I have long declared Mark Helprin's
Winter's Tale to be one of my favorite novels. I first read the novel the winter I graduated from college, when I was living in New York as a "grown-up" and not a student for the first time.
For as long as I can remember, I have been enamored with New York as a place. I loved my college years in Manhattan, but it wasn't until after school that I started to more fully appreciate the power and captivating beauty of a city so hard, so concrete, so fast.
Winter's Tale took my new-found love of the city and reflected it back at me. Helprin's appreciation for the quirky nature of New York was palpable on every page, transporting me through the water tunnels beneath the city to the lakes upstate to the ceiling of Grand Central and back again.
But when I picked it up to re-read it this winter, with the chilly December air descending outside and perfectly grey skies overhead, I couldn't finish it. I've been stuck about 150 pages in since February, and it is breaking my heart.
Where is the book I cherished? Where is the story that gripped me so tightly from start to finish? Where are the characters I remember, the city I want to revisit, the adventures I want to relive?
I still appreciate Helprin's stunning way with words; it's hard to argue that he can't craft a mean sentence. And I am still in awe of his ability to recreate a city that feels at once very, very real and yet so far-fetched and impossible that we as readers know it cannot exist. But the book as a whole no longer grips me the way it did when I first read it.
Has the book changed, or have I?
Of course, this is a silly question. The book is the same; I'm even reading the same copy I read six years ago. So clearly I have changed. I have moved away from New York, no longer immersed in the city I once loved so dearly. I have grown as both a person and as a reader. I no longer demand the same things from my beloved novels as I once did. Six years ago, I had just discovered magical realism. I had spent the four years prior reading assigned texts with very little pleasure reading. I had not yet taken up blogging and reviewing, so felt more comfortable languishing in the pages of a novel for weeks on end. I had not yet begun reading more than one book at a time.*
In short, I am no longer the same reader I once was.
But I think it is more than that. I think, too, that part of the beauty I found in
Winter's Tale lay in its ability to surprise. Helprin's variety of magical realism is subtle until of a sudden it is not; knowing what to expect and where I was going next took away just enough of that magic to leave me wallowing in the middle of the story, unable to finish.
Winter's Tale resonated with me so much on my first read that even my failed attempt to re-read it will not demote it from my list of favorite novels. This list, which exists in no physical form and changes on a daily basis, does not have to be a list of my favorite novels
right now. Instead, it is the list of novels that spoke to me in such a way that they never really left me, changing me both as a person and as a reader.
Winter's Tale is still that book to me, so while I'm sad to have lost something in my attempted re-read, I am still eternally grateful for my love of the book the first time around.
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Has this ever happened to anyone else? Have you re-read a book you once loved, only to find you no longer do? Why do you think your opinion changed?
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*The implications of reading as a blogger and reviewer, as a reader who reads multiple books at one time, and as a reader in the age of social media distraction are great enough to warrant an entirely separate post. Stay tuned.
