I have no idea what would come up: gypsy folk music? Pete Seeger? La Boheme? In any event, whatever it was there would be an underlying echo of it in The Gap of Time. I would set my Spotify to play Bohemian music. Yield: 12-16 servings.Īlthough The Gap of Time’s characters Mimi and Perdita are singers, I couldn’t fathom what time of music they might sing. Bake at 350° for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Gradually add to batter beat just until combined. In a small saucepan, heat milk and butter just until butter is melted. Combine flour and baking powder gradually add to batter beat at low speed until smooth. Gradually add sugar, beating until mixture is light and fluffy. In a large bowl, beat eggs on high speed for 5 minutes or until thick and lemon-colored. There’s a scene in the book with a pot of scalded milk and I looked for a dessert recipe to bring in this plot point and found this recipe from for Hot Milk Cake. I would serve this with a nice, simple green salad, good bread and dessert.
*1 1/2 pounds frozen shrimp, thawed 1 1/2 pounds peeled crawfish tails or 3 cups chopped cooked chicken may be substituted. Add shrimp reduce heat, and simmer, stirring often, 5 minutes or just until shrimp turn pink. Stir in cream of potato soup, milk, and pepper bring to a boil. Melt butter in a Dutch oven over medium heat add onion, and sauté 8 minutes or until tender. Perdita’s family lives by the sea and her brother Clo has made her shrimp chowder when Perdita returns home one night. I can recommend it for you or your book club with only a cautionary reservation that the language could prove off-putting for some readers. It is a meaty book - some of the scenes have stayed with me for several weeks. This is not to say I didn’t like it or enjoy it, I did. Though The Winter’s Tale is sometimes called a romance and sometimes a comedy, The Gap of Time‘s humor seemed to me minimal and the “happy ending” suspect. Violent, bold, imaginative, wistful - yes. The Gap of Time tells a classic story in an innovative way, slicing narratives, transforming locations, infusing characters. This caught moment opening into a lifetime. It’s not that time stops or that it hasn’t started.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter that it’s night or day or now or then. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that there was any time before this time. Winterson’s novel is about ideas and time and regret. Suffice it to say, there’s a man and a woman who have a child and the child is lost and adopted by another family and then grown, the child returns. The Gap of Time’s plot is so complex I’m not sure it’s worth it to even summarize. It’s a play about forgiveness and a world of possible futures - and about how forgiveness and the future are tied together in both directions. By that I mean part of the written word(l)d I can’t live without without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something. I wrote this cover version because the play has been a private text for me for more than thirty years. Within the text of the novel, she explains her choice to rewrite T he Winter’s Tale, not the best-known, best-loved, or most-understood of the Bard’s works.
In any event, Winterson introduces no bears in The Gap of Time.
How to get a bear on stage? How to teach it to pursue Antigonus? Why does it matter? Perhaps it is one of Shakespeare’s jokes on the future. A desert country near the sea,” character Antigonus is directed to exit, “pursued by bear.” It is irrelevant that no bears have been mentioned prior to this direction. In Act 3, Scene 3, which takes place in “Bohemia. The Winter’s Tale, written near the end of Shakespeare’s life, is most well-known for a stage direction.
I’m quite looking forward to Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, and I’m listening to Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, a rewrite of Taming of the Shrew, right now, so keep an eye out for that blog post in the near future. Hogarth has published three Shakespeare-inspired novels so far and revealed eight authors and the plays they chose to interpret. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the two cover versions that I’ve read. Here’s a link to my review of Curtis Sittenfeld’s rewrite of Pride And Prejudice Eligible. The Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by no less than Virginia and Leonard Woolf, announced an audacious plan in 2015: to rewrite the works of Shakespeare as novels “retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today.” The Gap of Time, a rewrite of T he Winter’s Tale, is the first of these retellings, published in the fall of 2015.Īs regular readers of know, there is also an on-going project to rewrite the works of Jane Austen.