Winter's Tale Author: Mark Helprin | Language: English | ISBN:
B007XA3KUM | Format: EPUB
Winter's Tale Description
A bestseller that takes readers on a journey to New York of the Belle Epoque, where Peter Lake attempts to rob a Manhattan mansion only to find the daughter of the house at home. Thus begins the love between the middle-aged Irishman and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. “This novel...is a gifted writer’s love affair with the language” (Newsday).
This e-book includes a sample chapter of IN SUNLIGHT AND IN SHADOW.
- File Size: 2509 KB
- Print Length: 770 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0156031191
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 20, 1983)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007XA3KUM
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #818 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #71
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary - #86
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary
- #71
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary - #86
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary
Winter's Tale, a gorgeous masterpiece by master writer Mark Helprin is a book about the beauty and complexity inherent in the human soul, about God, love and justice and the power of dreams, those that take place while we sleep and those that we conceive while awake.
The story begins and ends with Peter Lake: orphan, master mechanic, and master second-storey man. One night Peter attempts to rob a fortresslike mansion in New York's Upper West Side. Although he believes the house to be empty, it is not. Beverly Penn, daughter of the owner is home. Home and dying, and thus begins a love affair between a middle-aged Irish burgler and a fatally-ill heiress.
A simple and uneducated man, Lake cannot understand the love in which he becomes so thoroughly entangled that he is driven "to stop time and bring back the dead."
Inbetween the story of Peter Lake and his quest to overcome death through the power of enduring love, Helprin shows us a magical view of a New York City that is, at times, so extraoridnarily real you think you are there, and at other times so magical you only wish you could be.
All of Helprin's protagonists, however, are not native New Yorkers and have come from elsewhere to seek their destiny, a fact that goes a long way towards helping those of us not familiar with the city feel that we have come to both know and love it.
Winter's Tale spans the entire twentieth century and we get a glimpse of everything from horse drawn carriages on cobbled streets to lunatics who rub elbows with sable-wrapped heiresses on Fifth Avenue.
Winter's Tale was the first contemporary novel I ever bought in hardcover; it came out when I was 13 years old, and I was so taken by the worshipful front page review in the NY Times Book Review that I bought it. At the time, most of my literary reading had consisted of Charles Dickens novels, and David Copperfield had already put the writing bug in me. But it was Winter's Tale that fixed me on my course--Helprin's writing was so astonishing, his asides so insightful, his descriptions of places and people so tangible (I can still taste the hot rum toddies from the Oyster Bar!), and best of all, he was ALIVE.
In fact, I was so enraptured with the book as a 13-year-old that for many years I was afraid to pick it up again, for fear I'd find it a lesser piece of work than I'd remembered. A Soldier Of the Great War had not had the same effect on me (though I still thought it was a superb book), and Memoir From Antproof Case had struck me as entertaining but erratic. Finally, a couple of years ago, I fetched my old hardcover Winter's Tale from my parents' house and got up the nerve to page through it again. Right away, I was swept right back into Helprin's fairy tale New York. It is what a great city ought to be: larger, wilder, more beautiful, a place where dramas play themselves out on a cosmic scale. And the thief Peter Lake remains one of my favorite characters in all of literature.
The book does have its flaws, but what novel doesn't? The sections with Peter Lake are far and away the best; Part Two feels like Helprin is marking time (it was the slowest part of the book even when I was 13), and there are some who might find his italicized introductory sections tendentious (though I still get shivery when I read them).
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