Winter's Tale -- Take 2

I started reading Winter's Tale almost two years ago! Remember way back when E was working in NYC and I went to stay with her?  (In case you've forgotten, you can re-read my series of posts, because I know you want to: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.)

Anyway, I have been SO SLOW finishing this book.  I mean, two years!  It's a long book, but really?  I would pick it up and read 15 pages, then put it down for a month or so.  And when your book is 800 pages, you can imagine that it takes a long time to get through it at that pace!  I finally decided to put the nail in the coffin when I had some free time to read down at Uncle P's place.

Early on in my reading of this book, I recall thinking that it seemed almost like a very long collection of short stories, each set in a different in New York.  I was talking to Dad about this book, and he commented that he thought some sections of this book may have been published as short stories before the whole book came out as one.  Perhaps in the New Yorker?  I don't know, but Helprin and the New Yorker go back a long way, so that's a good bet.

I loved this book.  It falls squarely into that category of rangy fictional history that are just a teeny bit fantastic and that are set in New York which I love so much.  There are about 9 books that fit into this category. Mark Helprin has a special way with words, and he weaves a tale that travels through time with great ease, and with just enough flourish in the description:

"Many skills and arts had atrophied, the public was not what it had once been, and most of the population sat immobile for a third or more of its waking hours, absorbing without reaction or resistance whatever they saw on their televisions.  Morals and mores had become so rational and progressive that criminals and prostitutes resurrected from another age would have faced neither barriers nor censure.  In fact, a criminal such as Peter Lake would have been greatly offended by the dishonesty and corruption of the norm, and disoriented by the general refusal to distinguish between right and wrong.  The city had rotted, until the anarchy was such that islands of reconstitution were allowed to thrive within it.  These islands steadily grew.  Amid waters that were anything but pure, they were like a rising reef, and though they were rising slowly, when the force that carried them finally broke the surface, it would break all at once."

The story follows Peter Lake, our immortal hero, as he ventures about the city from gang-ridden, horse-trodden streets, to the busy buzz of modern times.  He loves, loses, gets lost, forgets himself, finds himself again.  And along the way, New York becomes New York, and the short stories become a novel.