The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham
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The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham
Free Ebook PDF The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Hours"Michael Cunningham's best novel in more than a decade."-Megan O'Grady, VogueIt's November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. At the same time, in Brooklyn, Barrett's older brother, Tyler, is struggling to make his way as a musician-and to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. While Barrett turns unexpectedly to religion, Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers, and Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon. Michael Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence, demonstrating a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul. Beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, The Snow Queen proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation.
The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham- Amazon Sales Rank: #7572932 in Books
- Brand: Cunningham, Michael
- Published on: 2015-06-01
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.10" h x 5.80" w x 8.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Library Binding
- 500 pages
From Booklist *Starred Review* Like By Nightfall (2010), Cunningham’s elegant and haunting new novel examines the complex dynamics among a couple and a brother. In this configuration, Barrett Meeks, a poetically minded man in his late thirties who has just been dumped by his most recent boyfriend via text message, shares a Brooklyn apartment with Tyler, his older musician-bartender brother, and Beth, Tyler’s great love. Beth and Barrett work in Liz’s vintage shop. She’s 52; her current lover, Andrew, is 28. Beth is undergoing full-throttle treatment for cancer. Tyler is struggling to write the perfect love song for their wedding, and breaking his promise not to do drugs. Barrett, long afflicted by his flitting interest in everything, remains in an altered state after seeing a strangely animated “celestial light” over dark and snowy Central Park. As his characters try to reconcile exalted dreams and crushing reality, Cunningham orchestrates intensifying inner monologues addressing such ephemeral yet essential aspects of life as shifting perspectives, tides of desire and fear, “rampancy” versus “languidness,” and revelation and receptivity. Tender, funny, and sorrowful, Cunningham’s beautiful novel is as radiant and shimmering as Barrett’s mysterious light in the sky, gently illuminating the gossamer web of memories, feelings, and hopes that mysteriously connect us to each other as the planet spins its way round and round the sun. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pulitzer Prize–winning Cunningham will tour with this resplendent novel in sync with national advertising and extensive online promotion. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Arguably Mr. Cunningham's most original and emotionally piercing book to date.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Michael Cunningham's best novel in more than a decade.” ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue
“At its best, the novel is Cunningham in his sweet spot, compassionate, emotionally exhilarating, devilishly fun.” ―Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
“That voice, Cunningham's inimitable style, is the real miracle of The Snow Queen.... Remarkable.” ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“The miraculous returns to earth in sentences so gorgeous that we can barely feel the wheels touch down.... This is a masterful performance.” ―John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“Michael Cunningham writes some of the most beautiful prose in contemporary American fiction, and his gorgeous way with words is on full display in his new novel, The Snow Queen . . . The author is tender with his characters even when they're obnoxious or dumb. And he's particularly tender with Tyler, a self-deluding drug addict who is also that quintessential Cunningham protagonist, the artist struggling with his muse. As in his Pulitzer prize-winner, The Hours, Cunningham writes with specificity and intimate knowledge about the desire ‘to make something … marvelous, something miraculous.' Failure is not a threat inevitably overcome; it happens. The wedding song Tyler composes for Beth is, he knows, ‘more sentimental than searing.' His wincing analysis of the song's weaknesses gives a much truer portrait of the artistic process than the gauzy romanticism we usually get. Art is Cunningham's deepest faith, the Big Subject he approaches with a passion and conviction . . . There aren't any final answers in Cunningham's hauntingly inconclusive novel, which fittingly enough, closes with a question.” ―Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast
“Cunningham weaves an ode to the immortal city of New York and its artistic souls and lost citizens. His books remind us that the mythologies we imagine about our lives stem from seemingly ordinary moments and seemingly ordinary people . . . With elegant prose that peeks into the most private thoughts of his characters, Cunningham challenges the reader to imagine a pervasive, indifferent god--if any god even exists.” ―Allie Ghaman, The Washington Post
“Like By Nightfall (2010), Cunningham's elegant and haunting new novel examines the complex dynamics among a couple and a brother. In this configuration, Barrett Meeks, a poetically minded man in his late thirties who has just been dumped by his most recent boyfriend via text message, shares a Brooklyn apartment with Tyler, his older musician-bartender brother, and Beth, Tyler's great love. Beth and Barrett work in Liz's vintage shop. She's 52; her current lover, Andrew, is 28. Beth is undergoing full-throttle treatment for cancer. Tyler is struggling to write the perfect love song for their wedding, and breaking his promise not to do drugs. Barrett, long afflicted by his flitting interest in everything, remains in an altered state after seeing a strangely animated "celestial light' over dark and snowy Central Park. As his characters try to reconcile exalted dreams and crushing reality, Cunningham orchestrates intensifying inner monologues addressing such ephemeral yet essential aspects of life as shifting perspectives, tides of desire and fear, ‘rampancy' versus ‘languidness,' and revelation and receptivity. Tender, funny, and sorrowful, Cunningham's beautiful novel is as radiant and shimmering as Barrett's mysterious light in the sky, gently illuminating the gossamer web of memories, feelings, and hopes that mysteriously connect us to each other as the planet spins its way round and round the sun.” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“The omniscience that runs throughout the novel's narration allows readers to not only glimpse, but take deep and heart-wrenching looks into the lives of these very tangible characters . . . Truths that other characters are ignorant to, moments that other characters are blind to, become welcome knowledge for readers in Cunningham's twisted and often disparaging world. Cunningham weaves whispers of spirituality, questions of mortality, themes of family and lessons on life's finer, more subtle pleasures. A work infused with passion, hatred, beauty and disgust, I found myself hard pressed to put the book down.” ―Chicagoist
