Book
Gertrude and Claudius
Record details
- ISBN: 97803754090810
- ISBN: 0375409084
-
Physical Description:
print
212 p. ; 21 cm. : ill. - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : A.A. Knopf, 2000.
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Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at South Central Regional Library.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Other Formats and Editions
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morden Library | F Upd (Text) | 35864001434941 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Book News : Book News Reviews
Updike's 19th novel is a prequel to Hamlet . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 January 2000
Oh, dear, here is another one of Updike's lapses, which are occurring with increased frequency; in fact, it seems that lately he would be better off permanently consigning every other novel to his desk drawer. This latest effort has an interesting premise, but what might have been a rich historical novel is nothing more than a stuffy, stagy costume drama. Updike tells the story of the lives of Queen Gertrude and King Claudius, taking the tale up to the point where Shakespeare's Hamlet begins. We witness Gertrude as a young princess being married off by her father, the king of Denmark, to a mighty warrior whom she doesn't love. Upon the old king's death, the warrior becomes king and the princess his queen; their son grows into the young man we know as Prince Hamlet. Never having accepted the roles of wife and mother, the middle-aged Gertrude enters a liaison with the king's brother, Claudius. What follows, of course, is the stuff of Shakespeare's tragedy: Claudius murders his brother, marries Gertrude, and recalls Prince Hamlet home from his schooling in Germany. Giving Gertrude and Claudius pre-Shakespearean lives is a genuinely intriguing idea, but Updike fails to pump real life into these characters and wraps the story in a lacquered style too grand even for evoking the regal past. This one is only for the most devoted Updike followers. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2000)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2001 July
Best bets for book clubsThe month of July offers several great choices for reading groups. BookPage's selections, all newly published in paperback, are listed below. We hope these titles will inspire lively discussion in your book club.
The Binding Chair
By Kathryn Harrison
The story of beautiful, seductive May, a young Chinese woman subjected to the brutal tradition of foot binding, The Binding Chair is set at the turn of the 19th century. The novel follows May from rural China to a Shanghai brothel and eventually to Australia, where she meets and marries Arthur Cohen, a Jewish man who is a member of the Foot Emancipation Society. In Australia, May grows close to Arthur's niece, the rebellious Alice, and their unusual alliance turns the family upside-down. This finely detailed, well-researched book has a broad geographical span. Through sensuous, rich writing, Harrison examines history, femininity and the meaning of family. Ask your local bookseller for a reading group guide.
In the Fall
By Jeffrey Lent
Lent's critically acclaimed debut novel begins at the end of the Civil War. Norman Pelham, a young Union soldier, returns to his father's Vermont farm with his bride Leah, a former slave. Enduring the contempt of their neighbors, the couple creates a life for themselves that transcends the issue of race. But Leah, who fled North Carolina to escape the abuse she faced as a slave, fears repercussions from the past. When she leaves Norman and their three children in order to face her fate, the family falls apart. The novel follows the Pelham clan through three generations, coming full circle with Foster, Norman's grandson, the one person who is able to put together the pieces of the family's history - including the truth about Leah's mysterious past. A reading group guide is available online at www.vintagebooks.com/read. For a printed version, ask your local bookseller.
Fiona Range
By Mary McGarry Morris
Morris, whose Songs in Ordinary Time was a 1995 Oprah book club pick, has created a strong, smart heroine in 30-year-old Fiona. Raised by well-to-do relatives outside Boston, Fiona - whose mother abandoned her when she was a baby - has a wild streak that has earned her a reputation and brought grief to her family. Anxious to change her life, she tries to connect with Patrick Grady, the volatile Vietnam veteran who may be her father. She also embarks on a series of romantic relationships with the wrong men (her cousin's ex-boyfriend, for instance), entanglements that lead to trouble. This story of a wayward woman's attempt to find love and identity is Morris at her best. A reading group guide is included in the book.
The Lost Legends of New Jersey
By Frederick Reiken
Set in the suburbs of Livingston, New Jersey, Reiken's second novel is a chronicle of the dysfunctional Rubin clan. At the center of the story is teenaged Anthony, whose mother has deserted the family for a new life in Florida. To make matters worse, Rubin pere has had an affair with Anthony's best friend's mother. In the midst of this familial unraveling, Anthony turns to street-wise Juliette, and the two begin a romance that is infused by Reiken with the power of myth. Taking his cue from the stories of famous lovers (Lancelot and Guenevere, Romeo and Juliet), the author weaves legend into the fabric of his narrative. The match between Anthony and Juliette is made on earth, not in heaven, but through it, Reiken reveals the magic that laces mundane life. A reading group guide is included in the book.
