Winter's Tale

I've not been so disappointed in a novel in a long, long time. I really wanted to love this novel, but honestly it was a chore to read. The author seems to be completely disconnected from his reader and is off in his own world. But I think a book needs a compelling plot and some sort of payoff

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after such a long and labored buildup -- and to me, this book had neither.

Winter's Tale held the promise of being a book that I would have absolutely loved: a fantastical novel set in a New York City of the Belle Epoque -but in some alternate universe- with perpetual winters, with a large cast of characters, and a love story at its core. I really looked forward to reading it, and was actually excited at the prospect of immersing myself into the world that Mark Helprin created, and losing hours for the story that he told, reading deep into the night. This last year, the novel was finally adapted into a movie - but I decided that I could wait no longer and dove right in to the novel, instead. I am sad to say that I was wrong - and that with each passing page initial enthusiasm that I had for the book waned, and as I was nearing the end it disappeared altogether

Instead, Winter's Tale is a mess - it's a long book, and throughout all that length I could never find a real story that it wanted to tell. Perhaps the largest offense of the novel is the love story, which makes absolutely no sense. Early in the novel Peter Lake breaks into an luxurious apartment, where for no reason a girl falls in love with him at first sight. Literally. Beverly Penn is her name, and she is perfect - hopelessly beautiful, and brilliant. People are changed for the better when they are around her, and even evil villains stop being evil. She's also dying. But from tuberculosis - nothing which would spoil her beauty and perfection too much. What! Ever!

So then Beverly eventually dies 'off-screen', and the book loses what little focus it had. Characters come and go without much impact on whatever events are going on, random people fall in love with other random people, and we're never sure what the novel is actually supposed to be about. There is also an actual flying horse named Athansor, who serves no real purpose other than getting Peter Lake out of completely impossible situations.

Maybe had the entire book been written as a poking satire, laughing at our culture's wish to harness the perceived perfection of times long gone while simultaneously making terrible decisions that will lead even further away from a golden age, it might not have been so tedious. All the word misuse was not fanciful, the ridiculous names not whimsical. It was grating and it irritated because the story was not a simple satire.

It was also supposed to be a love poem to New York City. But instead, we also have a...what? Fallen angel trying to make the rainbow bridge in order to get home? Or maybe the rainbow bridge was to connect other realities with this one. I don't know, it was never explained...! And now that I'm done with the novel, I'm not sure I care. In fact, I never did discover a plot. The human characters came and went without any real impact, either on the story or on me, although the magical horse is characterized probably better than most. Peter Lake does span the whole novel, but he spends the final part in a daze of incomprehension which I shared. The occasional moments of drama all resolved easily and without any great surprises. Everything happens without much point, even within the universe of the book. Why would a super idealistic newspaper run a column entitled 'The Mayor Looks Like an Egg. Period.?' Why is it that the one horrid person in the universe is a complete buffoon? What was the point of the horse other than a deus ex machina? Why did the little girl die in the first place? What is the point of her coming back to life? Why did we hear about Beverly's so called prophecy of the little girl in the last 50 pages of the book? And worst of all, why is there that complete copout of for what happened to Peter Lake, it must be left to the reader's imagination? My imagination's pretty strong, I could have imagined what happened to him about 500 pages before it was actually asked of me. Such a pointless waste of time.

I was irritated by the wholesale dismissal of non-central characters, but it seemed I was expected to believe in the city and care what happened to it. I am reluctant to call it New York because it is obviously not a real place. In fact, we are somewhat confused as to what century it is that Peter Lake "time-travels" to at first.. Was it modern day? Who knows?

The problem is that in this case, and in this novel, fantasy does not mean "anything goes." Dude, fantasy must have a self-consistent internal logic....! You have magic? Okay. Your magic needs rules, boundaries, limitations....! This is the source of tension and suspense. In Helprin's universe, there are no rules. Nothing is constant. Nothing obeys causal logic. Magic occurs capriciously to paint a pretty image or solve plot problems. Since anything can happen at any time, there is zero tension. Without tension, I find no reason to read any more of Helprin's fiction.

