Description: How great literature can change your life
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I’m traveling at the moment and so will confine myself today to sharing an upbeat passage I liked from Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell (2016) . It’s a very strange work that tells a modern version of the Hamlet story from the point of view of a Hamlet who is still in utero . Part of the inspiration for the novel comes from Hamlet’s declaration, “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.”
In a crazy personal account that reminds me of Tristram Shandy, we see a fetus that has consciousness, language, and adult knowledge while being alert to the sensory clues that come to him via his mother’s biology and through the walls of her womb. In the process, he picks up on Claude and Trudy’s plan to murder his father. If ever there was a novel that requires willing suspension of disbelief, this is it, but once you suspend, there’s fun to be had in identifying the Hamlet allusions and other Shakespea
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Seminary Ridge Review – The United Lutheran Seminary Journal