Winter's Tale [Paperback]

Mark Helprin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The celebrated New York City epic appears for the first time in trade paperback in anticipation of publication of Helprin's new novel, Memoir from Antproof Case.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"This novel is imaginatively engaging as well as entertaining, and it will find an eager audience among adults and older adolescents alike," predicted LJ's reviewer quite accurately (LJ 8/83)?the book became a smash best seller. This magical story of the multiple lives of protagonist Peter Lake is now available in an oversized trade paper edition.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reissue edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156031191
• ISBN-13: 978-0156031196
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (318 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, MARK HELPRIN served in the Israeli army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy. He is the author of, among other titles, A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Refiner's Fire, Winter's Tale, and A Soldier of the Great War. He lives in Virginia.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

412 of 434 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheer Insanity and Gorgeous Magic August 17, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Winter's Tale, a gorgeous masterpiece by master writer Mark Helprin is a book about the beauty and complexity inherent in the human soul, about God, love and justice and the power of dreams, those that take place while we sleep and those that we conceive while awake.

The story begins and ends with Peter Lake: orphan, master mechanic, and master second-storey man. One night Peter attempts to rob a fortresslike mansion in New York's Upper West Side. Although he believes the house to be empty, it is not. Beverly Penn, daughter of the owner is home. Home and dying, and thus begins a love affair between a middle-aged Irish burgler and a fatally-ill heiress.

A simple and uneducated man, Lake cannot understand the love in which he becomes so thoroughly entangled that he is driven "to stop time and bring back the dead."

Inbetween the story of Peter Lake and his quest to overcome death through the power of enduring love, Helprin shows us a magical view of a New York City that is, at times, so extraoridnarily real you think you are there, and at other times so magical you only wish you could be.

All of Helprin's protagonists, however, are not native New Yorkers and have come from elsewhere to seek their destiny, a fact that goes a long way towards helping those of us not familiar with the city feel that we have come to both know and love it.

Winter's Tale spans the entire twentieth century and we get a glimpse of everything from horse drawn carriages on cobbled streets to lunatics who rub elbows with sable-wrapped heiresses on Fifth Avenue.

Ignoring reality, Helprin's book is a glorious and ethereal melange of magic and insanity in which people are picked up by a wall of clouds that engulfs the city and then deposited in other times and other places.... Although it can seem disjointed to someone not accustomed to this style, it is always a delight.

Helprin never fails to reward readers with one surprise after another: a village hidden on an island in a solid lake of ice where time stands still and the inhabitants do nothing but skate, ice-sail and star gaze, equipped with sparkling lanterns and mugs of hot-buttered rum; dead loved ones who are not really dead at all but simply living joyously in another time and place awaiting our own arrival; and a majestic white horse that can actually jump five city blocks at one time and help its rider to escape anything that happens to be in pursuit.

In Winter's Tale, anything that can happen, does happen, and while some of it is impossible, though still always glorious, much of it really is possible, though not quite probable. There is Beverly, who sleeps on the roof of her father's mansion, in the cold, winter air, in a specially-made bed of furs and canopies, watching the stars and defying the advent of death; there is Lake, himself, who makes his home in the rafters of Grand Central Station; there are midnight horse-drawn sleigh rides from the heart of New York City to the almost mythical Lake of the Coheeries which can only be found by the light of the moon across almost endless expanses of ice and snow; there are the clouds that drop a living man into the icy waters beside the Staten Island Ferry; and there are boats that simply vanish into an opaque, lightening-flickered fog bank, never to be seen again.

Winter's Tale, however, is fantasy and intense romanticism, not magic realism. But fantasy and intense romanticism are exactly what are called for in this fantastic and intensely romantic tale.

The protagonists of Winter's Tale all meet, lose contact with one another and then meet again as destinies cross, lose their way, and then double back to cross again.

Helprin drops many hints along the way that New York is heading for its Armageddon, a point where all good and evil will finally meet in one climactic moment and a golden light of peace, love and justice will usher in a new life for this glorious city. It could happen, and then again, maybe not, but Winter's Tale is certainly worth the trip to see.