To make it worse, Mark Helprin is one of those authors who love hearing their own voices, and relentlessly drags every little description to make it as evocative and poetic as he possibly can, being less and less aware of this self-indulgence as the novel progresses. It seemed more like the constant glut of "lyric passages" were instead used to beat us in the head with Helprin's massive and expansive vocabulary, instead of educating/entertaining us plebeians. (It made me feel like one, anyway.). Also, one of the minor character (Mrs. Gamely) in fact vomited up such a volume of antiquated - and possibly non-existent words, that it seemed she ate thesauruses for breakfast. My iPad's dictionary had no idea what most of them were, and neither did the Internet.

I think this is a book which desperately needed an editor, but somehow never got one. Or worse - this is an actual edited book, and somewhere in the universe still exists the original manuscript of Winter's Tale, three times as long. (*shudders*). Ultimately meaningless, there were waaayyyy too many beautifully descriptive passages, mostly of the wind & snow. Unfortunately, there are SO many of them, and I found my heart beginning to sink whenever another chapter began with another beautifully descriptive passage about the wind & snow. I mean, is it just me, or is Mark Helprin constantly trying to sound profound rather than to make actual sense? I literally had to FORCE myself back to this novel, three times, just in order to finish it. And I LOVE large novels...!!

I also have to say that there's never any real sense of arriving somewhere in this plot, and learning something important and unique. The book never shakes off its internal confusion and decides what it wants to be and where it wants to go, and ultimately fails to leave any mark. I'd rather eat a shitload of snow than read it again. What a missed opportunity.....

Bottom line is that I don't mind reading the occasional crap, but I do mind deadly dull crap. In the end, I felt no attachment to the city, or the characters. and to me it seemed, finally, that the author didn't either. And I am left scratching my head, thinking that somehow, I have missed something.

1-1/2 stars, for making me work for nothing.

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I've read a couple of the other reviews of this book and the consensus seems to be that it's dense, complex, and reasonably well written. The story it's self is difficult to adequately summarize in any reasonable way due to the complexity. This seems to either make folks love the book or feel

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measured ambivalence to it.

Personally I found it a lot less dense than, say, Gravity's Rainbow. But I guess this is like comparing the graceful yet maze-like ridges of a coral brain to the fiendish complexity of the Gordian knot.

Interestingly I'd say that member fyrefly98 paints a pretty good picture of the story, except that where-as fyrefly98 didn't think very highly of it, I loved it.

To me the story seems not so much a narrative intended to be pursued diligently in order to catch all the carefully plotted twists and turns. Like Crowley's "Little, Big", the book is more a realm of wonderous imagery and sensation to wade through and become immersed in.

And if that's your thing, they maybe you'll enjoy it as well.

- Peter K.

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An amazing book: a love song to New York, a vindication of God's justice, and a insane, daffy picaresque all in one. Re-reading it over the past few weeks (now = 6.22.08) has made me realize how thin my exposure to real art has been over the past eighteen months. The sublime can transform your

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life, and transform the world into a golden dream of justice.

The second half drags and rambles. It still may be the greatest novel of the last 50 years.

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Beautifully written and huge in scope. I'm not sure the magnitude of the story quite justified 750 pages of prose, but Helprin's love of the language is evident on every page and this is a big story about heroism, justice, and true love.

Mark Helprin rocks. I love all his book, except this one. Too darn long, and too darn wierd. Like eating candy all day long.

Read this book at least once a year for about 20 years, from the age of 16 onwards, approximately, and loved it every time. Amazingly enough, I hardly ever met anyone else who knew it. Great read for cold-weather people.

A book like Winter's Tale should be read in small portions simply for the enjoyment of the literature.To read until the end only means
you can look forward to beginning this wonderful example of poetic literature again!!!

This may be the strangest, most beautiful and most frustrating book I have read. In terms of language, Helprin is a poet. That's the strength and weakness of the story, because the story is Helprin's vision of New York City, and poetic vision does not always translate well into plot. But no matter.

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Peter Lake, Beverly Penn, Hardesty Marratta, Jackson Mead, Praeger de Pinto, Harry Penn, Virginia Gamely, Pearly Soames, and a white horse named Athansor all exist in a shining, fluctuating world as mysterious as the white cloud wall that rises around New York as if the city sits in the eye of an enormous, eternal hurricane. At times the willing suspension of disbelief requires some heavy lifting. Yet after 748 pages, I was sad the book was over. It's as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez channeled Walt Whitman and E.L. Doctorow. Helprin took a hell of a risk with this book. Ultimately he is myth-making, and in the end his characters want what most of us want: love, purpose, eternity, and a touch of the empyrean.

