Tag: Shakespeare

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

Posted June 2, 2016 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 0 Comments

Title: The Gap of Time (Goodreads)
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Series: Hogarth Shakespeare
Published: Hogarth, 2015
Pages: 320
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

I have not read many of Shakespeare’s plays. I remember in high school I did do Romeo and Juliet and all I remember is watching the movie. Since starting my reading journey, I have now read Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Hogarth have announced that they will be releasing modern retellings (they are calling them cover versions) of Shakespeare plays in celebration of the 400^th anniversary of his passing. This will be including books by Howard Jacobson, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson. The first novel in this series is Jeanette Winterson’s interpretation of The Winter’s Tale called The Gap of Time.

I had to read The Gap of Time for book club and I will admit I was nervous, having never read the original play, but was happy to finally check out something by Jeanette Winterson. I am not sure if not reading The Winter’s Tale, put me at a disadvantage but I approached this book as a new story, not knowing what parts are influenced directly from the original text. I noticed many themes of identity, jealousy, forgiveness, parenting, power, race and sexuality but unsure if this was the work of Winterson. I know Jeanette Winterson often explores sexual identity in her novels but that does not mean William Shakespeare did not have an interest in the topic.

I read this book more like a coming of age story, exploring the idea of family in a modern day setting. There are elements of romance but for the most part it was a story of discovery and identity. It was playful (with quotes from Shakespeare in the text) and at times tragic. I think this is a balance that Shakespeare does really well in the plays I have read and Jeanette Winterson seemed to capture this really well in The Gap of Time.

I found this to be an enjoyable novel even if I could not compare it to the original text. I am impressed with Jeanette Winterson but I would be more interested in checking out what she can do without being constrained to a pre-set plot. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry are both books I would love to read in the near future. As for the Hogarth cover versions, I am not sure how many I will read. There are some great authors being selected but I think reading the original text beforehand would be a huge advantage. Only problem is, I have a huge reading list already and not sure when I will get a chance to read more Shakespeare.

Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Posted December 4, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 2 Comments

Title: Tragedy of Macbeth (Goodreads)
, 1606
Pages: 249
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

I probably don’t need to go into too much detail about the plot of Macbeth as most people are aware of what it is about. The Tragedy of Macbeth is obviously a tragedy the legendary playwright William Shakespeare, and is often considered his darkest play. Set in Scotland, the play explores the destructive psychological and political effects that form when evil is used as a method of gaining power. It is generally believed that this was written between the Elizabethan Era and the Jacobean Era, around about 1599 to 1606.

The Elizabethan Era was generally regarded as a ‘golden age’ for England. Colonialism was strong, England has dominating the seas (defeating the Spanish Armada) and there was great commercial wealth to be found in the ‘New World’. However the Jacobean Era was different; James VI of Scotland inherited the throne in 1603 and things seemed to change drastically. The ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of 1605 failed to assassinate the king and the plotters were executed. This possibly led to the King commissioning a new translation of the bible; the ‘King James Version’ was first published in 1611.

The reason I talk about these two eras is that there seems to be a connection to Macbeth. Set in Scotland, Macbeth seems to reflect the atmosphere of the Jacobean Era and there has been speculation to the play alluding to the Gunpowder Plot. However to try to draw direct correlations between Macbeth and the political situations of the time would require a lot of speculation. I just added this information into this review because there are connections that I feel would be relevant or interesting to readers of this play.

I was lucky enough to have experienced Macbeth as a play being performed before ever reading it for my university course. There is something about the performance that was essential to critically reading the text; I already understood the plot, the tone and the overall emotions behind the words and this allowed me to grasp a lot more out of the play. One thing that I picked up in reading Macbeth that I seemed to have missed was the importance of gender roles within the play.

Let’s look at one example which appears in Act 1 scene 7. Within the scene Macbeth is having second thoughts about killing the king and taking the crown. Lady Macbeth scolds Macbeth and manipulates him to go through with his original plan. How does she do this? Simply by calling him a coward and telling him he is not a man. She even suggested that she is more of a man and stated she would kill her own child; taking that child from her breast and smash its head against a wall.

There are other themes that are prominent within Macbeth, but the idea of masculinity verses femininity seems to stick with me the most. This idea that claiming you are more of a man than someone else is a common occurrence but the way Shakespeare presented this graphic manipulation really stuck with me. Obviously feminist literary studies would have a field day with this play. I have been picking more and more issues to do with feminism within literature, but I would rather be looking at Marxism or psychoanalyst; why does this keep happening?

