Evanston: WINTER’S TALE
Evanston: WINTER’S TALE
Winter is a window away. The sky is low and gray. The ground covered with ice and snow. And although the temperature at the moment is just above freezing, it has been below for most of this month.
But the subject line is not that winter, but the title of a magical novel by Mark Helprin.
I first learned of Mark Helprin in the early 1990s when a later novel, A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, was published. I’ve read it twice and will again later this year. Like most of my books my copy is on the boat. I consider it one of the two greatest contemporary American novels. (In case you wonder, the other is Larry McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE.
WINTER’S TALE was written almost a decade earlier, first published in 1983, and has gained even more critical acclaim. While I still slightly prefer A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, it is easy to see why. WINTER’S TALE is an extraordinary original affirmative work of the imagination.
Set mostly in New York City at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and at the end, it includes a flying, fighting white horse, Dickensian characters, a bridge of light, and a main character, Peter Lake, who disappears early in the century only to return at the end, unaged and amnesiac. I suppose the term for all this is magic realism. Certainly I often thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquez when reading WINTER’S TALE.
There is much, much more. This is a book to be read rather than described; and I fully expect to again.
Mark Helprin is a great writer.
Saturday, December 13, 2008