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Inside my copy, I found a page of notes on Helprin's vocabulary, including the following: liripoop, rapparee, dagswain, bronstrop, caroteel, opuntia, sough, patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, glockamoid, mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale,

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comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary, few of which I now remember. It was harder to track down definitions in those days before the web...

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Winter's Tale was my introduction to Mark Helprin. I sat on a couch in the summer sunlight and was so entranced by his descriptions of the frozen winter that I would look up from the book and find myself shivering from cold. Helprin is a wonderful wordsmith and draws you in to a tale of love,

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adventure and the fantastic dreams of building the modern world in the early 20th century.

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Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin was on the New York Times bestseller list in 1983. It has such great character development, the writing is beautiful, and the author really knows how to tell a story.

The story takes place in New York City at the turn of the century. The main character came to America

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as a baby, but his parents were turned away because they had consumption (tuberculosis). Because they knew they were both going to die and wanted the best for their baby, they put him inside a little boat and lowered him off the ship and into the water. He was found by an uncivilized tribe of clam diggers who turned him out into the world at age 12. He knew nothing of the world and how it worked. He had no concept of money and didn't know how to read. He came across two beautiful women dancing in the moonlight and he joined them in their street dancing. They taught him how to pick pockets while dancing. One day one of the girls found $30,000 in the pocket of a businessman and split it between the three of them. They told him that if he took his share to a building with the letters B-A-N-K written on it, that his money would be safe there. In his naivety and ignorance, he takes the money into a bank, puts it in a pile on the floor in the corner, and leaves. Eventually, he's taken into an orphanage, but flees after accidentally committing a crime. In his flight, he is taken under the wings of a gang called the Short Tails. He eventually gets on their bad side, and he and his spirited white horse go into hiding. He lives above the constellations on the ceiling of Central Station. One night he decides to rob the home of a rich man and is struck dumb by the sound of the man's beautiful fevered daughter playing the piano in the middle of the night. She has consumption and lives on the roof of her mansion in a room made especially for her so that she can enjoy the fresh winter air swaddled in furs and down blankets while watching the constellations of the night sky. She dreams of meeting a man and experiencing bodily pleasures during her inevitably short lifetime, and so perhaps this awestruck thief will do ...

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In a mythical New York, people get caught in time and are transported through the centuries to make their marks.

Beautifully written, haunting with memorable characters (many of whom are caricatures, but superbly drawn). This is a languid tale, and took me a long time to fight through, but was well

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worth the effort.

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A waste of time.

One of those rare books I read over and over. Helprin is a master of magical realism. Splendid prose, a flying horse, the Short Tails roaming the rafters of Grand Central Station, a tubercular heiress on a rooftop, and Peter Lake -- master mechanic and second-story man of New York's Belle Epoque.

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What's not to love?

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This is one of the best books I've read. The writing is absolutely beautiful, the characters are wonderfully fleshed out and the story continues to enchant after multiple readings.

Wow, this is just one big messy pile of "um, wha?!" Magical realism, as you may remember, is super not my jam, mostly because I am a firm believer in the notionthat if you introduce magic or any other out-of-the-ordinary elements into an otherwise-normal setting, you're gonna need to explain and

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justify it. But this novel goes so far beyond breaking that rule that it pushes over into utter nonsense. So we have a steampunk-ish, old-timey, yet sort-of-quasi-futuristic NYC, a street rat orphan who's wise beyond his means, a magical (and in no way explained) flying horse, a street gang that's meant, I think, to be menacing but comes off 100% comical and which is, I think, supposed to be the main Big Bad, but disappears for most of the book only to POOF back into the action at the end, again, with no explanation, and a super-rich and super-brilliant (or maybe just totally bananas) young woman who's dying of TB. Oh, and a cloud bank that's somehow deadly and surrounds NYC but also moves but also people come and go from the city unharmed with - you guessed it - no explanation. But wait - there's more! Helprin apparently gets bored of these main characters, so he abandons them for a new set, but their actions and circumstances aren't any less lacking in logic. Just...wooof. And it doesn't read as if all these logistical problems are the point; instead it reads like a sloppily-written fevre dream, or a toddler telling you about the dream they had last night and getting sidetracked many, MANY times along the way. Yeah, it's that agonizing and exhausting.

