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stacialithub's review
4.0
Really enjoyed this one. I think Winterson actually managed to get to the emotional core of the story more than the bard himself did. (Is that possible?) It's a tragedy that ends in a comedy, I guess, but Winterson's version does a better job of intertwining the stories over the time gap, I think. Worth reading.
heathssm's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
__nyx__'s review against another edition
4.0
‘It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change. […] Everything, but she couldn’t say it. Too much, but she couldn’t explain it. Enough, but she couldn’t understand why what she wanted seemed to have happened and she didn’t want it at all. Soon […] we have to go to work, have children, make homes, make dinner, make love. We will have dreams but will they come true?
[…] Love. The size of it. The scale of it. Unimaginable. Vast. Your love for me. My love for you. Our love for one another. Real. Yes.’
The Gap of Time it took between starting and finishing this book is unforgivable. But so is the play of Shakespeare’s The Winter Tale. But this is only my opinion. And as ironic as it is, as an English teacher, I hate Shakespeare. I don’t quite enjoy his tanglement of words. I think as I’ve grown older I’ve grown more fond of the slowness of love and its language and the way it carries you and I feel like the language of Shakespeare is too clunky hence. And it pains me to see so many of Winterson’s gorgeous, picturesque words dancing on the page but in the midst of a Shakespeare take. But for her, I respect it. And for her, I read on until the last word. And despite my lack of interest in Shakespeare and my lack of understanding of the intertextuality hence, I don’t even care. I don’t care because Winterson’s words made it better. They make everything better.
They make love more beautiful than love is. And love is very beautiful.
Time and connection and love explored timelessly.
A must.
Especially if you cannot stand Shakespeare.
[…] Love. The size of it. The scale of it. Unimaginable. Vast. Your love for me. My love for you. Our love for one another. Real. Yes.’
The Gap of Time it took between starting and finishing this book is unforgivable. But so is the play of Shakespeare’s The Winter Tale. But this is only my opinion. And as ironic as it is, as an English teacher, I hate Shakespeare. I don’t quite enjoy his tanglement of words. I think as I’ve grown older I’ve grown more fond of the slowness of love and its language and the way it carries you and I feel like the language of Shakespeare is too clunky hence. And it pains me to see so many of Winterson’s gorgeous, picturesque words dancing on the page but in the midst of a Shakespeare take. But for her, I respect it. And for her, I read on until the last word. And despite my lack of interest in Shakespeare and my lack of understanding of the intertextuality hence, I don’t even care. I don’t care because Winterson’s words made it better. They make everything better.
They make love more beautiful than love is. And love is very beautiful.
Time and connection and love explored timelessly.
A must.
Especially if you cannot stand Shakespeare.
artemishi's review
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Characters: 6, each character was distinguishable from the others, but they were fairly one-dimensional, defined more by a single instance in their lives than by actual personality. I don't find them very memorable, and I didn't care much what happened to any of them. That said, Winterson presents an interesting take on Shakespeare's original characters (themselves rather one-dimensional) and a possible toxic masculinity origin for the two male leads' overblown emotional reactions.
Atmosphere: 7, the setting was rather bare bones, but recognizable (both New Bohemia and London). Full marks for setting being established and developed through Shep's narrative perspective and Leo's narrative perspective (two very different voices), neither of which feel a strong connection to place- though Shep has clearly been molded by place and Leo clearly avoids forming emotional attachment to place and just tries to buy everything.
Writing: 6, this is a tough one to rate. I loved the voice employed for Shep's narrative. It felt easy, natural, and I could hear his voice in my head. Leo's chapters, on the other hand, were punctuated by stilted, violent, and obscene language, which turned me off. Was it supposed to push me away from the character? Maybe. But it also pushed me away from the story. Maybe if his conversations with Pauline had been more casual, it would've felt less awkward. She also sometimes wrote dialogue with quotation marks, and sometimes not, so you didn't know if a character was entirely in their own head or actually conversing with the other person present. Given the melodramatic nature of the story and her own more philosophical wanderings, some passages felt genuinely profound and impactful, while others felt like the author was stroking her own ego.
Plot: 8, the pacing was a highlight of this retelling. I understand the difficulty keeping interest, given the source material's jumping around in time, so I'm sure pacing must've been a difficult aspect of writing this. But there was tension, mystery, and emotional resonance throughout, from start to finish. That tension propelled me to keep reading, more than anything.
Intrigue: 6, the story held my interest while I was reading it, apart from wincing through Leo's chapters. But I wasn't gravitating toward it in my free time.
Logic: 9, more full marks for consistent characters- everyone acted in line with their own motives, which were largely either love or fear. As much as I didn't want to deal with Leo's insecure-manyboy ego or Xeno's (sometimes written as Zeno as well) insecurity-dressed-as-highbrow-maturity, every action they took was in line with their impulses (likely due to being ignored by their fathers). The female characters, by contrast, were more difficult to understand (MiMi is largely defined by being a singer and then a victim, Pauline is a voice of reason to balance Leo, Perdita understandably wants to meet her birth parents). But again, the throughline between past action and present action was discernable. And although the play involves some breaking of the rules of reality, the retelling is solidly contemporary and plays by our known reality rules.
Enjoyment: 6, it was OK. It seems like, for every passage or chapter that I liked and which resonated with me (largely Shep's, to be honest), there was one that was gratuitous and off-putting, or felt lazily written. As a retelling, I applaud its faithfulness to the original play and bringing modern relevance. But the style just wasn't entirely to my liking.
maissad's review
3.0
I stumbled upon this book a couple of months ago and I think one of the greatest things for bookworms is discovering new authors and books. The Gap of Time is a part of Hogarth Shakespeare Project Series, a group of Shakespeare retellings written by different authors such as Margaret Atwood, Joe Nesbo, Anne Tyler to name a few. Jeanette Winterson's writing is poignant , I sensed the sadness, romance , haterd , paranoia of the characters who kept their Shakespearean traits despite the modernization . Winterson's choice of re-writing The Winter's Tale was deeply personal as she had explained in the end of the book. Just like Perdita , the main character , Winterson is adopted and this fact affected her life on different levels. She opted for a book that highlights forgiveness and breaking generational traumas instead of one of Shakespeare's earlier work where characters are cursed by tragedy , revenge, death and most importantly by their parents' mistakes.
libkatem's review
3.0
This book is fanfiction of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale which... I have never read.
So it stands on it's own, is what I can tell you. If you only know what happens in the The Winter's Tale because of the introduction, that's fair, that's fine, this book will carry you through. Winterson is incredible like that.
There was one section where she breaks the fourth wall and talks about the play, and then breaks back into the story. It didn't ruin it for me, but it would have been better without it, in my opinion.
So it stands on it's own, is what I can tell you. If you only know what happens in the The Winter's Tale because of the introduction, that's fair, that's fine, this book will carry you through. Winterson is incredible like that.
There was one section where she breaks the fourth wall and talks about the play, and then breaks back into the story. It didn't ruin it for me, but it would have been better without it, in my opinion.
collegecate's review
4.0
I listened to the audio book which had three narrators: one for Shep's perspective, one for Leo's, and one for Perdita's. It was really weird but interesting to see how some characters, like Zeno in particular, were portrayed differently by Perdita's voice vs. Leo's. Overall, an interesting retelling, the weird gaps in the play are mostly covered here, also I mind it less in a book than in a play. The video game metaphor got old though. Also, confused New Bohemia with Arcadia and then California before realizing it was New Orleans.
Highly recommended by Elizabeth S.
Highly recommended by Elizabeth S.