“Michael Cunningham is known for his lyric and evocative language, and his sixth novel, The Snow Queen, is no exception . . . An emotionally charged story, simply told, about four people who come to defy that term ‘middle age.'” ―Alex Gilvarry, New Orleans Public Radio
“Michael Cunningham is among America's most gifted writers: graceful, delicately hued, wise.” ―Earl Pike, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Some books I don't want to read on my iPad. I want to go to a bookstore, buy a hardcover and slowly savor every brand-new page, preferably in a hot bath with a serious box of chocolates at my side. One such book is The Snow Queen . . . The narrative is almost amorphous, constructed of seemingly random scenes, all of which are situations set on the brink of something -- a presidential election, New Year's Eve, any one of the characters' hopes about to be realized or shattered. And the sense they make together is one of almost understanding one's life, or just about grasping the meaning of the universe, or practically but not quite realizing why we care about our friends and lovers. Or why we don't. In the end there's no doubt a story has been told and it's one that can easily stay with its readers for the rest of their lives. But it would be a fool's errand to try to go back to connect all the dots. It's like our own lives, full of seemingly pointless moments that add up to something that matters, a vision realized, perhaps, even if we never quite get to the bottom of what it all means . . . by reading his work, he reminds us that we are not alone in our desires, despair and dreams, and in our quests to find meaning in our lives together.” ―Rob Phelps, Wicked Local
“The Snow Queen is inspired by classic fairytales, though Cunningham's sensibilities skew in a thoroughly modern (even post-modern) direction, resulting in a very beautiful hodgepodge . . . The lush writing is gorgeous throughout . . . At a technical level The Snow Queen is extraordinary.” ―Ed Power, The Irish Independent
“The Snow Queen wears its contemporaneity lightly, because the novel really concerns itself with eternal themes: the quest for love, the unfairness and inevitability of death and the hope of a meaningful life . . . [A] thoughtful, intimate novel.” ―Martha T. Moore, USA Today
“The attention to the quotidian creates the best parts of the book. In the quiet moments between the chaos of illness and new relationships, Cunningham gives the characters time to slow down and think.” ―Lindsay VanAsdalan, The City Paper (Baltimore)
About the Author Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York.
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Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 56 people found the following review helpful. Why You Read Cunningham By James Hiller After reading all of Michael Cunningham's books, starting with the miraculous "The Hours" to today, one thing is very clear. He loves commas. Commas, commas, commas, extending his sentences, so that one sentence can spin, and re-spin, in several different directions, sometimes individually, sometimes all at once, and then, so adroitly, coming back to the point of origin, and somehow, being the same and slightly different than when you first started reading these comma-laden sentences.Surely, I jest. I am a Michael Cunningham fan. I have come to realize, after devouring his latest work "The Snow Queen", that I read him, not for incredibly compelling storytelling, but for his prose. He commands the language with an ease and deft that makes reading him, and his complex sentences, seem like little reading journeys. He paints New York City unlike any other author I can think of, making the city alive and recent. His gift in the technical skill of writing is not matched by his storytelling abilities.The Snow Queen is about two brothers. Barrett, a gay sales clerk, sees a vision in Central Park one evening that seems to challenge his understandings about life. Tyler, a rock star wannabe, struggles with the current political scene and the health of his girlfriend Beth, who is fighting cancer. Cunningham, thankfully and successfully, manages to constrain the story to these two, and a few people in their immediate orbit. However, in the course of the story, where things happen to the characters, you are left wondering, by the end of the story, what this was truly all about.For one thing, I didn't buy Tyler's political rantings through the book. They seemed incredibly misplaced and took me out of the story, or at least his character. The story begins in 2004, so we are treated to some diatribes on the presidency of George W. Bush, which at the time would be welcome but now seem too much like yesterday. I wished they were less prominent somehow.Another demon that Cunningham seems to place in many of his books is the dramatic tension between gay men longing for straight men, and the thin line that sometimes happens between them. That device, or plot line, seems a bit tired now. It shows unrequited longing, sure, but haven't we been there with him before?Still, despite the weakness in the plot (no spoilers here), there were at least a couple of parts of the book that were incredibly moving to me. Perhaps of all the characters, Beth is the most real and realized. Her struggle with cancer is real, and perhaps, harkens back to the book that I love so, "The Hours".And perhaps, that is the source of the vision of light in Central Park that Barrett sees at the beginning of the story. The haunting, spectral brilliance of this novel that set us all on fire, and how it is dimmed now, and we spend years afterwards trying to find the beauty once again. Only we can never find it again, can we? Or perhaps, Cunningham should try to search for a new light. I, for one, will go along.
