MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Shakespeare We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 JULIET by Anne Fortier /2011/juliet-by-anne-fortier/ /2011/juliet-by-anne-fortier/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:21:17 +0000 /?p=19571 Book Quote:

“How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.

Her name is Diana.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUL 29, 2011)

Hands up anyone who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet. No-one? Thought not. Chances are you cut your literary teeth on it, and it probably holds some special associations for you. That’s why it’s such a good subject for a modern/historical parallel romance story with sinister overtones.

Julie Jacobs is the quasi-eponymous heroin of the novel. Orphaned as a very young child, she has been brought up by her Great-Aunt Rose along with her twin sister Janice… who is as like to Julie as a marble is to a strawberry. Great-Aunt Rose has brought the sisters up in the States, but when they are in their mid-twenties she ups and dies, leaving Janice the estate and Julie (rather inconveniently) merely a letter and the address of a banker in Sienna. A heartbroken and down-at-heel Julie makes the best of a bad deal and packs her unfashionable bags for Sienna.

Matters get complicated almost immediately with a chance befriending by the glamorous Eva Maria Salimbeni – and that’s before Julie ever even reaches Sienna. The narrative rapidly develops distinct fairy-tale colours, which grow richer by the page. Julie soon discovers that few things really happen by chance in this neck of the woods. What with Julie’s historical trouble with the Italian police (don’t ask) and Eva Maria’s handsome nephew Alessandro being Captain Santini of the Sienna police, a certain amount of intrigue becomes inevitable from the word go.

The mystery trail of the letter leads from the bank, to a box, to clues, to the Pallio, to museums and clan rivalries, to subterranean passages and clean through to the 14th century. Sienna, it seems, not Verona, is the original location for the historical characters that inspired Shakespeare’s tragedy: a story already two hundred years old and re-told countless times by the time he got to it. To gain the treasure that the historical Romeo and Juliet supposedly left behind, Julie must immerse herself into her own past, which extends far beyond what one would think reasonable in chronological terms.

Fortier displays brilliant craftsmanship in weaving the multi-faceted timelines of her story into a cohesive narrative. She intersperses new mystery, romance and violence at a pace which will leave no reader able to resist the next page. But above all, she really loves her Shakespeare. This work has obviously arisen from a love of the original text. The imagery of warring opposites, fire and ice, danger and beauty that characterize Shakespeare’s work have given birth here to whole neighbourhoods, new characters and impassioned landscapes. This is no half-baked, ill-fadged limping mess that so many supposedly more straightforward “historical” novels fall into. It’s an inspired work of art with a backbone not only of research but of understanding, one could almost say sympathetic resonance. It’s so clever one wishes it were true.

However, not everyone will like it. Readers often divide into camps between the two sisters Julie and Janice: some finding the latter two-dimensional, many considering the former mawkish and generally kickable. The main plot is pretty easy to guess from the start, which is perhaps not ideal for a mystery. I didn’t find this a problem at all, as there were so many details in between A and B that just because one knows the outcome it doesn’t make the journey any less pleasurable.

Possibly its main detraction for many might be that it’s essentially chick lit. Let me qualify this swiftly: I don’t read chick lit and I found Juliet thrilling. It’s the sort of thing you put down with a glow and wonder whom to tell about it first; and then possibly consider that boys might not be so keen on it. I hate to say it, but with 80% of serious readers being female, I still think it’s got a pretty good market. Chick lit it may be, but very good chick lit. As I read it, I was taking notes on structure and tactics, thinking, “if only I could write more like this.” I’m not sure what higher form of admiration one could offer.

If you like your stories well-written, exciting, properly researched, and you have a tendency towards things pre-1400s with a dash of the paranormal and several cask-fulls of romance, don’t delay in reading this especially now that it is available in paperback.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 159 readers
PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER: Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Anne Fortier
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Romeo & Juliet tales: 

Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James

Brazil by John Updike

And another Julia on a quest through the past:

The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

Bibliography:

]]> /2011/juliet-by-anne-fortier/feed/ 0 THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR by Arthur Phillips /2011/the-tragedy-of-arthur-by-arthur-phillips/ /2011/the-tragedy-of-arthur-by-arthur-phillips/#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:39:34 +0000 /?p=18498 Book Quote:

“If you think it’s him, it sounds like him,” Arthur says to his sister; “if you think it’s not, it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 24, 2011)

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author – Arthur Phillips’s ingenious faux-memoir – was to Google to see what was true and what wasn’t…only to find that much of Phillips’s traceable past has been erased.

Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he’s accomplished in this novel – er, memoir – is sheer genius.

Arthur Phillips – the character – is an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and points it out in various excerpts. Right from the start when he says, “I have never much liked Shakespeare,” we feel a little off-center. The book is, after all about the ultimate Shakespeare scam: his neer-do-well father, at the end of his life, shares with Arthur a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur and entices him to use his Random House connections to get the play published.

To say his connection with his father is complicated is an understatement. Arthur Phillips, memoirist, reflects, “His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy – even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those.” Now he wonders: did his father perform the ultimate con? If so, how did he pull it off? And how do the two Arthurs – Arthur the ancient king portrayed in the “lost” play and Arthur the memoirist – intertwine their fates?

It’s a tricky project and Arthur Phillips – the novelist – is obviously having great fun with it. At one point, he urges readers to, “Go Google the van Meergeen Vermeers…Read James Frey’s memoir now…We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it.” But somehow, it does.

The play is reproduced in its entirety in the second part and indeed, it reads like Shakespeare (I read all of his major plays in grad school and have seen many of them performed). It’s absolutely brazen that Arthur Phillips could have mimicked Shakespeare so successfully and with seeming authenticity.

So in the end, the theme comes down to identity. As Phillips the memoirist writes, “So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and security, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan.”

And, as Phillips the novelist knows, it’s also a trick for perspective. The play, the novel, the memoir, the scam can equally be said to be “about a man born in Stratford in 1565 – maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way — or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or.” Just as Shakespeare may or may not have written his plays – according to some anti-Bards – so might this new one be a fakery, written by Arthur’s fictional father. There is layer steeped upon layer steeped upon layer in this book. It’s audacious and it’s brilliant. Arthur Phillips convincingly shows us just how easy it is to reinvent a play, a history, or ourselves with just a few sweeps of a pen.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 43 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Arthur Phillips
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:The Song is You

Another book had us fooled:

Incident at Twenty-Mile by Trevanian

Bibliography:

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