Macbeth is this wonderfully dark play that has a lot to offer; I can see why Shakespeare remains a legend. I am not really sure how to review a play like this; there is so much to talk about with plot and theme, however I would rather people discover that for themselves. I do feel like this review turned into something that would resemble a Jackson Pollock with random thoughts flicked onto a page but I wanted to get some of my thoughts down.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Posted October 24, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction / 0 Comments

Title: Station Eleven (Goodreads)
Author: Emily St John Mandel
Published: Pan Macmillan, 2014
Pages: 333
Genres: Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Emily St John Mandel’s new novel Station Eleven begins with a performance of King Lear; everything was going smoothly until the lead actor Arthur Leander dies on stage. A new strand of the flu known as the Georgia Flu sweeps the world. It “exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth” and wiped out 99% of humanity. This all happens in the first 30 pages, the rest of the novel focuses on a group of performers known as The Travelling Symphony, who travel America putting on Shakespeare plays to those surviving colonies.

The post-apocalyptic novel has been a popular topic over the past few years. There are millions of YA novels on the topic and in the world of literary fiction it books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Passage by Justin Cronin and the Maddaddam series by Margaret Atwood dominate. Recently I have read some post-apocalyptic novels that have failed to satisfy me in the way that books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy had in the past. Both California by Edan Lepucki and On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee had potential but just did not get there. Luckily Emily St John Mandel was there to restore my faith in the literary post-apocalyptic genre.

What I look for in a post-apocalyptic can be difficult to pin point. I want a dark but glittering novel that is both intelligent and audacious. It needs to do something that is different so it will be set apart from others. Station Eleven did this for me; this is not a novel about the aftermath of a global pandemic, this is about the power and importance of art. Not so much the survival of art but the importance it plays on a more personal level.

Mandel wrote a roving novel that follows a group of people struggling with life in a desolate time. This is a stylistic and complex novel told in a non-linear way to explore both the present struggles like the rarity of food and water and the disappearance of all technology. This is an exploration into individuals rather than a collective destiny. Each character has their own story to tell and the non-linear format allows their backstory to be told. They are struggling with memories, loss, nostalgia, solitude and yearning from some stability.

Canadian author Emily St John Mandel is one of those authors that receives high praises for her novels but still manages to fly mostly under-the-radar. I hate to use this term, but with all the praise from other authors she comes across as a ‘writer for writers’. Based on my experience of her writing from Station Eleven this a sad situation, her skills deserve to be realised by the reading public.

I am glad I picked up this novel; I was a little hesitant but I had heard so much about Emily St John Mandel that I just had to find out for myself. To begin with the story of Shakespearian actors was what made this different but I soon found the haunting and complex plot full of subtleties that worked in the books favour. I am still hesitant of all the new post-apocalyptic novels to come but now I know not to overlook Emily St John Mandel in the future.

Guest Post: The Problem with Literature

Posted October 3, 2013 by Guest Post in Guest Posts, Literature / 0 Comments

Want to be the next Shakespeare? Forget literature. Shakespeare wasn’t trying to write enlightened literary fiction. He was writing the Elizabethan equivalent of daytime television – easily digestible, relatable stories (mostly stolen from elsewhere and given a quick spit and polish to make them look and sound new) that would appeal to an audience of mostly illiterate working-class people. He didn’t care about being a great artist or creating work that would last for centuries. He just wanted to make money.

I think modern literary authors forget that. They want to create art. They want to be taken seriously. God forbid their work be mistaken for trashy pulp fiction. God forbid it be accessible. True art, according to the modern literary author, is by nature elitist. In order to understand it, one must have more sophisticated tastes than the types of people who read mass-produced romances or pulpy sci-fi thrillers. One has to be discerning. Every great literary author wants to be remembered as the next iconic genius.

