Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION HELPRIN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
An old man's magnificent tale of love and war-a recapitulation of a life and a reckoning with mortality told by one of America's most acclaimed novelists.
Author Notes
Mark Helprin was born in Manhattan, New York on June 28, 1947. He received degrees from Harvard College and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and Columbia University. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force.
He is the author of numerous novels including Refiner's Fire, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, and In Sunlight and In Shadow. Winter's Tale was adapted into a movie in 2014. His short story collection, Ellis Island and Other Stories, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1981. His other short story collections include A Dove of the East and Other Stories and The Pacific and Other Stories. He also writes children's books including Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows. He has received several awards including the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix de Rome, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award in 2006, and the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding in 2010.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With energetic, often lyrical prose capable of poetic images of great intensity, coupled with an antic imagination unleashed in scenes of high adventure and bizarre and droll events, Helprin's ( Winter's Tale ) dramatic, sweeping narrative focuses on one man's experiences during a turbulent period of history. Septuagenarian Alessandro Giuliani, scion of a cultured Roman family, looks back on a life whose direction was irrevocably altered and thereafter shadowed by WW I. Idealistic Alessandro first sees action in the Tyrol (giving Helprin the opportunity to display his knowledge of mountain climbing), is part of a ``phantom'' unit sent to Sicily to capture deserters, becomes a deserter himself and later a prisoner sentenced to death--in short, undergoes experiences that encapsulate war's many horrors, ironies and tragedies. As counterpoint to brutal battle scenes, there is dark comedy in the character of the demented dwarf Orfeo Quatta, who pursues his awesome responsibilities at the Ministry of War with capricious maniawhy passive voice? doesn't dwarf himself pursue these responsibilities? . Helprin uses Giorgioni's painting La Tempesta to convey the novel's message: that women, with the promise of love and new life, are civilization's salvation in the aftermath of war. The author himself again demonstrates his ability to create vivid settings: ``as vivid as graphic representations''? magnificent landscapes teeming with activity and colored by extremes of weather, illuminated with the clarity of a classical painting . While the plot early on sometimes seems padded and digressive, the reader will soon find Alessandro's story a gripping, poignant and universally relevant moral fable. 125,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; paperback rights to Avon; author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An old Italian professor of aesthetics recounts his experiences in WW I to a young acquaintance as they trudge along the road from Rome to Monte Prato 50 years later--in this ebullient, elegaic novel of destruction and survival. ""When I love someone, that person disappears,"" says Alessandro Giulani after having lost not only the objects of his expected early infatuations--the little girl, ""whose name, of course, was not Patrizia,"" he meets in a fairy-tale encounter in the South Tyrol; high-spirited horsewoman Lia Belloti, whose father has bought some of his bourgeois family's land; Janet McCafrey, the Irishwoman who shares a sleeping compartment in the train that takes him to the front in 1914--but also his parents, most of his regiment, his beloved friend Raffaello Foe, and finally his lover Ariene, pregnant with his child, killed in a bombing run on the hospital where she's tending the sick. Ariane's death turns Alessandro's mission in life from survival (on the northern front fighting the Austrians, in Sicily fighting deserters, in Rome and the prison of Stella Marls after the murder of his colonel forces him to turn deserter himself, as a prisoner of the Austrians on his return to the front after a last-minute reprieve from execution) to revenge for Ariane's death, and then--when he suspects she may have escaped after all--to an impossible search through Italy for her. The fondness for magic realism apparent in Winter's Tale turns up in Alessandro's repeated confrontations with querulous old scribe Orfeo Quatta, whose terror of being replaced by newfangled typewriters led him to develop a weirdly beatific model of a universe held together by heavenly sap that turns diabolical when his mechanisms single-handedly unleash the war and all Alessandro's bereavements; but most of this story is in the more old-fashioned mode of the Victorian triple-decker. Tender, optimistic, and sumptuously presented: a feast of a novel, right down to Alessandro's tender lingering over the final course. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In summer 1964, a distinguished-looking gentleman in his seventies dismounts on principle from a streetcar that was to carry him from Rome to a distant village, instead accompanying on foot a boy denied a fare. As they walk, he tells the boy the story of his life. A young aesthete from a privileged Roman family, Alesandro Giuliani found his charmed existence shattered by the coming of World War I. The war led to an onerous tour of duty, inadvertent desertion, near-execution, forced labor, service high in the Italian Alps that took advantage of his (and Helprin's) skill at mountain climbing, capture by the enemy, and return home, dispossessed of most of his friends and family. Along the way, he gains, loses, and eventually rediscovers love. This rousingly good story of survival is all the more remarkable in the telling. The language is rich without cloying, complex yet luminous in Helprin's best style. In a number of thoughtful philosophical passages as engaging as any adventure story, Alesandro struggles to reconcile his appreciation of beauty and his religious faith with the horror around him. That he finally persuades us to believe in a ``God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror'' is testimony to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91.--Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ROME, AUGUSTON THE ninth of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes. The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few slightly swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed through the Villa Borghese, alone. Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.Alessandro Giuliani was tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair fell and floated about his head like the white water in the curl of a wave. Perhaps because he had been without his family, solitary for so long, the deer in deer preserves and even in the wild sometimes allowed him to stroke their cloud-spotted flanks and touch their faces. And on the hot terra cotta floors of roof gardens and in other, less likely places, though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands. Most of the time they held in place and stared at him with their round gray eyes until they sailed away with a feminine flutter of wings that he found beautiful not only for its delicacy and grace, but because the sound echoed through what then became an exquisite silence.As he hurried along the Villa Borghese he felt his blood rushing and his eyes sharpening with sweat. In advance of his approach through long tunnels of dark greenery the birds caught fire in song but were perfectly quiet as he passed directly underneath, so that he propelled and drew their hypnotic chatter before and after him like an ocean wave pushing through an estuary. With his white hair and thick white mustache, Alessandro Giuliani might have seemed English were it not for his cream-colored suit of distinctly Roman cut and a thin bamboo cane entirely inappropriate for an Englishman. Still trotting, breathless, and tapping, he emerged from the Villa Borghese onto a long wide road that went up a hill and was flanked on either side by a row of tranquil buildings with tile roofs from which the light reflected as if it were a waterfall cascading onto broken rock.Had he looked up he might have seen angels of light dancing above the throbbing bright squares-in whirlwinds, will-o'-the-wisps, and golden eddies-but he didn't look up, for he was intent on getting to the end of the long road, to a place where he had to catch a streetcar that, by evening, would take him far into the countryside. He would have said, anyway, that it was better to get to the end of the road than to see angels, for he had seen angels many times before. Their faces shone from paintings; their voices rode the long and lovely notes of arias; they descended to capture the bodies and souls of young children; they sang and perched in the trees; they were in the surf and the streams; they inspired dancing; and they were the right and holy combination of words in poetry. As he climbed th Excerpted from A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| i Rome, August | p. 1 |
| ii Race to the Sea | p. 94 |
| iii His Portrait When He Was Young | p. 211 |
| iv The 19th River Guard | p. 249 |
| v The Moon and the Bonfires | p. 297 |
| vi Stella Maris | p. 388 |
| vii A Soldier of the Line | p. 490 |
| viii The Winter Palace | p. 634 |
| ix La Tempesta | p. 733 |
| x La Rondine | p. 782 |
