The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Hardcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345809173 ISBN 13: 9780345809179

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2015

Synopsis

The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's “late plays”. It tells the story of Leontes, King of Sicily, whose insane jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter, Perdita, from the kingdom and then the death of his beautiful wife, Hermione. Perdita is brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of miraculous events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.

In Jeanette Winterson's retelling we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crash, to a storm-ravaged city in the US called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, video games and the elliptical nature of time. It tells in a hyper-modern way, full of energy and beauty, of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and love, redemption and a lost child on the other.

— Finalist, Lambda Literary Award 

About this title

About the Author:

JEANETTE WINTERSON, OBE, has written 10 novels, children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays, and writes regularly for the Guardian. She was adopted by Pentecostal parents and raised in Manchester to be a missionary, which she wrote about in her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and twenty-seven years later in her bestselling memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The Winter’s Tale tells the story of Perdita, the abandoned child. “All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years,” Jeanette says of the play. The result is The Gap of Time, her cover version.

Review:

Longlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award

“[T]he perfect opening act for the Hogarth Shakespeare project. . . . [P]oetically charged.” —Brian Bethune, Maclean’s

“[V]ery funny, much like the play. It is certainly a quick and enjoyable read.” —Peter Robb, Ottawa Citizen 

“[The Gap of Time] is very clever and engaging. . . . It’s a rather improbable plot, but she manages it very well.” —Margaret Atwood, Post City Toronto

“Winterson is incapable of being dull, and The Gap of Time is a fitting addition to her uniquely inventive catalogue.” —Irish Independent 

“Winterson is raucous and experimental, achieving a sort of poetic mastery over a disjointed play that ranges from high tragedy to low comedy, with a foundling child at the story’s center. . . . Winterson’s ability to lift high up out of the plot to speak of broader psychological concerns while remaining closely connected to the destinies of her characters, and to her own stake in the story, is admirable.” —Santa Fe New Mexican

“Winterson’s writing shines in passages that reflect on the unfolding of the story and the mysterious operations of time, its capture and manipulation by art. . . . The Gap of Time, like the original, resounds with echoes of the author’s work, hinting at the way Winterson’s writing has always perhaps been in dialogue with this play in one way or another. . . . Winterson’s work has been defined by risk in many ways, whether in narratives of defiance, chance and gambling, or stylistic experimentation. To rewrite Shakespeare is to take a huge artistic gamble, and Winterson embraces it with characteristic brio and lyrical certainty.” —Kristin Tranter, The Australian

“Hang on to your seats, because Winterson, like Shakespeare, is an expert at teasing, pleasing and torturing our emotions.” —The Guardian

“Winterson turns [The Winter’s Tale] into a deeply psychoanalytic fable. . . . By moving her own tale toward fantasy, she shifts our understanding of Shakespeare, too, pulling him out of the shadow of the realist novel. . . . [A] fabulist and a dazzling stylist.” —Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, The New Yorker

“Thrilling. . . . The Gap of Time succeeds as a cover version and on its own because Winterson understands that Shakespeare’s characters remain (and have always been) timeless. . . . [T]his is a cover version that hopes to acquaint you with the old song you so fell in love with years ago.” —Manuel Betancourt, Slant Magazine 

“With a few deft strokes, Winterson recreates Shakespeare’s characters in contemporary clothing. . . . [The Gap of Time is] a triumph.” —Daily Express 

“[M]oving, pacy. . . . [A] witty and funky adaptation. . . . A thrilling read.” —The Press and Journal 

“Inaugurating a new series, a gifted writer recasts this late play as an illuminating novel.” —The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“[A] shining delight of a novel. . . . Winterson’s gift for capturing unspoken emotion with powerful but never overwritten lyricism creates a cast of characters whose points of view are fascinating and sometimes harrowing to inhabit, fully employing the novel form’s unique ability to illuminate the interiors of the actors on the page. . . . Winterson’s great gift is capturing the emotional heft of her stories with sen­tences that hum along, beautiful, unexpected and swift. . . . Winterson wrestles wonderfully with a perplexing text and emerges with a complicated, satisfying and contemporary tale that stands wholly on its own, despite the Bard’s significant shadow.” —Dean Bakopoulos, The New York Times

“The prose is spartan. . . . [L]ovely, poignant.” —Joanna Kavenna, The Telegraph (4 stars)

“Winterson is the perfect choice to re-examine The Winter’s Tale. . . . Winterson makes The Gap of Time’s oddities work, casting a spell with her own lovely poetic prose. . . . She also skillfully negotiates the play’s swift turn from tragedy to comedy.” —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald 

“[S]tylishly done. . . . [T]he richness of [Winterson’s] language, the swing and swoop of her sentences, smoothes out the transitions and eases us over the joins. What’s more, despite her faithfulness to Shakespeare’s storyline, Winterson manages against the odds to keep us gripped. By providing her characters with rich back stories . . . she wins our sympathy and so injects a real sense of jeopardy into a familiar tale. It’s no mean feat. . . . [C]ompelling, entertaining and elegant.” —Sarah Crown, The Guardian

“[The Winter’s Tale] is a story about loss, remorse and forgiveness, and the nature of time. Winterson has captured all this with evident respect and affection for Shakespeare’s text, and made it new with her own bold and poetic prose and her insights into love and grief. There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps . . . there is plenty of Winterson’s characteristic sharp humour. . . . Perhaps most surprising is how readily the plot translates to a modern context; how plausible this version seems, for all its knowing self-reference.” —Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian 
PRAISE FOR JEANETTE WINTERSON:

“Fierce, curious, brilliant.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“At every turn . . . her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration.” —The New York Times

“Her writing is funny and beautiful.” —The Times

“The reader will be carried along by the vitality of her style and her ever-present sense of adventure.” —The Guardian

“Jeanette Winterson has always possessed an extravagantly metaphorical imagination.” —The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0345809173
• ISBN 13: 9780345809179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288