Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
The best book I've read this year, and well worth a review: I shall write one when this damn essay is finished. In the meantime, read this book. *Time Passes*I found The Tragedy of Arthur in the ‘classics’ section of my local bookshop. This, possibly, is a bit presumptuous. Arthur is a play by William Shakespeare that may not have been written by William Shakespeare. All the tests, all the critics, all the academics say that this lost work, now found, is a miracle. They attest that something so
I see that I am in the small minority of readers who dislikes this novel. I also admit that I did not read the play itself after suffering through the author's Introduction. The pace of the book is very slow, endlessly repetitive, and self-absorbed, like the fictional author who shares his name with the actual author of this book. The idea of writing a fictional memoir, using your own name and some real facts about your own life is bizarre, bordering on ridiculous. No publisher would have put up...
The framework for The Tragedy of Arthur is so clever and well-executed that I had to keep reminding myself that the work was a novel. The narrator/protagonist is woefully unsympathetic but has the virtue of being self aware in that regard. The supporting characters are not terribly well drawn, but since we are seeing them through the experience of the narrator/protagonist, that makes perfect sense. A knowledge of Shakespeare's plays is helpful but not required since the narrator tells us what we...
Arthur Phillips is our most reliable creator of unreliable narrators. And in the case of this book, it is "Arthur Phillips" himself who narrates. That is the "Arthur Phillips" who is the author of Prague, The Egyptologist, Angelica, The Song Is You, as well as the discoverer of what may be a newly discovered Shakespeare play: The Tragedy of Arthur.The book begins with a short preface from "Random House", followed by an Introduction to the newly discovered play by "Arthur Phillips," and then the
The Tragedy of Arthur is a title with a double meaning. In one sense it refers to a lost Shakespearean play of that name and in the other it refers to the narrator of the tale, someone who may or may not be the novelist Arthur Phillips. Like the real Arthur Phillips, the fictional Arthur Phillips grew up in Minnesota, has lived in Prague, has written a novel named after that city. The fictional Arthur has a father was was a con man possessed of wild and grandiose schemes who spends much of his l...
You don't have to be a Shakespeare scholar to feast on this book. To wit, whether you love, like, devour, admire, or even scorn Shakespeare, you can easily negotiate your way through this accessible "problem play" and trundle along with page-turning merriment. By the final pages of this faux memoir/novel/play, you will have also amassed a literate and impressive font of Bardology. You'll acquaint with the big hits and the B side of the Bard. You'll learn facts about his peerage, his years, the s...
This book is odd. It is set up as a memoir, but it's not. The author takes a fictional account of his family and includes the Arthur legend in it with some Shakespeare thrown in. It shouldn't have worked, but honestly the book as a whole really does work if you read the play first (it's in the back) and work back through the fictional introduction by the author talking about him wanting to show the world about his father. And as we know about the Arthur legend, it is ultimately a tale of fathers...
There are a whole lot of Arthurs in The Tragedy of Arthur. There's the author, Arthur Phillips, the main character, Arthur, his father Arthur, King Arthur and a long lost Arthur. That last one is the second of the two tragedies of Arthur. In that list there's the lost Shakespearean play about King Arthur and the tragedies of all the other Arthurs who appear in the novel. Got it? Good because it's worth getting.For the moment let's concentrate on the character Arthur. He was raised by a forger, c...
Clever, clever… maybe too cleverThink, for a moment, of a novel as a painting. You have the central subject: a picture of human beings living their rich, messy, and often complicated lives. You have the means by which the artist puts this across: his choice of medium, his style, his handling of paint or language. And then you have the frame: the structure that holds everything together, that comes between the artifact and the real world. For a long time in my reading, I thought I was dealing wit...
The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author - Arthur Phillips's ingenious faux-memoir - was to Google to see what was true and what wasn't...only to find that much of Phillips's traceable past has been erased.Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota...