Except that our last iconic genius wrote exactly the kinds of fiction these aspiring greats treat with such derision. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth – these might be timeless classics, but to The Bard, they were how he paid the bills, and to the people who paid to see his plays performed, they were the equivalent of a good popcorn flick. We talk about Shakespeare, Kit Marlowe, Dickens, Conan Doyle as though they were trying to create enduring works of highbrow literature. They weren’t; they were writers working at their trade. It just so happens that they were very good at it, which is why we still enjoy their work today. But they had no lofty aspirations, no desire to be seen as anything more than working writers. Oh, sure, Shakespeare enjoyed the patronage of two successive monarchs. I’m not denying that he was a master wordsmith and a well-regarded one at that. But to the people who crowded into the globe to watch his work play out on stage, he was nothing more than an entertainer. Not an artiste, not a figure of reverence. He wrote theatre for the masses. He was Elizabethan England’s answer to JK Rowling, not Vonnegut.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d probably be writing for some wildly successful primetime drama. Dickens and Conan Doyle, were they to stick to the serial formats they preferred, would probably find a home in graphic novels. Byron was something of a poseur, but he wrote his generation’s equivalent of Harlequin romances. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters? They’d have been penning this summer’s hottest chick lit. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing things that people will enjoy just because they’re fun. There’s nothing wrong with writing to entertain, to captivate, to thrill. And just because work is engaging and accessible, doesn’t mean it can’t also be challenging, thought-provoking and enduringly popular.

The Bard was a genius at his craft, no doubt about it. I just came home from a fantastically staged production of Macbeth, a play still enjoyed by audiences around the world centuries after Shakespeare’s death. I hope to one day pass on my love of Shakespeare to my children. But I’ll also pass on my love of fantasy novels, detective mysteries, cheesy sci-fi and even the odd paranormal romance. Why not? Fiction is meant to be fun. Sure, it can also be a lot of other things, but if we don’t enjoy reading it on some level, what’s the point?

If you’re writing for an audience of people who think enjoying fiction for its own sake is below them, you’ll never be the next Shakespeare, or the next Marlowe, or the next Dickens or Mark Twain or Agatha Christie or Jane Austen. Hell, you won’t even be the next JK Rowling (and believe me – someday, we’ll talk about her work with the same reverence we reserve for the works of long-dead white men today). Don’t focus on creating literature. Focus on creating great entertainment. Take your readers somewhere new. Give them a means of escaping. Take an old story and make it sing again. Make it fun, for heaven’s sakes, because I can guarantee you that five hundred years from now, we won’t be talking about dry and dusty tomes written by pretentious poseurs with delusions of grandeur. We’ll be talking about what was popular, just like we do now. We’ll be talking about theatre for the masses. We’ll be talking about this generation’s Shakespeares. And if you’re not willing to do what he did – to write for all people, to amuse, to engage, to entertain – then you’ll never be one of them.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Posted May 21, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 0 Comments

Title: Mrs Dalloway (Goodreads)
Author: Virginia Woolf
Published: Oxford World's Classics, 1925
Pages: 185
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Personal Copy

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London preparing to host a party that evening. It’s a nice day and she finds herself being reminded of her youth in the Bourton and wondering about her life and her choice of husband; marrying the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the mysterious and challenging Peter Walsh, as she never had the option to be with Sally Seton. These conflicts have been reintroduced when Peter pays her a visit.

The novel begins with Clarissa’s point of view and follows her perspective closely, travelling forwards and back in time and in and out of her mind to construct an image of her life. Clarissa is bubbly and lively, caring a great deal about what people think of her, but she is also self-reflective. She is often questioning life and constantly wondering whether happiness is truly possible. Though she is happy with her marriage to Richard she feels both great joy and dread towards her life and struggles to strike a balance between her desire for privacy and her need to connect with others.

Her husband Richard Dalloway is a member of the conservative government and plans to write a history of The Brutons, a great military family. He is a loving husband and father and devoted to social reform while appreciating English tradition. Peter Walsh is a close friend of Clarissa, once desperately in love with her. When she rejected his proposal, he moved to India; though frequently having romantic problems with women throughout the novel he is currently in love with a married woman in India. A socialist and highly critical of people, he is conflicted about everything in his life. Then there is Sally Sutton, a close friend of Clarissa in their youth, she was a wild handsome woman who would say anything. They were sexually attracted to each other as teenagers. Sally now lives in Manchester where she is married and is known as Lady Rosseter.

This is primarily a novel about life and relationships, with Clarissa reflecting on her life and wondering if she has made the right choices when it comes to marriage. There are so other themes that play a big part within this novel as well; some of these include disillusionment towards the British Empire, fear of death, oppression and balancing life between the need to keep up appearances and having some privacy. I won’t go into these themes in any detail, for the simple reason that I feel that Virginia Woolf leaves it very open to interpretation and it is up to the individual reader to make of it what they will.

