There are so many things I want to say about this book, that I don't know where to begin. First off, I loved it. I don't believe I've ever read a book that touched me on so many different levels. I can't really say what it was "about." It begins as the story of Peter Lake, who falls in love with the daughter of the man whose home he is attempting to rob. Then it travels over dozens of other lives, in and out of time, turning into a fantasy story that might not really be fantasy. It's the story of love lasting through time, but different kinds of love. And it is without question the most beautifully written story I have ever read. The language, the descriptions, the conversations--absolutely masterful. I went to a book reading by Mark Helprin once, and found him to be a very colorless and dull conversationalist. He must save it all up for his writing. To top it all off, I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Oliver Wyman, who did a fabulous job with the reading. Every character (and there were a ton of characters) had a distinctive, recognizable voice that doubled my enjoyment. It kept me enraptured for 22 CDs over 3 months. When I finished, I didn't want to read anything else. ( )

This is my favorite book of all time. Funny, magical, surprising, poetic, mysterious...a work of beauty and elegance. Helprin is a very gifted writer and here he is at his best . ( )

Some great writing illustrating mind expanding scenes. ( )

Perhaps it was because it was an audiobook, perhaps because I was distracted by life, but I lost interest about halfway through. ( )

This was magic realism, I think, with that very languid, dreamy, slightly distant feel I've come to associate with magic realism. Very hard to get into: nothing I actually disliked, but there was no immediacy, nothing to grasp, no characters that came alive.That's not entirely true; Peter was intermittently real, and Virginia, and various of the little vignettes like the lovers talking through the walls. But Helprin always whisked them out of sight again. I suppose the real main character was the city, but it wasn't presented very clearly either, I don't have any picture of it. I do like the irony in making New York the site for the bridge to heaven and the ideal of the Perfectly Just city. Having read some of Helpirns' articles, though, I'm not sure I'd want to live in his idea of a perfectly just city. Even in Winter's Tale I thought he had too great a tolerance for collateral damage.Still, there was compassion. It's hard for me to realise that someone with political beliefs so markedly different from mine can still share many of the same values. Something to remember. ( )

One of those rare books I read over and over. Helprin is a master of magical realism. Splendid prose, a flying horse, the Short Tails roaming the rafters of Grand Central Station, a tubercular heiress on a rooftop, and Peter Lake -- master mechanic and second-story man of New York's Belle Epoque. What's not to love? ( )

Frankly, one of the best books I ever read. The combination of magical realism and historical New York City are irresistable. ( )

A brilliant fantasy of nineteenth century New York with a white horse flying through a city shrouded in arctic winds and snow. I have never looked at Grand Central the same since reading this 1983 novel. ( )

Peter Lake and his amazing white horse Athansor have to be two of the most memorable characters in literature. Yes, a horse, but what a horse! The tone of the book is outrageously funny in places and just plain outrageous in others. Peter Lake's tale spans the last century of the past millenium. It is a time of great optimism when seen through his eyes.

One of the real stars of the book is Manhattan, the city like "an engine just beginning to fire itself up." The book is a thrilling paean to New York City's essence and spirit of survival. Helprin writes some of the most enchanting decriptions I've ever read with new glories on each page. His words come alive and transport the reader to a magical place unconstrained by time and physical limitations.

However, after all this praise, to my disappointment, the book went on too long for me and dissipated in confusion in the last section. I was befuddled in places and quickly became disenchanted. I may have just reached the outer limits of my comfort zone which tends to be set in reality. Still, I would recommend Winter's Tale for the outstanding writing. I will definitely be reading more of Helprin's books. ( )

Simply one of the best books I have ever read ( )

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.

I decided to give up on this one. The writing was nice but the whole thing seemed rather random and nonsensical. I really get the feeling that if I put the time in to finish it, I'll be rewarded with more of the same and no real idea about what the purpose was. In a way it reminds me of Pynchon's writing but I find his writing more interesting. A year ago I may have held out but I've had less time to listen to audio books the last couple months so I'm less willing to take risks.

I'd like to say that there's a chance that I'll get back to this book that many find so enrapturing but with so many other books to read it's very, very doubtful. ( )

I enjoyed the lyrical tone, vibrant imagery and humor throughout the story. ( )

I blame this book more than any other (with 'Little Big' a close second) for my passionate love affair with NYC historical sites. ( )

quite possibly my favorite book of all time. poetry and magick and that dreamy quality. ahhhh. ( )

I have been trying to get through this book for a long time. I love the spanning, majestic city-scape; unfortunately, New York is the only interesting and relatable character in the book. The actual people are shallow & charmed, lifted right out of some intermediate fantasy series. Helprin's writing is amazing, though, and I'm going to pick it up again someday.

