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Snowleg (Hardcover)

by Nicholas Shakespeare (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Harcourt (4 Sep 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 015101146X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0151011469
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 956,884 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #25 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > S > Shakespeare, Nicholas

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Product Description

Review

"Already my bet for this year's Booker Prize. A superbly achieved and moving novel."
--Giles Fodden, "Guardian"
"Snowleg is his finest book yet. Beautifully written, rich in character, it displays all the courage for which its hero so desperately wants to be recognized."
--"Economist"
"This novel is one of the finest attempts in English to convey something of two very strange places which no longer appear on the map of Europe... Shakespeare has told a very skillful story."
--"Evening Standard" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.


Product Description

When a young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students, he meets an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. He wants to help, but her situation makes him nervour. He ends up in denial about his feelings for the girl until one day, with Germany now united, he sets out to find her. But he has no idea where to start - all he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave to her - Snowleg. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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4 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "Remorse. The bird that never settles.", 12 Nov 2004
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Snowleg (Hardcover)
In one of the most elegantly written and carefully constructed love stories in recent memory, Nicholas Shakespeare introduces Peter Hithersay, who, on his sixteenth birthday, learns that "Daddy" is not his father. In Leipzig, East Germany, for a vocal competition, his mother had met and loved his biological father very briefly, only to see him arrested, and taken away forever. Curious about Germany, Peter spends his gap year in Hamburg and applies for and is accepted to its medical school, where he lives for the next six years. Eventually, Peter makes a trip to Leipzig, where he, now twenty-two, falls passionately in love with a young East German, whose Icelandic nickname, "Snjolaug," sounds to him like "Snowleg." When he has to leave, he is unable to forget her.

Peter's search for Snowleg, and secondarily, for his father, is told through flashbacks and memories, and the nature of their relationship unfolds in detail. The role of the secret police in their separation and the conflicts between the original ideal of communism and its later implementation are shown through Uwe and Hesse, two secret policemen, who appear in the prologue and in the conclusion and provide fresh perspective on the action, elevating this novel above the typical love story.

The vibrancy of Shakespeare's prose makes every page of this novel a delight to read. Filled with irony and, often, humor, the dialogue comes alive. Unforgettable descriptions, especially of the darkness, cold, and soot in Leipzig, reveal feelings as well as convey information. To Peter, listening to the radio, a love song "had red eyes and ran furtively across his mind...It was a rat dressed up as a promise." Repeating motifs--a van with a fish painted on it, a dying deer, the story of Sir Bedevere, a fur coat, and the bones of a muskrat--echo throughout the novel and connect scenes symbolically. Like most romances, the story relies on coincidence and fortuitous accident, but Shakespeare's writing is so strong and the story is so exciting that even the most jaded reader will willingly accept the implausibilities. Mary Whipple

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Too many coincidences, 13 Jan 2008
By Joachimski "Leseteufel" (München) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Snowleg (Paperback)
A name like the author's is a heavy burden, and, as far as style goes, this Shakespeare here does quite well. His problem is how to organise a convincing plot, and, sad to say, this is where he fails, at least in the long run. At the beginning his story is really thrilling and quite unusual for a British author. On his 16th birthday young hero Peter Hithersay finds out, that his beloved father is not his biological one, as his mother had a one-night-stand with a German prisoner on the run in Leipzig in the GDR. From that moment Peter feels German, takes German language courses at his rather posh school and endures being mobbed for his German roots by his fellow students. He then studies medicine in Hamburg and gets the chance to go to Leipzig with a student drama group. Here he hopes to find out more about his father. Instead he falls in love with a girl called Snjolaug, a name that sounds to him like Snowleg. She takes him to the farewell party of her brother, who has finally been allowed to leave the GDR. Snowleg finds out, that this also means her personal future is in shambles. So after they spend the night together in a Schrebergarten datscha, she asks Peter to smuggle her out of the country. Although he first is glad about that, he then has second thoughts and in the end denies knowing her when confronted with her at an official reception. And now his and the reader's torment begins. Shakespeare is neither really interested in his hero's quest to find Snowleg again, nor in the dire situation he has left her in. What we hear about the infamous methods of the Stasi is just cheap sensationalism, nothing new or convincing. Like Housseini's hero in "The Kiterunner" Peter keeps moaning on and on about his fatal mistake. And, there are just one too many coincidences in the plot.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Could not appreciate this book., 17 Mar 2005
By Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Snowleg (Paperback)
Despite the praise that has been heaped on this book, I can't say that I liked it much. The author seems well acquainted with East Germany both before and after reunification, and sometimes he gives fine descriptions of atmospheric settings; but to my mind these were often over-written, forced or pretentious. The same goes for the description of often rather seedy and grotesque characters, even given that the Stasi went in for (to put it mildly) seedy and grotesque operations; and there is one incident which is just too gratuitously disgusting for words. Nor did I take very much to Peter, the central character. True, he is supposed to be a flawed human being, riddled for years with guilt for not having taken the risk to smuggle out to the West a girl with whom, as a young visitor to the GDR, he had had a short affaire; but I find little that is attractive about his personality or about his relationships with all except one old woman. The book is slow - once Peter is on a trail of interviews to find the girl, his interlocutors are all deliberately and tantalizingly slow to pass on any information they have: that in itself becomes monotonous. There are too many rather improbable coincidences. There are references near the end of the book to certain incidents earlier on which you are likely to have missed unless you have read the book very closely and have a good memory. It's the sort of book which one really ought to read twice, which I sometimes like to do under similar circumstances, but had no desire to do in this case.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable tale of long lost love...
The concept of lost love isn't anything new and you can probably work out how it will end, but you're still likely to be drawn into the intricate stories of the main characters... Read more
Published on 29 Jan 2007 by BB999

3.0 out of 5 stars Good in parts
A story of love and longing which takes us into Eastern Germany past and present.

In common with other reviewers I found Shakespeare very convincing at evoking atmosphere and a... Read more

Published on 17 Jan 2006 by G. L. Haggett

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