For me, the major theme that came out was the struggle Clarissa had with trying to play the good hostess by drawing people together through her parties and her introverted nature. I saw Clarissa as an introvert, though she has a bubbly personality, she is often feels shrouded within her own reflective soul and thinks the ultimate human mystery is how she can exist in one room. She likes the idea of being independent and able to spend time to reflect but she is also aware of the inevitable loneliness that comes with a life of self reflection. If you understood something completely different from this novel, please let me know how you read this book in the comments below.

Now that I’ve looked at the themes of this novel, I want to have a quick look at some of the motifs and symbols used in Mrs Dalloway. The most important of them is time, which is so important to the structure, themes and characters of this novel that Virginia Woolf almost called it The Hours. Time keeps order to this novel; with all the thoughts, memories, and encounters within Mrs Dalloway, it becomes a vital element to the book. Also the old woman in the window across from house symbolises the life Clarissa desires; a private life with time to reflect. You also have things like the flowers with all their colour, varieties and beauty being a motif for emotions, Shakespeare and poetry representing these emotions as well and water suggesting the possibility of death.

Virginia Woolf can be a difficult author to read and requires a lot of thought but as I’ve now discovered with Mrs Dalloway, it is worth the effort. I remember reading To the Lighthouse and really struggling, but when I was told it was about sex, I thought I really missed the point. It’s a novel I plan to revisit again but as I mentioned in this review, I think Woolf writes her novels in such a way that you can interpret it anyway you want.

I don’t know if I would call myself a Virginia Woolf fan now, but I was really impressed reading and studying Mrs Dalloway. I will admit that that I’m planning to read A Room of One’s Own and reread To the Lighthouse. Maybe after that I might call myself a fan but I would recommend reading Virginia Woolf for all serious literature readers and studiers and anyone that needs to increase their pretentious levels. For me, Mrs Dalloway was both an interesting book and an interesting endeavour into improving my critical reading skills.

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Posted May 11, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 4 Comments

Title: Decline and Fall (Goodreads)
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Published: Penguin, 1928
Pages: 216
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Personal Copy

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Paul Pennyfeather finds himself taking a job at a public school called Llanabba after being expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour. He takes up some private tutoring to get close to the student’s mother, Margot Beste-Chetwynde. Their relationship forms and they are soon engaged; all the while Paul is still unaware that the main source of her income is a number of high class brothels in South America. Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is a black comedy satirising British society in the 1920s.

This is my first Evelyn Waugh novel; why did I pick this over Brideshead Revisited? Simple answer is a friend loves this book and I thought I would see if I trust her taste in literature; since they are more of a genre reader. Decline and Fall gets its name from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book that traces the trajectory of the Roman Empire, and Western civilisation as a whole. There are some who also attributes the title to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a philosophical book that rejects the Euro-centric view of history. Both books are important to remember as both look at western civilisation and reject the idea that it is the be all and end all.

Decline and Fall satirises a world where the British social institutes (like schools) have lost their integrity and their authority. The church has lost its faith and the aristocracy have declined to the same level as the masses since the educational system teaches nothing worth learning. The situation is both humorous in its approach and also very dystopian. Waugh has a great deal of fun playing with this world but when you reflect on this book and take out all the comedy, it really is quite scary; sure I’m for equality in the social classes but the prediction of a failing education system is not something I look forward to.

There are two major literary techniques within this novel that I feel are worth looking at; first of all there is the humour which, while funny, leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination with the deadpan narrative of the newspaper reporter. For all I know the book really isn’t about the decline of education and society but the way this book is written has set my mind running in that direction, it could have filled in the blanks on its own. The second is the way this book parodies English literature within the book, from a reference to Shakespeare’s Othello to many more. A better English major than I could probably pull this book apart a lot better and tell you every single literary reference within the book.

This book confronts the reader with some difficult moral decisions all the while doing it in a tone that reminds me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python. The general decay of society is the major theme throughout this book but you might not even pick up on this if you are only reading this for the humour. There are elements of both Horatian and Juvenalian satire within the book and I like the way Evelyn Waugh writes it so you can read in either form and still get some enjoyment from Decline and Fall.

After reading this novel, I’m keener than ever to check out Brideshead Revisited and some of his other works. This is not a perfect novel, I did find myself a little bored at times and even lost but Decline and Fall has some interesting ideas worth reading about. I can’t help but wonder if reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or The Decline of the West might have a positive effect on this novel. I won’t say this is a great novel but I’m glad to have read and dissected Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.