Where to start with this one? I rarely give five stars. In fact, almost never. But the artistry and craftsmanship of this novel are things that some readers have apparently totally missed.
While this book won untold numbers of awards and has many other 5 and 4-star ratings, I am frustrated by the number of reviews that say "This book was slow!" or "This book was boring!" Those readers are certainly owed their opinions, and I'm not here to question them, but I don't know that those readers understand what kind of novel this is. It's not your page-turner. It's not your heart-burner. But what it is, is something very different and very special.
While I would not call myself a Shakespeare scholar, I would confidently call myself a Shakespeare student. I studied his works very extensively in college and have acted in some of his plays. Any serious study of Shakespeare begins with an introduction to his life. And for someone as famous as he, with works as immortal as his, the details of his life are frustratingly scanty.
*SPOILER ALERT*
I think most people who know anything about Shakespeare know that his son Hamnet died, and Hamnet's death was a deciding, changing factor in Shakespeare's life, for good or ill. And no one knows for sure Hamnet's cause of death. And most people who have studied Shakespeare also know that his marriage with Anne/Agnes (I have read that at this point in history, those names were largely interchangeable) was largely spent apart from each other and seems to have deteriorated for reasons unknown to time. We know she was a few years older than he; we know that she was almost certainly pregnant with their first child at the time of their marriage. The rest of the details, no one knows.
This is a brilliant attempt not at imagining him, but imagining her. The wife of a writer so immortal that his works are still being read, interpreted, made into films and other works of art, and reimagined in different eras, 500 years on -- but who was she? And has history ever really cared?
"Hamnet" imagines her as a child of nature -- also a psychic and, in a way, according to the views of the times, a witch. She's clearly smitten by him, and vice versa, and I find that very believable, considering that in real life, they came from different social stations, and one must only speculate what drove them together so powerfully in the beginning of their relationship.
In the novel, she gives up much of her own free thinking, and her own lifestyle, and her kestrel, and other things that make her happy, out of love of this man. I would ask, what woman of the late 16th century did not? If you were a woman of this era, no matter how much you loved the man you married (and I would argue that most marriages of this time did not feature love, so you probably didn't love him at all), marriage meant the death of you as to whoever was you, whoever was the individual you were before. Among many, many other things, I think "Hamnet" is an incredible exploration of that, emotionally.
And it's a shattering, unbelievably intimate and emotionally descriptive dive into the gradual disintegration of a marriage based on the horror and heartbreak of the loss of a mutually loved child.
The fact that Shakespeare's first name -- or that his name in general -- is never used, to me is a stroke of art. It implies that the reader knows who HE is ... doesn't everyone? It is an introspection of a woman NO ONE knows, and he is a supporting character -- yet, brilliantly, at the same time, he is the main character. Because the planets circled him, not her. He's portrayed as self-absorbed and troubled and needy -- and at least in my own imagination, I can see him being all of those things.
If my review henceforth hasn't made this clear, I thought this was a brilliant book. Yes, it IS slow at times. But sometimes with "slow," you just have to stop and smell the roses. And this book has many, many roses. And people who don't have time to smell the roses when it comes to literature just need to go read something else, rather than criticizing works like this. Amazon's full of beach reads -- go find one.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.Highlighted by 2,815 Kindle readers- How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?Highlighted by 2,432 Kindle readers
- He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.Highlighted by 1,913 Kindle readers
- “That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”Highlighted by 737 Kindle readers
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Reviews with images
A beautifully-written masterpiece
How does a family go on after their boy - their son, their brother, their twin - ceases to exist? How does life continue after a mother, father, and sisters watch the boy being lowered into the ground? How does a marriage already strained by distance and time apart bear this loss? These are some of the themes explored by author Maggie O'Farrell in Hamnet, a beautifully-written masterpiece which imagines the story of the life - and death - of William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet.The year is 1596 in rural Stratford, England. Eleven-year-old Hamnet (a name interchangeable during this time with Hamlet) lives with his mother, Agnes, and sisters Susanna and Judith (his twin) while his father - whose name is never mentioned - resides in London, finding great success as a playwright and ensemble actor on the city's stages. One day, while the rest of the family is out, Judith falls ill with the plague. Within a day, her loving and devoted twin will play a trick on Death, exchanging places with Judith, and ultimately sacrificing his life so she can live. What follows is an exquisite tale of unbridled grief, of learning to survive when a part of you is missing forever, of forgiveness and healing and bearing life, and of turning loss into inspiration - in this case, inspiration for one of the most famous tragic plays of all time.I absolutely loved this book. Admittedly, although I have read several of Shakespeare's plays and seen many movies based on his works and life, I have never read the play Hamlet. I found, however, that this didn't take away from my enjoyment of the novel at all. The writing is so gorgeous, like that of an artist painting a picture, or weaving of a detailed tapestry. The tragic love story of Hamnet's parents blooms in tandem with the equally tragic story of the young man's last days and untimely death. I have never before read a story in which the death of a beloved family member is described with such heartfelt and soul-crushing detail. This book is a thing apart, and the business of feeling, the love and loss, emanate from every page.Hamnet has garnered such amazing critical praise, and for a very good reason. In my opinion, it's perfect. I savored every page and each individual person's story. I have a bad habit of not re-reading most books, but I feel that I'll be revisiting this one in the future, and will again feel ALL the feels for Hamnet and his family.
Top reviews from other countries
Antonio Aguilar
Climaxes into a wonderful, painful, story
Reviewed in Mexico on March 23, 2021