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let me tell you and let me go on

let me tell you and let me go on

by Paul Griffiths

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature
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“So: now I come to speak.” With this line, Shakespeare’s Ophelia starts telling her story. In let me tell you, this newly revealed woman uses exactly the same words Shakespeare gave her in Hamlet, shifted as in a kaleidoscope to create a very different voice: her own. We hear her personal narrative from childhood to the moments before the start of the play, when she knows she has a fateful decision to make. Along the way, we discover whole new angles on her father, her brother, the prince, and other characters who come out from behind the curtain.

In let me go on, her decision made, she refashions herself. Emerging from her old world, she explores a new one, of magical variety yet coherent. As she goes in search of what she may still become, she meets a new cast of characters, some poignant, some hilarious. Paul Griffiths gives this remarkable protagonist—and us—a play-full of humor, poignancy, passion, adventure, and a great many surprises.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681379258
Pages: 384
Publication Date:

Praise

Griffiths, a leading music critic and author of two other novels, here lets Ophelia recount her story in her own words. Literally. His first-person narration uses only the 481-word vocabulary that Shakespeare gives to Ophelia in Hamlet. It sounds bizarre. Yet the result is tender, touching and extremely beautiful.
—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Whereas let me tell you is set before the action of Hamlet, thereby offering Ophelia the chance to dodge the fate that awaits her in the play, let me go on is set after it. [She] embarks on a journey to find out who she is in this afterlife. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she has many extraordinary encounters along the way.
—Lara Pawson, The Guardian

The remarkable achievement is to extend Ophelia’s world into impossible realms while remaining connected through deep feeling to her original. She resembles herself.
– Oli Hazzard, Music & Literature

I found 'let me tell you' a beautiful and enthralling work, as well as a great success in Oulipian terms.
– Harry Mathews, co-editor (with Alastair Brotchie) of Oulipo Compendium

I was amazed by how moving and true Ophelia’s voice is when up against and, surely thanks to, the constraint.
– Caroline Clark, author of Own Sweet Time

Griffiths trusts that his form will effect its own kind of “saying.” That it results in a character with emotional depth that plausibly develops a life story about which Hamlet is otherwise silent only validates the wisdom of the author’s commitment to that form.
—Daniel Green, The Reading Experience

Griffiths’ work as music critic and translator shines through; he has composed a prose work whose components recur and resound like familiar notes.
— Alyssa Pelish, Rain Taxi

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