Currently reading what is considered a great literary book of the 20th Century and classic of fantasy fiction in Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale written circa 1980. The prose is at times sublime and the story itself and its characters beautifully drawn and is described as Magic Realism, which is one of my favourite movements/classifications right now. I had never heard of this author until a few weeks ago but I'm already eying off a collection of his short stories Borders also has on offer. This book is generally considered to be his masterpiece and placed alongside such modern SFF classics as John Crowley's Little Big. Only a couple hundred pages in but already shaping up as one of the books of 2009 for me. It's the kind of book that is difficult to put down.
Blurb:
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks hte house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
