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Cathryn_Conroy
One of Those Rare Books That Is Both a Literary Achievement and So Good You Can't Stop Reading
This is one of those rare books that is both a literary achievement and unputdownable (I love that word!). Magnificently written by Maggie O'Farrell, the prose is so lyrical that many sentences deserve to be reread, but that is only possible if you can stop reading forward long enough to do that.
And while this novel is ostensibly about a young William Shakespeare, his courtship of his wife, his marriage, and the birth and lives of their three children (Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith), it is more a book about the plague. Specifically, it is a book about the physical suffering caused by this horrific illness—one that was treated in 1596 with a dried toad laid upon the victim's stomach. It is a book about grief, blame, and the alienation of a loving couple after the death of their beloved son, Hamnet.
The first half of the book is alternately told in two narrow time lines: young Will's courtship and marriage along with their life just before Hamnet contracts the plague. The two are skillfully woven together until they become one, and the story proceeds from there as the grief-stricken Will and Agnes attempt to put their lives back together. (O'Farrell changed Anne Hathaway's name for an excellent reason; see the Author's Note at the end of the book.) Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" in honor of his little boy as a way to bring him back to life the only way he knew, but Agnes is horrified, thinking he has taken the name of their precious child in vain.
This highly imaginative tale is, on the surface, a profile of the greatest English playwright who ever put quill to paper, but even more so, it is a profound and emotionally resonant story of the human heart.
Bonus: The incredibly detailed and many descriptions of life in England in the late 1500s are magnificent, dried toads and all.
JR
Beautifully written
Rarely is a work of fiction so incomprehensibly so beautiful and so tragic in the same breath. The author embraces the known history and wonderfully tells the story of the heartbreak of loss and how each of us find the strength to overcome. The story broke my soul, the writer filled it up.
JanS
A new look at an old master
From the first paragraph, O’Farrell led us into a new approach to William Shakespeare. His name is never mentioned, and it’s his family that takes center stage in the captivating lyric novel. The author engrosses the reader with details of life in the 16th century England. Just as the Bard was beginning to ply his trade in London, his family lived a world away in the smaller village. It’s a deep dive into a backstory where this gifted storyteller weaves grief, sorrow, hope, courage, and love into a masterful work.
Lana_Maskus
Achingly Beautiful!
Achingly beautiful, grief-laden, resounding with love, and ultimately uplifting! Hamnet is by far the best, most beautiful book I have read this year and one of my 10 favorite books of my lifetime of reading. Maggie O'Farrell's writing is enchanting and captivated me from the first page. Her descriptions of illness and grief were perfectly nuanced and made me wonder how they could be so correct in portraying those things. I subsequently read that Ms. O'Farrell has written a memoir, "I Am, I Am, I Am" about near death experiences she has gone through which seemed to explain her understanding of illness and death.
Katherine Pond
The Backstory to Hamlet?
A fictional imagining of Shakespeare's early life and marriage in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The focus, however, is not really upon him but rather the family in which he was raised and the young local woman who becomes his wife. Indeed, he is never mentioned by name and once married doesn't appear very often in the narrative. He is an absentee father, living, writing and acting in London as his wife and three children reside in a small home alongside his parent's home. The marriage is loving and warm despite the lengthy separation between the spouses, until the plague hits them and their young son, Hamnet succumbs at a young age. The impact of the loss on them and their families is devastating but seems to give rise to one of the most famous plays in English literature.
Anna Rowe
Wonderful Reading Experience
Maggie O'Farrell is such a talented stylist and it shines through like the sun in the writing of this book. I loved what she did with the character of Shakespeare's wife, Agnes. I loved how she keeps Shakespeare offside to give room for Agnes to tell her story. I also love the way O'Farrell portrays grief in her writing. Unlike anyone else. It is a beautiful, creative, memorable piece of writing
Anna Maria Rowe
My best of 2020
Maggie O'Farrell is such a talented stylist and it shines through like the sun in the writing of this book. I loved what she did with the character of Shakespeare's wife, Agnes. I loved how she keeps Shakespeare offside to give room for Agnes to tell her story. I also love the way O'Farrell portrays grief in her writing. Unlike anyone else. It is a beautiful, creative, memorable piece of writing.
