcroft's fingerprints are largely absent." But Toby Young, writing in the Mail on Sunday, described the book as a "hatchet job" offering a "smorgasbord of scandalous revelations". Charlotte Henry, in the Independent on Sunday, summed up the general verdict: "It feels more like dinner party tittle-tattle than prime ministerial biography." A more substantial offering came in the form of the second volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher. The book's subtitle echoes the Wham! hit "Everything She Wants", which gave the Mail on Sunday's Craig Brown an irresistible gag opportunity. "I can't deny that there were odd times in the narrative -- the ins and outs of Europe, or the rates, or the Northern Ireland situation -- when another Wham! song -- 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' -- would seep into my head," he wrote, before adding hurriedly, "but these moments were few and far between." John Lloyd, writing in the Financial Times, called the book "a study of detailed depth, and fine and transparent judgment", though he would have liked "a larger consideration of Thatcher's influence". In the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook sounded positively misty-eyed: "A model of close research, fluent prose and impeccable judgment ... One of the great biographical achievements of our times." In the Times, Matthew Parris was less convinced. "There are people who, under the magnifying glass, shrink. This, I fear (and I think he fears) is turning out to be Charles Moore's problem as biographer ... [the book] tends to encumber rather than enlighten, and in doing so diminish. I'm beginning to wonder whether this life is big enough for three volumes." Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time, a "retelling" of The Winter's Tale, was praised, albeit in a lukewarm fashion, by Joanna Kavenna in the Sunday Telegraph. "Sometimes I wondered why on earth Winterson had thrown in her lot, mostly, with sober literary realism when she might have cast her characters into the wild storms of her exceptional hyper-realist imagination instead," she wrote. For Lucasta Miller in the Independent, however, Winterson tackled the task "often with great ingenuity and always with good humour ... What could have been a cynically postmodern jeu d'esprit pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it."
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
BEYOND WORDS: What Animals Think and Feel, by Carl Safina. (Picador, $18.) Humans have been far too anthropocentric when trying to understand the mental experiences of other animals, Safina, a marine conservationist, argues here. His observations on grieving elephants in Kenya, endangered wolves in Yellowstone National Park and a harmonious whale society in the Pacific Northwest build the case that other species are capable of nuanced thought and emotion. KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST, by J. Ryan Stradal. (Penguin, $16.) This bighearted novel is partly a culinary biography of Minnesota, tracing how traditions (lutefisk) give way to fads, and partly a sendup of food. The story's central character, Eva, is born into a food-obsessed family and soon displays preternatural gifts of her own, using cooking to overcome a childhood tragedy. THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen and Anthony Berris. (Riverhead, $16.) The author, an Israeli, has built a fan base devoted to his fantastical short stories. In this, his first nonfiction book, Keret focuses on the stretch of time between his son's birth and his father's death, and considers the absurdities of fatherhood and family life. DAYS OF AWE, by Lauren Fox. (Vintage, $16.) The death of Isabel's close friend in a car crash sets off a period of tragedies; a year later, Isabel and her husband have divorced, her adolescent daughter has grown aloof and a number of her other relationships have become unmoored. Isabel reconsiders her identity throughout this novel as the relationships that once defined her fall away, but her rapport with her mother remains at her emotional core. THE WEATHER EXPERIMENT: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, by Peter Moore. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) If forecasts and precise weather reports are now a ubiquitous part of life, in the 1800s, the premise was improbable - even laughable. Moore, a Briton, tells the story of the 19th-century scientists and sailors who set out to show that data could help predict future meteorological patterns, and he includes the American contributions to the field. THE GAP OF TIME, by Jeanette Winterson. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In this novel, the inaugural title in a series of books "covering" plays by Shakespeare, Winterson ad apts the story of "The Winter's Tale" to a con temporary, post-financial-crash setting. Leo, a paranoid hedge fund manager in London, sends his newborn daughter to New Bohemia, a facsimile of New Orleans, after a fit of jealous rage. MIDNIGHT'S FURIES: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition, by Nisid Hajari. (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) Hajari's account focuses on the months preceding the 1947 split between India and Pakistan, probing one of the conflict's central questions: How did two countries with so many commonalities end up as bitter rivals?