Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
As William Styron once wrote, the historical novelist works best when fed on short rations. The rations at Maggie O’Farrell’s disposal are scant but tasty, just the kind of morsels to nourish an empathetic imagination.
... told with the urgency of a whispered prayer — or curse.
... moving.
..superb.
... vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages — from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire, enriching her narrative with atmospheric details of the sights, smells, and relentless daily toil involved in running a household in Elizabethan England — a domestic arena in which a few missing menstrual rags on washday is enough to alarm a mother of girls.
This is a remarkable piece of work, in which emotional intelligence and solid, intellectual research are evident, but with enough of a 'space for fiction' to make it a novel and not a thesis.
... a wholly original, fully engrossing reimagining of Shakespeare’s little-explored home life with barely a flubbed line, misplaced stage prop or tedious soliloquy in sight.
O’Farrell’s great skill throughout the book is to treat obviously 'Shakespearean' themes, such as...gender-blurring or the affinity between boy and girl twins, with subtlety, making them almost tangential when they occur in the playwright’s own life.
... audacious, beguiling.
... the idea that motivates Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel...is an awkward one. What father would memorialize his dead child as a depressed man who contemplates suicide and the murder of his uncle before being murdered himself?.
... nominally a work of historical fiction. But its core subject is the kind of unchecked, ravaging despair that follows the death of a child. The author, whose memoir I Am, I Am, I Am covered the near-death experiences of herself and her ailing daughter, understands the parental terror of a child’s suffering.
... magnificent and searing.
...the story goes rather slowly, weighed down in part by O’Farrell’s love of the rhetorical rule of three. She never describes something once if she can do it multiple times.
Such an undertaking is an enormous challenge, but O’Farrell is passionately steeped in the period.
There are, that is, interesting historical notes here. Interesting information about the house Shakespeare grew up in, and the one he purchased when he began to make money. About flowers and herbs and their medicinal properties. There is a moving account of the courtship of an unlikely couple, an even more moving story about the grief experienced over the loss of a child. But what elevates the story above 'interesting' is its engagement with Shakespeare’s life, and there’s something peculiar about hinging the story’s emotional gravity on a reader’s knowledge of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
Those even faintly squeamish about coronavirus might find themselves particularly traumatised to read Farrell's extraordinary description of how, in the summer of that year, the virus travels.
O’Farrell creates a period setting through mood rather than historical facts or details.
...both a brilliant re-creation of the lives of William Shakespeare and his family in late 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon and an emotionally intense account of the death of the dramatist’s young son and its painful aftermath.
Historical sources on Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway Shakespeare are few, so O’Farrell’s imagination freely ranges in this tale of deepest love and loss. Flashbacks document the Shakespeares’ marriage; O’Farrell offering a gentler rendering than the traditional view.
...evocative.
It takes a brave writer to put words in William Shakespeare’s mouth. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell almost gets away with it.
...her gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display.
...an outstanding masterpiece.
... a brilliant historical novel steeped in the heady atmosphere of the 16th century.