Told in gorgeous prose throughout, Winter's Tale weaves an insanely magical tapestry of beauty and love that is both death-defying and life-affirming. After you read it, you will feel that it is something you could not have lived without. Read more ›

114 of 119 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Still astonishing after all these years August 7, 2001

By OmnivorousReader

Format:Paperback

Winter's Tale was the first contemporary novel I ever bought in hardcover; it came out when I was 13 years old, and I was so taken by the worshipful front page review in the NY Times Book Review that I bought it. At the time, most of my literary reading had consisted of Charles Dickens novels, and David Copperfield had already put the writing bug in me. But it was Winter's Tale that fixed me on my course--Helprin's writing was so astonishing, his asides so insightful, his descriptions of places and people so tangible (I can still taste the hot rum toddies from the Oyster Bar!), and best of all, he was ALIVE.

In fact, I was so enraptured with the book as a 13-year-old that for many years I was afraid to pick it up again, for fear I'd find it a lesser piece of work than I'd remembered. A Soldier Of the Great War had not had the same effect on me (though I still thought it was a superb book), and Memoir From Antproof Case had struck me as entertaining but erratic. Finally, a couple of years ago, I fetched my old hardcover Winter's Tale from my parents' house and got up the nerve to page through it again. Right away, I was swept right back into Helprin's fairy tale New York. It is what a great city ought to be: larger, wilder, more beautiful, a place where dramas play themselves out on a cosmic scale. And the thief Peter Lake remains one of my favorite characters in all of literature.

The book does have its flaws, but what novel doesn't? The sections with Peter Lake are far and away the best; Part Two feels like Helprin is marking time (it was the slowest part of the book even when I was 13), and there are some who might find his italicized introductory sections tendentious (though I still get shivery when I read them).... The women are all just a little too beautiful, and the men (other than Peter Lake and his nemesis, Percy Soames) just a little too square-jawed and handsome. Those who think of Helprin as a conservative first and a novelist second won't be surprised by his romanticization of turn-of-the-century New York or the messianic overtones of Peter Lake's story; the fantasy is always at heart a reactionary art form.

But all that said, everything I loved about the book the first time through still holds true today. Prose artists like Helprin come along only once or twice in a generation, and Winter's Tale remains his highest stylistic achievement. His descriptions--the fog that hangs over Staten Island, Beverly's tubercular rosy glow, sleighing on a cold clear night, the thunder of hooves on cobblestones, a bridge made of light--still have the effect of altering how I see and think about the world around me. And I'll say it again: Peter Lake is one of the all-time great characters, on a par with Hamlet, Pip, Dorothea, Isabel Archer, Jay Gatsby and Mrs. Ramsey.

Like Helprin's New York, the book's flaws may keep it earthbound, but in its glimpses of transcendence it remains as breathtaking as ever. Read more ›

125 of 133 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A high-hearted romance; marred by low-rent Kindlization August 22, 2012

By Szilard

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I loved this book when I was a young'un; so romantic, high-hearted, exuberant. Revisiting now as a cumudgeon, I still think it's a fine piece of light reading, filled with joy and a love for language. But it's surely not great literature - the characters are not and never will be us, and the tale illuminates nothing of essence. Who cares, though? Well-executed pulp is a blessing and several million times better than television.

But the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, must be driven into the wastelands for its shoddy Kindle version. This is yet another auto-OCR mess with no apparent proof reading effort. Errors on most pages, and a pathetic low-point: "half a" consistently rendered as "Haifa". Actually, even worse: "city" often becomes "dry".

How much would it have cost them to have a junior editor proof read and correct? Hardly anything, and failing to do this indicates contempt for their product and their customers.

I think they were coming out of bankruptcy when they released the Kindle version, and you can assume that the tawdry effort was part of a push to "monetize" their backlist at the lowest possible cost. But with this kind of attitude to quality, no surprise if they slip back into the pit before long.

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Great book; terrible Kindle version September 1, 2012

By Mark Siegel

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book itself is a beautifully written novel, but Amazon needs to demand better quality control from publishers. The Kindle version is replete with typos the detract from the reading experience. Is there some way to notify Amazon of this problem? Such errors wouldn't be acceptable in a hardbound edition and the same principle should apply here.