Vinegar Girl
Back–to–back listening to Taming of the Shrew.
Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Page 10.
So the author Anne Tyler sets much in Baltimore, MD. Her nominal home, like Austin or San Antonio might be for me.
Confession; I can’t think of any of this author’s material I’ve been exposed to, not before this. Prolific and acclaimed by both popular media and the highbrow lit-crits alike.
When I first read about the Hogarth Shakespeare series, I was excited; the notion is re–telling each a play in a modern novelist’s idiom. While I’ve seen Taming of the Shrew several times, a particular version always comes to mind, played by an all female cast.
Men can be such pigs.
While merely a post–modern, southern female novelist’s reframing of the story itself might be tad over–wrought, the wry observations and deft characterizations, and fleshing–out of the plot’s bones, sprinkled with tidbits of human insight? Nicely done.
“Why, there’s a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.”
Petruchio in TotS, V.ii.108
Imagine Petruchio with a smart phone.
One character’s name in the novel, or novelization, I had to wonder, drawn from the antecedents to American Realism at the turn of the last century? Cute trick. Quite clever, but also a fun little romance, of sorts.
From the Hogarth Shakespeare series.
Vinegar Girl: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare)