Gertrude and Claudius
By John Updike
This ingenious, detailed take on Shakespeare's Hamlet may be viewed as a preface to the play itself. The spotlight here is not on the moody Dane, but on his mother and stepfather, whose stories are given new dimension by Updike. Fabricating pasts for the pair, he portrays Gertrude in her pre-queen days as a young girl given unhappily in marriage to a man she doesn't love. Her father, the king of Denmark, insists on the match, and Gertrude eventually gives birth to Hamlet. Yet she never settles in to life as a wife and ultimately becomes involved with Claudius, her husband's brother. The results are, of course, the stuff of Shakespeare. A clever prequel, Updike's story stops where the bard's starts, lending new richness to two of literature's most familiar characters. Copyright 2001 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1999 December #2
A risky and ultimately unsatisfying departure from what we've come to think of as Updike s distinctive territory: suburbia and its discontents. Here, he retells the story of Hamlet's mother, the adulterous queen, and her brother-in-law and lover, in the years leading to Prince ``Amleth's'' return from college in Wittenberg, to bury his father and attend the marriage of his mother and uncle. Updike's sources include Shakespeare's primary one, Saxo Grammaticus' 12th-century Historia Danica, as well as Hamlet itself, from which he quotes sporadically (noting, for instance, that the lovers exchange ``reechy kisses''). The novel is best in its first half: a clever re-creation of late medieval Scandinavia's tangled power struggles and of the austere court of famed warrior Horwendil the Jute, who wed reluctant young ``Gerutha'' and became king of Denmark (then Zealand) upon her father's death. The sly figure of Horwendil's ``dark'' brother Feng(on), a ``freelance'' adventurer whose tales of foreign lands seduce Gerutha (exactly as Othello's enchanted Desdemona) into intimacy, is quite convincingly evoked. Alas, once Gerutha and ``Feng'' (later Gertrude and Claudius, for reasons only partially spelt out) hit the sheets (this is Updike, after all), the hitherto lean and credibly stately prose often becomes, if not quite royal, certifiably purple (``Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird's lost call''). It isn't all risible, though. Long restrained tensions between ``King Hamlet'' (his name likewise having changed) and the wily Feng explode in a taut confrontation scene. Gertrude's transformation from unwilling bride to weary, guilt-ridden matron is deftly traced. And the offstage presence, as it were, of her brooding, ``theatrical'' son an aggrieved time bomb ticking steadily away is expertly sketched in. Yet the abrupt inconclusive ending (even though we know precisely what s to come) is almost certainly a mistake. One of Updike's more intriguing experiments but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection) Copyright 2000 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2000 February #2
Updike's latest is an odd but intriguing little novel that one suspects he had fun writing. It is a speculative piece exploring the relationship among Hamlet's mother, father, and uncle prior to the action of Shakespeare's play. Using details taken from early accounts of Hamlet, or Amleth, as he is called in theHistoria Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, Updike constructs a tale that is part "romance" "She lifted a finger to touch his fringed lips, to create there a tingle to mirror that which she had felt at the back of her neck" and part psychological study an examination of the motives that led to the betrayal and murder of King Hamlet. It offers not a justification of Gertrude's and Claudius's action but a possible explanation, and in the end Gertrude seems as much victim as perpetrator. Throughout it all, Prince Hamlet remains a minor if forebodingly sullen figure. This is by no means Updike's best work, but it is a fun read that will especially appeal to Shakespeare buffs and more serious-minded romance enthusiasts. For all public libraries and academic libraries seeking completeness in their Updike holdings. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/99.] David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 October #1
Will he never run out of steam? Updike's newest novel isAyou guessed itAa reconsideration of Hamlet that portrays the title characters sympathetically in the early years of their affair. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2000 January #1
Precisely honed, buoyant with sly wit, masterful character analysis and astutely observed historical details, this tour de force by the protean Updike reimagines the circumstances leading to Shakepeare's Hamlet. To emphasize the ancient provenance of the Scandinavian legend, he identifies the main characters by the names they held in various versions of the story. Thus in Part I, the future king is a hero from Jutland called Horwendil; Feng is his brother; Amleth his son; and Corambis the old courtier who will die behind the arras. The one name that remains nearly constant is Geruthe/Gertrude, the queen, portrayed by Shakespeare as a cold conniver in her husband's murder. Sometimes accused of misogyny, Updike acquits himself of the charge here in his sympathetic depiction of her character from age 16, when she is reluctantly betrothed to the stolid, self-important warrior Horwendil; to age 47, when she is newly married to Feng/Fengon/Claudius. In Updike's revisionist imagination, Gertrude is intelligent and sensible, with a