Friday, February 11, 2011

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: Recommended for Hamlet Lovers Everywhere

Wroblewski, David. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel. New York: Ecco, 2008.

I don't always have time to sit down with a thick novel, no matter how good it is. Often, I listen to the audiobook version. One of the benefits of doing so is that I can listen to it while driving, shoveling snow, doing chores, shoveling snow, working out, or shoveling snow (I do live in Minnesota, after all). Another is that I can listen to it at twice the speed, thus saving time. For The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I didn't save any time. It was so good that I listened to it twice.

I don't want to give away any part of the plot. You may know that it is structured on the plot of Hamlet, but part of the joy for me in listening to the novel was being uncertain just where or how it would deviate from Hamlet's plot. The best parts in that respect are the section that is analogous to Hamlet's exile to England and encounter with the pirates and the culmination of the novel. You really ought to read or listen to this novel yourself. It's highly recommended.

Links: The Novel at Wikipedia.
Click below to purchase the novel from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest