Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.
Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.
Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.
Maggie O'Farrell ens regala una magnífica biografia novelada de William Shakespeare, plena de fantasia i de moments onírics. La mort del seu fill Hamnet als 11 anys és l'eix central del llibre, però l'autèntica protagonista és la seva dona Agnes, que fa de pal de paller de tota la història i també del matrimoni amb Shakespeare. Una dona amb poders quasi sensorials, amb coneixements ancestrals en medicina natural, en herbes i altres remeis, i capaç de sentir presències fantasmals i de percebre els sentiments dels altres només agafar-los les mans. Al final, viuen els anhels d'eternitat que tots posem en els nostres fills i filles.
I generally don't like historical fiction. My last taste of it was Wolf Hall, which I despised. I'm not a romantic either. I should've hated this book, but I didn't. I loved it.
The characters of Agnes and Hamnet are brilliantly imagined, the rest maybe not so much but this story isn't about the others. The prose is beautiful without being overly pretentious.
This was a recommendation from a friend, and I have a couple of thoughts, mostly mixed.
Lyrical prose, sure. At times beautiful, at times too purple and overbearing, made worse by the present tense.
Emotional, sure. But child loss is always emotional?
Hamnet is really about Agnes, Hamnet's mother and Shakespeare's wife. Through her, we get a glimpse of the bard's life, but mostly we watch her grow up, lose a mother, fall in love, create a family, protect that family, grieve a son.
A solid read that neither wowed me nor let me down. The fourth star is because it not only kept me reading but also evoked an emotional reaction.
Una novela histórica sobre la familia de un inglés famoso de finales del XVI, pero centrada sobre todo en el drama de una mujer que pierde a un hijo: en ese aspecto, irreprochable. Transmite magníficamente el carácter y las reacciones del personaje. El aspecto histórico también está bien resuelto, las diferencias entre una familia de artesanos (“burguesa” se podría decir) y una de labradores acomodados. El estilo no me ha gustado tanto, demasiado florido y recargado con adjetivos que no aportan gran cosa.
La autora toma como base lo que pudo haber sucedido en la vida de Shakespeare y nos hace un relato lleno de magia y de color, lleno de sentimientos que te embargan y te dejan marcado por mucho tiempo.
Una novela impresionante, fabulosa, que te engancha de principio a fin. Son muchos los temas que se pueden destacar, para mí el principal es el amor, el amor desarrollado en una familia, el de pareja, el de padre y madre hacia sus hijos y viceversa, pero me conmovió sobre manera, el amor de los hermanos. Ligado a ese amor, está el soporte brindado por la mujer a un hombre con grandes cualidades que se siente oprimido por su familia de origen y que gracias al respaldo de su esposa logra surgir y llegar a ocupar un lugar inolvidable en la literatura mundial.
Por último, un tema central, que también tiene que …
La autora toma como base lo que pudo haber sucedido en la vida de Shakespeare y nos hace un relato lleno de magia y de color, lleno de sentimientos que te embargan y te dejan marcado por mucho tiempo.
Una novela impresionante, fabulosa, que te engancha de principio a fin. Son muchos los temas que se pueden destacar, para mí el principal es el amor, el amor desarrollado en una familia, el de pareja, el de padre y madre hacia sus hijos y viceversa, pero me conmovió sobre manera, el amor de los hermanos. Ligado a ese amor, está el soporte brindado por la mujer a un hombre con grandes cualidades que se siente oprimido por su familia de origen y que gracias al respaldo de su esposa logra surgir y llegar a ocupar un lugar inolvidable en la literatura mundial.
Por último, un tema central, que también tiene que ver con el amor, es el dolor del duelo. Cada quien lo lleva como puede, a su manera. Es fácil dejarse devastar, encerrarse. Pero en esta familia cada uno lo hizo de forma que la vida continuara y que el recuerdo del que se fue, siguiera latente en sus corazones y que incluso nosotros, tantos años después nos veamos impregnados del cumulo de sentimientos que produjo en su familia.
Me quedo con la reflexión sobre la necesidad del género humano por ponerle nombre a todo, incluso al dolor de la muerte, y la pregunta de Judith “¿qué soy yo si murió mi hermano gemelo?, si pierdes un padre eres huérfano, entonces, ¿qué soy yo?”. Hay dolores que no tienen nombre.
Una invitación sincera a leer esta magnífica obra, seguro que encuentras algo que te hará sentir.
La trama del libro queda perfectamente resumida en el breve párrafo que lo abre: "En la década de 1580, una pareja [...] tuvo tres hijos: Susanna y Hamnet y Judith, que eran gemelos. Hamnet, el niño, murió en 1590 a los once años. Cuatro años más tarde su padre escribió una obra de teatro titulada Hamlet".
Alrededor de esa trama, O'Farrel construye una narración minuciosa, penetrante y con la dosis justa de preciosismo centrada esos personajes. Sobre todo en Agnes, la madre, a la que convierte en un personaje complejo y carismático. No es ni mucho menos una novela histórica al uso, sí un relato cautivador sobre una familia y dos tragedias (una real, otra escrita).
Nota: si al principio te parece más morosa de la cuenta, dale tiempo. Merece la pena.
A most interesting piece of genealogical, historical, fiction. Although, I have to say it makes me glad to have lived in different times from those of Shakespeare.
Bravo! Author Maggie O'Farrell has taken a few known facts from history and woven them into a lovely novel. I was absolutely captivated, all the way through. This story is populated with intriguing characters and the pacing is excellent. It is a memorable story, and I am so glad that I picked it up.
Bravo! Author Maggie O'Farrell has taken a few known facts from history and woven them into a lovely novel. I was absolutely captivated, all the way through. This story is populated with intriguing characters and the pacing is excellent. It is a memorable story, and I am so glad that I picked it up.
Education is wasted on the young, and in my case a good example of that was the waste of a year-long course in Shakespeare my junior year of college. I went to a good school with a strong English department and the teacher was a good one. I found that I could read just the parts of the plays he'd have us write essays on and write about them well enough to do all right. A week before the final exam, though, he told us it would be a four-hundred question trivia test that did nothing but assess whether or not we'd read the plays. In which play did they sing a song with these lyrics; that sort of thing. I and a friend went to the library got books with synopses of the plays but we both did horribly in the final and got Ds for the course. All …
Education is wasted on the young, and in my case a good example of that was the waste of a year-long course in Shakespeare my junior year of college. I went to a good school with a strong English department and the teacher was a good one. I found that I could read just the parts of the plays he'd have us write essays on and write about them well enough to do all right. A week before the final exam, though, he told us it would be a four-hundred question trivia test that did nothing but assess whether or not we'd read the plays. In which play did they sing a song with these lyrics; that sort of thing. I and a friend went to the library got books with synopses of the plays but we both did horribly in the final and got Ds for the course. All that sloth and guilt did not make me read [a:Maggie O'Farrell|91236|Maggie O'Farrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1208204636p2/91236.jpg]'s [b:Hamnet|43890641|Hamnet|Maggie O'Farrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574943819l/43890641.SY75.jpg|68289933] with a negative bias, though, and even if it had the quality of O'Farrell's writing and story telling would have overcome it. The subtitle is A Novel of the Plague, making it, as an outtake from a review in The New Yorker said, "All too timely." The book gives you a real sense of what life was like in England in 1600 thanks to O'Farrell's stunning ability to evoke senses.
Mary mutters a string of words under her breath, a prayer, of sorts, an entreaty, then pulls Agnes to her. Her touch is almost rough, her fingers gripping Agnes's elbow, her forearm pressing down hard on Agnes's shoulder. Agnes's face is pressed to Mary's coif; she smells the soap in it, soap she herself made—with ashes and tallow and the narrow buds of lavender—she hears the rasp of hair against cloth, underneath. Before she shuts her eyes, submitting herself to the embrace, she sees Susanna and Hamnet step in through the back door.
I probably would have enjoyed this more if I had never seen the wonderful British TV comedy "Upstart Crow". I only managed to get the families voices and faces out of my imagination half way through, but Shakespeare remained to the end with the grinning face of David Mitchell.
