Literary Style and Influence
Although many have stated that the novel has a similar feel to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie, and the book is in part a paean to New York City in the same way that Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tribute to Garcia Marquez's Colombia, Helprin himself is on record (in a letter to Keith Morgan, and elsewhere) as stating that he "detests" magical realism, because "it is exhibitionistic, forced, self-conscious, and almost devoid of emotional content. Perhaps I don't like it for the same reasons that I have never taken recreational or hallucinogenic drugs. I don't believe that a story must necessarily follow the conventions of 19th-century realism, but if it departs into the realms of unreality it must be pulled there by deep conviction and the sense of the story itself, not driven there as in a mechanical literary experiment. No one ever said the Bible was 'magical realism' even though what happens in it departs from the realm of physics. Put me down as leaning in that direction rather than toward South America." A more explicit influence may be Fielding's Tom Jones and Dante's Divine Comedy.
Read more about this topic: Winter's Tale (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary, style and/or influence:
“We that write & print have all our books predestinated—& and for me, I shall write such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published “The World”Mthis planet, I mean—not the Literary Globe.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)