Happy snowy Sunday everyone!
Today’s post features a beautiful fiction novel that I enjoyed very much. I hope you like it too. Have a great week ahead!
mariana
Why did I read this book?
This book was on my reading list for a while. For the past year or so, I’ve seen Hamnet featured in many reading and award lists. I finally got to it a couple of weeks ago and loved it.
What is the book about?
The story behind Hamlet: Back in 1596, in an English town known as Stratford-upon-Avon, a boy named Hamnet died at the age of eleven. A couple of years later, a play known as Hamlet materialises in the London theatre scene. Little is known about Shakespeare’s personal life. This book is a fictional attempt to connect the dots between Shakespeare’s family life and the story behind one of his most famous plays. The story is set up in such a way that Shakespeare’s name is never used. We mostly learn about him indirectly through the rest of the characters, having his story told to us from the outside in. It’s brilliant!
Family love: For centuries, family has been at the centre of the human experience for most people. This book tells us the story of a family and the love amongst them. The author touches upon the richness of parental love and the magic of twin love in the most beautiful way.
Loss and grief: What happens when a family loses one of its members? Grieving takes different shapes and forms for everyone, and reconciling others’ grief can push families and couples to the limits. Is there a way for us to accept and understand other people’s grief when it manifests in a different way than our own?
“Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet
Why should you read it?
Travel in time: One of the most amazing things about books is that they transport you to other places for free. This is especially appreciated now that we can’t move around much. Hamnet will transport you to life in England (Warwickshire) in the 1580s. The author describes in great detail what life was like back then. The jobs people had, the hardships they went through, gender roles, society and its rules at the time. One of the most interesting and timely aspects of the picture painted in this novel is the plague, an epidemic that people had to deal with during that period which can resonate with us now given what we’re living, and it shows how the actions of someone at one end of the world can impact everyone else.
An ode to imagination, creativity and beauty: The author’s resourcefulness allows us to picture what could have been the life of the family of one of the most influential literary characters in history (you don’t need to know anything about Shakespeare to enjoy it). The author’s writing style is poetic and easy to follow, her words sweep you further and further into the story with every page you turn. I especially enjoyed how original her descriptions of nature are.
“Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop instead of using Amazon :-) Also, have you considered joining a library?
UK
Spain
Mexico
Italy
Amazon IT (Kindle)
US
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”
“How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child.”
“Not that anyone, of course, would want to wed her. She is said to be too wild for any man.”
“There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence.”
“The words exist, if you know how to listen.”
“They are what most people dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or on those of the people they love. They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.”
“One house, she is learning, runs very differently from another.”
“It means business, this pain. It will not leave her be. Soon it will not let her rest or gather herself. It means to force her out of herself, to turn what is inside outside.”
“The fingers on the monkey’s hand are familiar and strange to the boy, all at once. Black and shiny, like boot leather, with nails like apple pips. Its palm, though, is striated, just like the boys and there passes between them, there, under the palm trees that line the wharf, the confluence of sympathy that can flow between human and beast.”
“She finds herself frequently unable to look away from her child, to remove her gaze from her daughter’s face. Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush? There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.”
“There is so much to do in a family of this size, so much to see to, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until – what?”
‘It would be hard,’ he says, without looking at her, ‘for a man to live in the shadow of a brute like that. Even if it was in the house next door. Hard to draw breath. Hard to find your path in life.’
“Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”
“How can it be that she will no longer exist?”
“He needs to find his mother: amazing how strong this instinct is, even now, as a great lad of eleven. He recalls this sensation, this urge – just – from when he was much younger: the driving need to be with his mother, to be under her gaze, to be by her side, close enough to be able to reach out and touch her, because no one else would do.”
“He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same.”
“He is going. She is, however secretly, sending him away.”
“She will encourage him to go but she will not watch him leave.”
“She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.”
“She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.”
“Agnes’s concept of death has, for a long time, taken the form of a single room, lit from within, perhaps in the middle of an expanse of moorland. The living inhabit the room; the dead mill outside it, pressing their palms and faces and fingertips to the window, desperate to get back, to reach their people. Some inside the room can hear and see those outside; some can speak through the walls; most cannot.
The idea that this tiny child might have to live out there, on the cold and misted moor, without her, is unthinkable. She will not let her pass over. It is always the smaller twin who is taken: everybody knows this. Everyone, she can tell, is waiting, breath held, for this to happen.”
“She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time.”
“She can tell, even through her dazed exhaustion, even before she can take his hand, that he has found it, he is fitting it, he is inhabiting it – that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do. It makes her smile, there on the bed, to see him stand so tall, his chest thrown wide, his face clear of worry and frustration, to inhale his scent of satisfaction.”
“Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.”
“She begins at the face, at the top of him. He has a wide forehead and his hair grows up from the brow. He had, of late, begun to wet it in the morning, to try to get it to lie flat, but the hair would not listen. She wets it now but it still does not listen, even in death. You see, she says to him, you cannot change what you are given, cannot bend or alter what is dealt to you.”
“She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.”
“...people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died.”
“Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again.”
“Gardens don’t stand still: they are always in flux.”
“Judith stays close to her mother, keeping in her orbit, as if proximity to her guarantees something. Susanna doesn’t know what. Safety? Survival? Purpose?”
“Agnes watched the child drop from her younger daughter, as a cloak from a shoulder. She is taller, slender as a willow strip, her figure filling out her gowns. She loses the urge to skip, to move quickly, deftly, to skitter across a room or a yard, she acquires the frightened tread of womanhood.”