Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

 

Raise your hand up if you've heard of this book, or watched the movie. Yup, I thought so...

For me the pros are that Hamnet will have something for everyone - the Shakespeare lovers, those interested in family relations, those who want to explore how people elaborate loss, and those who want to be transported to the past qutie effortlessly (O' Farrell is a really remarkable writer). It will also appeal to those who like to smugly say "Nope, that's not a true account of the creation of Hamlet" (as if that was ever the point). 

Yet, for me the book does have one huge con: I couldn't help but feel that it exploited the suffering and grieving of a family, and I'm not quite sure how (or if) that could be addressed - after all, it's most likely better to talk about this kind of loss (even if it is in part to sell copies of a book) than not talk about it at all. 

Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

Frankly, I would have never believed that a contemporary revision of Shakespeare's Tempest (with all its meta aspects) would have been such a hit with me. 

Instead, man did I enjoy this book. Theatre in prisons is something that has fascinated me since Caesars Must Die by the Taviani brothers. Plus, the wider setting reminded me of Bob Smith's The Boy Who Loved Shakespeare, just in a fictionalized way. 

And I do love, in this case, a revenge against petty career-advancing characters. Add to this the fact that, for once, I was able to see Margaret Atwood in all her quirky humour, and you end up with a book that I enjoyed well beyond my expectations. 

Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

  

I wouldn't have read this book had it not been for the fact that I'm now running out of titles from the Southwark electronic library that I'd consider reading...

Maybe I'm dumb, or maybe my English is not good enough yet, but man I struggled with this book. Granted, it is, unsurprisingly, like watching a Shakespeare play for me: I understand nothing for the first 15 minutes, then slowly things start to fall in place. The problem here is that reading for me is very much a start-stop thing, in particular these days, so I never really got in the flow of the supposed-16th century prose. 

On the plus side, I checked the Wikipedia entry for the book after I finished. Apparently I got all the main points, but that's hardly a sign of success, and that's not really the reason why one reads a book in the first place.

Hamlet's Dresser - Bob Smith

An extremely random book – a memoir rather than a novel really – that my parents bought for my wife ages ago (maybe when she moved to London and started to accompany me to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, first at the Novello Theatre, than at the fairly awful New London Theatre, and then finally at the Barbican?).

To me the book is fundamentally divided in three intertwined plots/narrative lines – the narrator’s troubled family past and his complex relationship with his sister and her mental illness, his personal experiences as a dresser/stagehand, and lastly his Shakespeare classes for elderly people in New York City.

The first narrative line is soft and touching, and Smith is actually remarkably good at portraying the situation for what it actually is/was (or at least, that’s the impression the reader gets) without any need to sweeten it, or to portray himself as better or worse than how he genuinely appears to be.

The second narrative line is intriguing – reading about Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, and all the other great actors who crossed the stage in Stratford CT is like watching a very good documentary with random comments and anecdotes by people who happen to have crossed paths with some of the greats of the 20^th century.

The last narrative line is clearly the one that touches me the least, probably because I am one of those awful people who tend not to find too much poetry in the elderly and the remarkably problematic challenges they have to face on a daily basis – to me those are just painful and very possibly insurmountable.