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This book is amoung the best books I've ever read.

I just started adding books to my profile, so I don't have time today to write about my love affair with this book (since 1986). Mark Helprin has become one of the most respected contemporary writers; he's often lumped in with Jewish writiers or Magic Realism. Neither aspect is remotely as

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important as his gorgeous writing, which comes off as intuitive, effortless, passionate (rather than studied, deliberate, or structured). For a guy whose themes so frequently revolve around the significance of aesthetic beauty in worlds real and imagined, it's sheer joy to find, upon rereading, how no sense of plan or manipulation comes through. Some people don't always have the patience for writing-for-writing's-sake, but this is a book you can open to any page and find a paragraph that's a joy to read, even utterly out of context.

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I cannot stand this book.

I read it back in the late 80s, and remembered disliking it. I'm re-reading for book club. I'm at 16% and am wondering if I'm going to bother plowing all the way through... my mind has already been fully refreshed as to WHY I disliked it so very much.

I think I'm going to

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downgrade from two stars to one star... I have a feeling that my dislike softened over the years along with my memory of the details.

Incidentally, this dislike is actually unrelated, so far, to Helprin's politics. I just don't appreciate the way he writes. The author clearly thinks he is oh so witty, and that his cartoonish fable version of New York is just so amazing... and reading it, I feel like I'm listening to fingernails grating on a chalkboard.

Update... I tried to read a bit more of this today, and subjected myself to yet more verbose, pseudo-profound whimsy. I dearly love my book club, and if I hadn't read this before, I would slog through. But I have already read it, and know it's not going to get any better.

In closing, I will borrow a Shakespeare reference, and one far more apropos than Helprin's (it's a true stretch to compare this book to the play of the same title): "It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."

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This is neither urban fantasy nor magical realism, occupying it own niche between the two. It is dreamy realism, an alternate version of reality overlapping our own where most things are recognizable but with fantastic elements scattered among them. A wall of clouds plays with time, pornography

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burns through the floor, police applaud in their sleep, an indefatigable horse can fly... Some people in the story are shocked and don't know what to make of it, while others hardly blink, and therein lies the clue and the difference. Perhaps the author's greatest invention lies outside of the city: the Lake of the Coheeries, an upstate backwoods Shangri-la. Another layer of unreality is added since its 1983 publication, in presenting a millennium without the Internet, cellphones etc. and events that never happened.

New York provides the perfect setting for the majority of this novel. It is one of a handful of cities that pervade the western cultural conscience even of those who will never lay eyes on it. Many of its citizens no doubt love and appreciate their city, but for distant admirers never exposed to day-in, day-out experience that can take the shine off of anything it projects an aura of myth and legend, like a distant land of Oz.

While it is not a difficult novel to read, it is also not straightforward. Characters we're introduced to in part one are set aside for the entirety of part two as we move significantly forward in time. It didn't bother me, personally. I can see how the passage of time is mirrored in the interval we must wait before Peter Lake returns (multiple clues are dropped to assure us that he eventually will.) We're introduced to several other engaging characters who can be made three-dimensional, rather than rushing their introduction all at once. And we can share Peter's disorientation upon his rejoining the story, now an outsider among the characters we've been following in his absence.

The novel's ending becomes clearer upon noting the underlying unreality to our reality, and that this novel is populated by characters with the ability to see it. Pearly Soames is fascinated by colour, the Baymen predict the future, Beverly's father opines that she has seen what he cannot, etc. - and then there is Peter Lake, in a class of his own. It is due to these characters that lines between worlds have been blurred in the telling, thus the 'magical realism' elements. In that underlying reality, justice is ultimately served and all things must be balanced. Someone who understands that balance as well as Peter Lake (he is a master mechanic in every sense) knows how he must proceed if he is to maintain it. He knows the sacrifice he must make in order to obtain his desired victories.

The descriptive passages in this novel must be mentioned. Mark Helprin is a writer's writer, not necessarily for the words he uses but for the sound they make. I expect he read every page aloud to himself and then fine-tuned it like a piano. Of course all that would be lost when the story is translated to film. It's a shame the 2014 movie is apparently so terrible that it couldn't renew much interest in this intriguing, mystical novel. I'd like to view it now, to understand what went wrong.

