Winter
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy's life" (The New York Times).
A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The Elephant Keeper.
The novel focuses on true events surrounding the London theater dramatization of Hardy's acclaimed novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, including Hardy's hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude Bugler to play Tess. As plans for the play solidify, Hardy's interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy's reclusive, neglected wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy's desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealousy and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters—with devastating results.
Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Winter is "a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
"A book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter's night, while she holds her baby in her arms." —The Washington Post
"Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas Hardy fans will be engrossed by Nicholson's fictional account of the true story of Hardy's infatuation, at age 84, with a married 18-year-old amateur actress, Gertie Bugler, playing Tess in the local Corn Exchange production of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This disconcerting tale is told from three alternating standpoints: Hardy's, Gertie's, and that of Hardy's second wife, Florence. Although the women's narratives are credible and entertaining, Hardy's perspective dominates and captivates through its slow rhythms, antiquated vocabulary, and above all its third-person style featuring natural imagery, meandering syntax, and melancholy observations. In classic Hardy fashion, the novel begins with a rural landscape, zeroes in on the silhouette of an old man walking with his dog, and then reveals that the dog is named Wessex and the old man is the great novelist. Even before Florence has her say, the strains on their marriage are evident, what with Hardy preoccupied by work, memories, and increasingly by Gertie. Hardy invites Gertie to tea when Florence is away, watches Gertie's performance from backstage, keeps a lock of her hair, and imagines eloping. Gertie, meanwhile, imagines a London stage career, while Florence imagines widowhood. As in his two previous novels, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper) presents an impossible, inappropriate passion. This effort proves most remarkable for its deliciously archaic prose and portrait of the artist as an old man falling in love partly with a girl, partly with the disappearing countryside and lost youth she represents, and mostly with his own creation.
