Winters as cold and snowy as this one cry out for a long and thought-provoking winter book.
I finished re-reading Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale the other day, and only
today’s 40-degree heat wave has managed to break the contemplative spell in which it left me.
The book may be a paean to New York, a morality tale, or a treatise on beauty and justice, but it’s also a window—a window through which we can see not just the struggles of another time, but the way in which humanity struggles against everything which it cannot know or control in blind pursuit of ideals, principles, happiness, and survival.
Living as I do in an engineer’s world of specificity and detail, it is humbling to consider the city on such a scale. But Helprin’s gift is to make it seem magical and effortless, like the passing of the seasons.
Photo: Self-portrait at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, 2008.
I’m a big Helprin fan, but Winter’s Tale just didn’t do it for me. In fact it’s my least favorite out of his major novels.
There’s a lot about it that’s very well done – beautifully written in places – but it was just too much magical surrealism for me to handle.
Nice post though.
Er, magical realism. Either way.
I can see where you’re coming from. Flying and time travel don’t come up too often outside of science fiction…