42 of 47 people found the following review helpful. Beautiful, true… and a little boring By Roger Brunyate Michael Cunningham writes beautifully, there is no question about that. Almost every page of his new novel reads as elegantly as it looks on the page. His prose is lucid and refined, without any trace of over-elaboration; indeed, he has an endearing habit of making parenthetical remarks to himself in descriptive passages (such as "face it" or "remember that?") that gives a pleasantly informal air to the whole. You may not know these people, but feel you might, and know that if you did happen to meet you would be welcomed into their circle.And the characters and their lives are also real: two forty-something brothers sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with the girlfriend of one of them. Barrett, the younger, is gay and works in a vintage store in Manhattan; on the way home one night, he sees a mysterious aqua light appear in the sky over Central Park, a miracle that he keeps to himself at first, but that turns him towards a kind of religion. Tyler, his older brother, is chasing his own miracle; a musician, he is still hoping for a breakthrough as a song-writer, and takes drugs to transport him to the necessary nirvana. Meanwhile, he is going ahead with his wedding to Beth (co-owner of the store where Tyler works), even though she is in the fourth stage of cancer.I don't really remember the Hans Andersen story of the same title that Cunningham is apparently reworking here, nor am I sure of its essential point. Certainly, there is a lot of snow and ice imagery, literal and otherwise, and I think I see a common theme of two people (though by no means children here) living close together in an urban setting, until each finds a way to unlock something essential that had been frozen within them. Section by section, chapter by short chapter, the affairs, hopes, and delusions of these three people and their immediate friends are portrayed with wonderful reality. Further, their situation changes in slow but significant ways over the four-year span -- the novel runs from the presidential elections of 2004 to those of 2008, and Cunningham makes no secret of his sympathies. But I felt very little direction or momentum as I was reading, and could easily have laid it down at any time and not bothered to pick it up again.
39 of 45 people found the following review helpful. Cunningham’s most emotionally strong book By Helpful Advice ‘The Snow Queen’ written by Michael Cunningham, a previous Pulitzer Prize winner, a story in which are mixed humor and tragedy, emotions and fairy tale beauty, is a novel that confirms Cunningham status as one of the best storytellers of today's generation.The author didn’t accidentally chose a name for his story, because just like in a children tale which bears the same name he manages to show how love can do everything, even melt the heart that seems forever frozen.Same as was the case with previous Cunningham’s works, he again uses three main characters and their stories and interweaves them into a single story. This time these are two brothers – Barrett and Tyler, and Tyler’s ill girlfriend, who has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Barrett is near his forties; he works in clothing store and he broke up recently with his brother Tyler, a drug addict. Tyler is a musician who never managed to sell anything, his life becoming even more miserable after learning that his girlfriend is dying.The reader will find out that the two brothers became close after the tragic death of their mother, and that despite their age, actually both of them have never found themselves, thus figuratively speaking about one lost generation that exists today, just struggling to survive, without any specific purpose in life despite their talents. Around these three characters the author will build a story in which interweaves psychology, humor and tragedy of life - people who are equally friends and lovers, colleagues and family.On the other side, this story is a kind of allegory for finding meaning in middle age after we spent adolescence on anything particular, and now looking for some purpose of our existence, the reason for which we would be able to look back once at our life and consider that we did not spend it in vain.‘The Snow Queen’ is so far Cunningham’s most emotionally strong book, novel that vividly describes New York in the second half of the 2000s, novel about our sense of belonging and purpose, novel that can certainly be recommended to his previous fans, but also for everyone else who by reading it along will likely become ones.
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