“Shakespeare”, as Jeanette Winterson succinctly puts it in the closing pages of her latest novel, The Gap of Time, “was not an enthusiast of family life.”
It’s a resonant understatement, and one that hardly begins to encompass the chaotic series of wilful or random tragic turns and bizarre coincidences that determine the plot of what has gone before — a “retelling” of Shakespeare’s strange late play The Winter’s Tale.
The Gap of Time
From a family-placed obituary in Maine that dealt openly with the deceased’s heroin addiction and the closure of the state clinic that was treating her (it was noticed nationwide), to the news obituaries (now less strait-laced) that run in big-city papers, the genre is getting multiple makeovers Pacific Standard
If you are an American aged under 25, then much of your social life probably consists of sitting around with your friends sending messages to absent friends. You will sometimes even message people sitting next to you. You rarely do one thing uninterrupted for as long as three minutes. You never experience boredom, uninterrupted conversation or even solitude — because the moment you are alone, you turn to your phone. And young Americans are merely extreme cases. Most of us have these dysfunctions.
Sherry Turkle directs the “Initiative on Technology and Self” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation*, based on many years of interviews with young Americans, arrives at a moment of tech fatigue. Most people are now ready for Turkle’s findings: how smartphones have damaged human interaction, and how we can recover.
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