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Big Paraphrase- I'm not quite sure I could come up with a definitive definition of Literature (with a capital L) but I recognize it when I see it. A few pages in and one becomes aware that s/he has arrived in Literature Land. Let's get some of those markers out of the way. Verbal irony,

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transcendentalism, symbolism, rhetorical device, postmodernism, parable, oxymoron, mimesis, Marxist literary criticism, simile, hubris, figurative language, metaphor, and dream vision are some of the literary tools used. So, you ask- how does the damn thing read? Surprisingly well, actually. There are some story lines that are very entertaining and original. Some characters appear for a few pages then are gone, usually killed off in various manners. I wanted more detail on a few of them.

There are dozens of descriptions of light and cold. A bridge to be built out of unobtainium, well, actually light and more corporal materials. The focus of the book is New York City and its imagined future when it might become more just. It also delves into sort of an alternative history for the city. Conclusion? The parts didn't gel into a completely satisfying whole. Plot and storyline aren't the focus of books like this one but it probably could have been a bit more conclusive without losing too much.

For those trying to decide if it's a book for them, I'd label it with something like magical realism slipstream. [Little, Big] would be a comparable book. Personally, I liked Little, Big more.

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I really like the fantastical wonder about this book even though I was expecting a little more from it. I don't think it's a perfect novel..there was just a little too much romance in it for me to be honest, but I found it worth reading. My mom called my attention to the fact that Helprin is a

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political conservative but those who might avoid the novel based on that should be aware that it doesn't really delve into politics and has a far more fictional content complete with time travel elements as well.

In many ways, the novel succeeds in being fairly epic feeling with its 748 page length and its long span of eras and it really celebrates NYC in particular in all its majesty. At his best, Helprin is creative and seduces the reader in rejoicing in the anything can happen element that New York has always had. At its worst, its a little long winded and not as coherent overall as Helprin may have thought it was. Still, it's an intelligent diversion and, though it's no Crime and Punishment, there is an intellectual challenge to it that keeps the reader invested overall.

Some memorable quotes:

pg. 57 "The entire city was a far more complicated wheel of fortune than had ever been devised. It was a close model of the absolute processes of fate, as the innocent and the guilty alike were tumbled from its vast overstuffed drum, pushed along through trap-laden mazes, caught dying in airless cellars, or elevated to platforms of royal view."

pg. 107 "Beverly took back her pages and studied them. After a while, she looked up. 'They mean that the universe...growls, and sings. No, shouts.'"

pg. 522 "To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been."

pg. 618 "When he crossed the line, they fired with an exactitude that identified them as creatures of geometry."

pg. 645-646 "History is very difficult. A nearly infinite number of waves interact within an infinite number of conjunctions. As you might suspect, there has been of late a tendency for strong alignment, and many different waves are running together, in phase. I don't see, however, that they can be aligned by the year two thousand, which is only two weeks away, unless by some catastrophic event."

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I cannot remember why I put this one on my to-read list, but I'm going to have to be more picky in the future!! Wow, the only reason I managed to finish this one is because I was listening to it while traveling and had nothing else to switch with it. Ugh, the author is in love with his own

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convoluted words. I felt like it could have been an interesting story, if the author ever shut up and let the plot move it forward, instead of belaboring every possible description. I do not recommend this one.

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While describing a character's bookshelf in "Winter's Tale," Mark Helprin perfectly characterizes his own book:
"The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule."

This is indeed a

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challenging and highly rewarding read!

The challenge lies in Helprin's extremely creative and brilliant writing, which often mixes the senses in a delightful synesthesia ("trees like bells shuddering sound in green"), coupled with the book's sheer length. Mulling over every enlightening sentence is a pleasure, but can become tedious when the reader is up against a 673 page behemoth. It took me six months to read this book because I was constantly pausing to let the various ideas sink in and periodically took breaks to read a frivolous mystery when the going got tough.

But there are so many shining moments in "Winter's Tale" that I always came back to it. I was inspired by the city of New York seen as a main character, the three central love stories, the mysterious superhero white horse, and the secret souls of machinery and bridges.

If I had to compare this to another book, it would be Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children." Both works use Magical Realism to weave the past and present through the life of a specific location (New York for Helprin, India in Rushdie's case). And both books deliver a message of ultimate redemption.

This is great, if heavy, stuff to really sink your teeth into!

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