Helprin is unique: romantic, philosophical, verbose, beautiful. He doesn't merely tell a story: he immerses you in his world and thoughts and sense of the unity of all things and the love of New York. The story itself is riveting, and the characters deep and lovable, but you get so much more when...
The last thing Mrs. Gamely said to her daughter was, “Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead.”Winter’s Tale is a BIG book. I refer not only to its 748-page length, but to its ambition. It is a big book about big ideas, and it takes some big char...
This is a book about people's lives, and it's one of those where saying too much risks spoiling it. There are a lot of lives, and deaths tangled together in this tale, and a lot of references to a history I know very little about. It made me wonder about a lot of things - a quality I always appr...
I finished this novel with a newborn baby (my own, if you’re wondering) on my chest. The book and the baby were (literally) roughly the same size, so turning the pages without waking the infant was a challenge. Also challenging was trying to read after having been awake for three straight days. T...
tUntil I bought a used copy of “Ellis Island and Other Stories” from our local bookstore, I hadn’t known of Mark Helprin. But I was rewarded for my $4 purchase with a collection of 11 short stories that boasts a wide range of geography, time, and mood. The stories range from Israel to the U.S. to...
This collection is the most refined, graceful, and cultured group of short stories I’ve read. All are masterfully done, emotional without being overwrought; not an easy task when writing about the tragedy of September 11th, as he does in one story. The tales take place in various countries, cultu...
Every story in this book is gorgeous. I love Mark Helprin, and I wish I could say that I found this book to be as flawless as ELLIS ISLAND AND OTHER STORIES or WINTER'S TALE, but for some reason I can't bring myself to do it. It's obvious that some of these stories were written when Helprin was y...
I consider myself a Mark Helprin fan (Winter's Tale was my favourite book for about a decade), so I was surprised to find myself struggling to love this book. I think this book lacked the transcendence of Winter's Tale, and without that it was too heavy to take flight.Helprin's prose is still enc...
Suzanna had no solid idea of what these places were like. Casco Bay had surrounded every instant of her life with its mists or its waves, or its storms that brought the angry Atlantic almost to the door of her house, which she locked at night if Michael were still out at sea. Suzanna had the most...
Whether by genetic accident, meticulous crossbreeding, an early and puzzling migration, coincidence, or a reason that we do not know, they exist in great numbers. Remarkably, they accentuate this unfortunate tendency by wearing mustaches, Alpine hats, and tweed. A man who resembles a rodent shoul...