Winter&#39;s Tale

Winter's Tale

Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B001682OV8 | Format: PDF

Winter's Tale Description

This is a book about the beauty and complexity of the human soul, about God, love, and justice, and yet you can lose yourself in it as if it were a dream. You will be transported to New York of the Belle Epoque, to a city clarified by a siege of unprecedented winters. One night, Peter Lake?orphan, master-mechanic, and master second-story man?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 affair between the middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. Because of a love that at first he cannot fully understand, Peter, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven ?to stop time and bring back the dead.? His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beset by winter, is a truly beautiful and extraordinary story.

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Audible Audio Edition
Listening Length: 27 hours and 45 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: AudioGO
Audible.com Release Date: February 28, 2008
Language: English
ASIN: B001682OV8

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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