Davida
Net or Let
For those who don’t know, Hamnet was the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, who died at the age of 11. In O’Farrell’s latest novel, she takes up the scholarly presumption that there was a direct connection between his son’s death and his play “Hamlet.” To do this, O’Farrell draws detailed portraits of two main people – Hamnet himself, and his mother Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway. Together with this, O’Farrell also draws a simpler, yet no less meticulous, portrait of Hamnet’s father, almost as an aside to his relationship with these two main characters. Goodreads says that this is a “luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss…”
I’ve read quite a few reviews of this book, many of which have picked up on things I was originally going to write about myself. For example, Shakespeare himself is never named in the book. In addition, there’s a whole passage which O’Farrell included here, which ended up being (far too) relevant to our present world pandemic, that being where she traces the minutia of how one wave of the plague reached Stratford. Reading that, and knowing that travel then was nowhere near as popular or widespread as it is now, no one would be surprised that this pandemic we are living through would be so devastating. Mind you, the few lines about how all the London playhouses were closed down as soon as the plague appeared made me think that at least Queen Elizabeth I and her Parliament knew how to handle such things much better than some countries (including the UK) are doing today!
Politics and current events aside, since other bloggers have exhausted all those talking points so nicely, I decided that for this review I’ll to concentrate on three less discussed topics. First, on O’Farrell’s writing style in this novel. Next, I’ll look at her character development. Finally, I will talk about how this book differs from her other novels. Now, as my regular readers know, I’ve read all of O’Farrell’s novels as well as her memoir, and so I believe I’m well equipped to approach this review from these particular angles.
O’Farrell’s writing style is what drew me to her books in the first place. What I find to be magical about her writing is how she’s able to use her language to build up an atmosphere. In this book in particular, O’Farrell has adapted a slightly more poetic quality to her writing, with highly descriptive passages, many of which felt pensive, dark, and a touch brooding. Yet, there was still an underlying level of lightness here, to keep this from feeling too gray. These descriptions are used to paint pictures of both the characters and the locations, as well as how the former moved through the latter. As someone who visualizes the action of the books as I read, this worked perfectly for me, and I could easily see everything and everyone that O’Farrell put down on each page. In fact, there were a couple of times when O’Farrell described the scent of something where I almost was able to imagine that same smell! If you ask me, that is artistry in writing at its very finest!
This leads directly to how O’Farrell developed her characters. What was most fascinating here, was that my ability to picture each character was accomplished with an absolute minimum of dialog. Usually, a character’s mettle is often revealed in what they say, in addition to what they do. However, O’Farrell accomplished this by concentrating more on getting into the minds of the characters than letting them speak for themselves. She showed us their gestures, their moods, their thoughts, as well as how their bodies moved within the spaces where she placed them. We saw them change and grow and develop, much like (pardon the cliché) watching a flower bloom. In the end, while Agnes ends up being the primary protagonist, each character portrayed here – no matter how minor – was believable, and flawlessly developed and formed.
How this book differs from her other novels is twofold. First, this one has a tiny touch of magical realism, where Agnes seems to be a bit of a psychic, which she seems to pass on to one of her daughters. This time, I wasn’t bothered by this at all, probably because back then people were very superstitious, and it fit in with the overall narrative and character development. Second, all of her previous books were either contemporary fiction, or had mixed contemporary and historical dual timelines. If I recall correctly even with the historical parts of O’Farrell other novels never went further back than early(ish) 20th century. This novel, however is not only fully and totally historical fiction, it is set far further back in time than any of her other books. And not just by one century, but reaching back to the late 16th century and very early 17th century, no less. Now, I’m a huge lover of historical fiction, especially biographical historical fiction, so this was absolutely no problem for me whatsoever, but this certainly was a departure for O’Farrell. I can only hope that her faithful fans won’t find this too startling of a departure, and can still enjoy it as they have done with all her previous works.
Finally, the way O’Farrell concludes this novel, had me weeping like a baby! Now, it isn’t often that one reads biographical, historical fiction (where we already know who will live and who will die and even how and when), that something appears in a book that makes you surprisingly emotional, but this one does just that with the last page. Taking all these things into account, what we have here is… well… nothing short of a masterpiece. There is therefore no way I could give this less than a full five stars. I will be recommending this to anyone and everyone, even people who don’t like historical or biographical, or women’s fiction.
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