I tried to get on the magic horse and have the prose take me along but after 50 or so pages I felt as though I was reading a foreign language. I just am not a fan of magical realism. I wanted to give it a try as it's a selection of my local book group and was given such enthuastic praise by others and many reviews of folks cataloging in Library Thing. ( )

An amazing book: a love song to New York, a vindication of God's justice, and a insane, daffy picaresque all in one. Re-reading it over the past few weeks (now = 6.22.08) has made me realize how thin my exposure to real art has been over the past eighteen months. The sublime can transform your life, and transform the world into a golden dream of justice.

The second half drags and rambles. It still may be the greatest novel of the last 50 years. ( )

A book of two halves. Complicated, discursive, meandering in the telling but what you get out of it is almost shown rather than told. The first half is a wonderful evocation of a wayward con man and the love of his life. It's description of Pearly Soames - a baby hating "golden dog of the streets" - is as good an evocation of psychopathy I've ever read.
The second half is a bit more rambling and hard to get, and I think a bit anticlimactic.
Generally, I love it, worth the hard work. ( )

I love this book. I have loved this book for decades. It would be difficult for Mr. Helprin and myself to be any further apart in terms of socio-political ideology, but I forgive him all because of this book. I grew up in The City, am now an exile in The Heartland. Mr. Helprin precisely captures the Mobius strip insanity and magic of The City. It could all be true, so much of it is true. Mr. Helprin's use of language has been more expertly lauded elsewhere, but was like a bolt of lightning for me upon reading this book for the first time. ( )

I've read a couple of the other reviews of this book and the consensus seems to be that it's dense, complex, and reasonably well written. The story it's self is difficult to adequately summarize in any reasonable way due to the complexity. This seems to either make folks love the book or feel measured ambivalence to it.

Personally I found it a lot less dense than, say, Gravity's Rainbow. But I guess this is like comparing the graceful yet maze-like ridges of a coral brain to the fiendish complexity of the Gordian knot.

Interestingly I'd say that member fyrefly98 paints a pretty good picture of the story, except that where-as fyrefly98 didn't think very highly of it, I loved it.

To me the story seems not so much a narrative intended to be pursued diligently in order to catch all the carefully plotted twists and turns. Like Crowley's "Little, Big", the book is more a realm of wonderous imagery and sensation to wade through and become immersed in.

And if that's your thing, they maybe you'll enjoy it as well.

- Peter K. ( )

Summary: So the back of the book would have you believe that this book is about Peter Lake, a master mechanic and honest thief, who breaks into a house that is not as deserted as he thinks it is, falls in love with Beverly Penn, the daughter of one of the richest men in New York, who dies from consumption shortly thereafter. Peter must then transcend space and time and death to get her back. Except... that's not at all what the book is about. I'm not sure what the book actually *is* about, but Peter's story is only one chunk of it, and there's also a newspaper and a town that's almost impossible to get to if you're trying to go there and a cloud wall that occasionally sweeps into the city and abducts people and several blizzards and the power to kill people with your mind and a giant white horse who can fly and a gang of thugs and arsonists and a guy who travels through time building bridges to heaven (or something) and a whole lot of rambling about winter and justice and the nature of the city and the dawning of a new age during the millennium.

Review: Oh, dear, where to start... the book jacket made it sound really good. Unfortunately, the book inside the covers is not the book that is promised on the covers. Peter/Beverly's story was actually pretty good... HOWEVER. It's a long, thick, dense book. To give you a framework, Peter and Beverly don't even meet until about page 150, and she's dead and he's disappeared by 250... and then he doesn't come back until after page 500. I'm okay with writing that veers off into tangents and does interesting, lyrical, magical things with the language. However, when your ostensible main character disappears for three hundred pages in the middle of your book, that's no longer really a tangent. Additionally disappointing (possible spoiler) is that when Peter does come back, he's an amnesiac, and there is absolutely none of the promised "transcending time and death to get her back". There's so much going on in this book, and things happen in sequence to one another, but that doesn't really make it a coherent story. There was probably a metaphor or a point he was trying to make, but it gets lost in the muddle... unless it was the metaphor of how the city was like a machine, because that, I get, I get it, for the love of little apples, I get it. The writing is pretty good, but like the city=machine metaphor, tends to get really repetitive in its ramblings. There were some good parts, which is why it gets 2 stars, but they were few and far enough in between, and so disconnected from each other and from everything else, that this book was a struggle and ultimately a huge disappointment. ( )

I read this a long time ago but I remember I found it beautiful and moving. ( )

I found it difficult to trudge through. This was a bit too detailed for me. I enjoyed the horse, but the "plan" was too involved. I should note I am not a fan of fantasy novels. ( )

Inside my copy, I found a page of notes on Helprin's vocabulary, including the following: liripoop, rapparee, dagswain, bronstrop, caroteel, opuntia, sough, patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, glockamoid, mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary, few of which I now remember. It was harder to track down definitions in those days before the web... ( )