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Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0449006972
ISBN-13: 9780449006979
Jul 2001
Publisher: Random House Inc
212 pages
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
John Updike takes the Hamlet story as the basis for this absorbing novel about power and lust in 12th-century Denmark. Using both Shakespeare's play and original historical sources, Updike concentrates his narrative on Danish history, and on the queen and her illicit passion for her husband's brother, rather than on the disaffected young university student, Prince Hamlet; in fact, the novel ends just as Shakespeare's play is beginning. A New York Times "Editors' Choice" for one of the best books of 2000.
| Size | | Length: | 212 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 7.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Given the novelist's exhaustive mappings of the perils of concupiscence, he is the perfect writer to riff on Shakespeare's tragedy, which he manages to do here without usurping the great play's rightful primacy....Updike dives into their affair with alacrity, eliciting both the sadness and the elation the lovers feel at betraying their family allegiances in order to honor one of the spirit....In taking the action of the play beyond its sullen hero's point of view, Updike gives us a drama that, with its machinations of power and its sexual tug of wars, resembles OTHELLO more than it does HAMLET. In the end, as in OTHELLO (as well as in most Updikean dramas), those who confuse the loins with the spirit get a whopping comeuppance."
Freeman
"Updike seeks to make Gertrude, sole daughter of Rorik, a product of her time, yet his desire to drop progressive thoughts in her head paints her in too-modern terms and makes some of her observations more appropriate for today's TV talk shows than the Denmark of centuries past....The prose is engaging throughout....But the tale takes off when the cuckolded King Hamlet realizes he has been betrayed and Claudius responds quickly and brutally...."
Guterman
"[T]he strength of [Updike's] small but immaculate novel [is] to illumine a historical development in narration--in characterization also--by revealing the dramatis personae of HAMLET as a film might do--one image in time and place superimposed upon another. It is a method with its own dangers and weaknesses, but Updike has never been afraid of risking a too evident artifice....[T]he results, aesthetically speaking, are highly agreeable....Updike's prose is, as always, beguiling and brilliant; nor in all probability would he be too dismayed to be told that the best thing about his novel is that it sends us back eagerly to the play: to its sources and to the history that lies behind it."
Bayley
"Coming from the sly and subtle Mr. Updike, one would expect this to be more than just an apologia for the queen and her new husband, and it is: GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS is also a reflection on, among much else, the contrast between Christianity and paganism and on the play's historical moment....Mr. Updike is a superbly skillful writer, and he needs every bit of his skill in taking on the delicate task he has set for himself in this novel. Historical novels are always difficult to pull off, but when you are dealing with characters from another millennium, who speak in another language, it seems almost impossible to make them sound natural. Mr. Updike has never been afraid of taking risks....This time he succeeds, to a large degree. The characters are real and speak and act as naturally as it is possible for them to; better yet, they meld in a plausible way with their familiar Shakespearean counterparts.... [T]he book surpasses the intellectual exercise it might have been and becomes a living, powerfully physical work."
Wall Street Journal - Brooke Allen (02/11/2000)
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