sweet-natured, radiant personality. She is an obedient daughter and a faithful, if unsatisfied, wife to her complacent husband until, feeling cheated of true happiness in the doldrums of middle age, she succumbs to the ardent pleas of his brother, who has been in love with her for many years. Updike details the irresistible sweep of their mutual passion and the mortal danger it entails with delicacy. Gertrude's loyalty to her husband and her royal duties, her initial resistance to adultery and her concern about her distant, sour, self-centered son contributes to a fully dimensional portrait. A constant theme is Gertrude's rueful acknowledgment of women's roles as pawns and chattels of their fathers and spouses. Updike also credits her with the metaphor for Shakespeare's seven stages of man: "We begin small, wax great, and shrivel, she thought." Claudius here is not an evil plotter, but a man driven to desperation when the king discovers the illicit liaison. Though he wears his knowledge lightly, Updike establishes the context of the time through details of social, cultural, intellectual and theological ideas. If the narrative seems a bit labored in Part Three, which immediately precedes the action of the play, the resolution is breathtaking: before the assembled court, Claudius is relieved and finally confident: "He had gotten away with it. All would be well." Enter Shakespeare. 75,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2000 January #4
Precisely honed, buoyant with sly wit, masterful character analysis and astutely observed historical details, this tour de force by the protean Updike reimagines the circumstances leading to Shakepeare's Hamlet. To emphasize the ancient provenance of the Scandinavian legend, he identifies the main characters by the names they held in various versions of the story. Thus in Part I, the future king is a hero from Jutland called Horwendil; Feng is his brother; Amleth his son; and Corambis the old courtier who will die behind the arras. The one name that remains nearly constant is Geruthe/Gertrude, the queen, portrayed by Shakespeare as a cold conniver in her husband's murder. Sometimes accused of misogyny, Updike acquits himself of the charge here in his sympathetic depiction of her character from age 16, when she is reluctantly betrothed to the stolid, self-important warrior Horwendil; to age 47, when she is newly married to Feng/Fengon/Claudius. In Updike's revisionist imagination, Gertrude is intelligent and sensible, with a sweet-natured, radiant personality. She is an obedient daughter and a faithful, if unsatisfied, wife to her complacent husband until, feeling cheated of true happiness in the doldrums of middle age, she succumbs to the ardent pleas of his brother, who has been in love with her for many years. Updike details the irresistible sweep of their mutual passion and the mortal danger it entails with delicacy. Gertrude's loyalty to her husband and her royal duties, her initial resistance to adultery and her concern about her distant, sour, self-centered son contributes to a fully dimensional portrait. A constant theme is Gertrude's rueful acknowledgment of women's roles as pawns and chattels of their fathers and spouses. Updike also credits her with the metaphor for Shakespeare's seven stages of man: "We begin small, wax great, and shrivel, she thought." Claudius here is not an evil plotter, but a man driven to desperation when the king discovers the illicit liaison. Though he wears his knowledge lightly, Updike establishes the context of the time through details of social, cultural, intellectual and theological ideas. If the narrative seems a bit labored in Part Three, which immediately precedes the action of the play, the resolution is breathtaking: before the assembled court, Claudius is relieved and finally confident: "He had gotten away with it. All would be well." Enter Shakespeare. 75,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. - School Library Journal Reviews : SLJ Reviews 2000 August
YA-This engrossing prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet is rife with relationship drama. Confidences between father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife, and siblings and servants provide an archival view that stops at Hamlet's 30th birthday, where the Bard takes up his tale. Updike relates the action at a cinematic clip reminiscent of many of the recent Shakespeare-influenced movies. Characters speak with assured and eloquent tongues. Enjoyment of the titillating castle chatter is not hampered by the fancy Old English associated with inspirational texts. Updike's dialogue is piercing, witty, and provocative. Characters' motivations are revealed through discourse and actions that the author describes in a singsong and playful way. Scenes include adulterous exchanges and a murderous undertaking, and the language is sometimes explicit, mostly sublime, and consistently clever. Close attention must be paid, however, because the characters' names change with each major lifestyle progression, symbolizing renewal or evolution. As the king's brother, the title character is known as Feng, but called Fengon during his affair with his sister-in-law, the queen, and finally, after assuming the throne he emerges at his own behest as Claudius. Updike is as crafty with intrigue as this Denmark cast is with living in riotous times. Young adults who have read Hamlet will find Gertrude and Claudius insightful, and those who are first experiencing the kingdom of Elsinore may be prompted to read the play.-Karen Sokol, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