Good book, well written, enjoyable, and thought provoking. Shakespeare pervades this book, so it is probably mostly of interest to those who like Shakespeare or are at least interested in Shakespeare. There were some things about this book I did not like: 1) I found the first chunk of it very rough going because I hated the narrator and thought he was whiney. In fact, the narrator uses that word, "whine," more than once about himself, possibly three times or more. Telling. Around the time the na...
When I’ve described this novel to friends, it’s always sounded interesting. That’s strange because I actually struggled to finish it, and only did so out of a sense of duty and respect to the person who enthusiastically bestowed it on me. It’s another in that line of novels that masquerades as a memoir of the protagonist who shares the same name as the author - Arthur Phillips. The memoirist Arthur Philips has a twin sister Dana whom he claims to love above all others despite the fact that he ca...
Too clever by half. A supposed lost early play of the Bard is discovered--by Arthur's father, a con man, who has spent most of his life in jail, for, among other forgeries, faking lottery tickets, making crop circles. The play is given to Arthur, his son and narrator of the Introduction. Is this drama really by Shakespeare, or is it a fake? To me the play itself was a pastiche of the history plays and of Macbeth, thrown together in a jumble. Random House, Arthur's publisher, insists on its publi...
Disclaimer: I won this from First Reads. Well, I think this book's saving grace is the inclusion of the play itself because it turns out that Phillips doing a mediocre imitation of Shakespeare is much better than Phillips doing himself. I decided to treat this as I would a real WS play and, at the urging of the fake preface by Random House, I read the text of the play before reading the 250+ pages of "introduction". I'm glad I did. The play, which I'll refer to as The Tragedie to simplify things...
The protagonist of The Tragedy of Arthur is purportedly the author Arthur Phillips and the book is one very long introduction, part biography, part confession, to a lost but now found Shakespeare Play “The Tragedy of Arthur” about the mythical King Arthur. The actual play is printed at the end. Arthur and his twin sister Dana have a colorful father who has spent most of their young lives in prison for various cons and forgeries. So when Arthur Sr. gives Arthur Jr. the original 16th century manus...
So here is a novel in a shape I've never seen before:1. A brief preface from Random House stating how excited they are to publish this brand new Shakespeare play, alluding to the role of the Phillips family in bringing the text to light, and suggesting that maybe we should go straight to the play and come back to Arthur Phillips' introduction later.2. A 256-page "Introduction" about Arthur Phillips and his family and how his father came to leave him a quarto of The Tragedy of Arthur by William S...
When I reviewed Arthur Phillips's last novel The Song Is You, I faulted Phillips for filtering the central relationship (a love affair that never quite happens) through a series of moments that felt a little more sentimentalized than actually lived. In the new The Tragedy of Arthur Phillips takes a sharp left turn into the personal by way of metafiction. What we are reading is supposedly Phillips's introduction to the first publication of a newly discovered Shakespeare play about King Arthur. Th...
A slow start to a convoluted story, told in the "introduction" to a supposed forged Shakespeare play. The "introduction" gradually became very interesting, and the narrative style was fun in a way that reminded me of Nabokov's Pale Fire. But then it ended abruptly with the text of the play itself, which is terrible, barely readable. the play didn't feel at all like Shakespeare, and the novel would have been far better if the play wasn't included.
After reading the preface, I decided to do what was suggested: skip to the back of the book and read the play, and then return to the 'Introduction' (which is actually the meat of the book). This turned out to be a good idea for me for two reasons: (1) since it clearly *is* the case that this play was written by the character's father to describe their lives, knowing it's contents provides a few interesting connections while reading the introduction, and (2) it seems that I enjoy Shakespeare's w...
The Tragedy of Arthur by William Shakespeare: The First Modern Edition of His Lost Play, with an Introduction and Notes by Arthur Phillips by Arthur Phillips was not at all what I expected. Which is funny since I love Phillips' work and know enough to not set up any expectations. He works in his own way and it is rarely the way anyone else works. It's better.The synopsis of the story presents the protagonist as (naturally) Arthur Phillips the narrator (as separate from? Or supposedly identical t...