The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips again.

“She begins at the face, at the top of him.

Agnes leans into her final maternal duty: she stitches Hamnet’s shroud, washes and dresses his body for burial. His father is summoned from the London stage and dashes back to the homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon but is too late. In O’Farrell’s telling the boy slips away fast. She shifts between decades flawlessly, braiding the foreground narrative with the personal history of the enigmatic Agnes Hathaway, the Bard’s wife and mother of his three children. In precise, lavish detail, O’Farrell recreates the story of Shakespeare’s only son (also known as Hamlet), who succumbed to bubonic plague in 1596 at the age of eleven. I was late to this stunning beauty, but in this case tardiness was a virtue: I picked up Hamnet at the moment I needed it most. Which led me to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, published last year to universal acclaim and named one of 2020’s five best works of fiction by the New York Times Book Review. The less my mind rested, I figured, the less restlessness would surge through me, like a virus. And I read books-not only for work, but also for nourishment I craved but couldn’t quite understand. I hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment, throwing myself into a skeleton list of tasks: indulging my wife and two other teenagers with Indian take-out, double-masking at the gym, grooming the cats, hauling out garbage and recycling bins. The best way to mourn, I vowed, was to go off grid. Grief–my grief–felt like a footnote to a vast malevolence, a ripple in a hurricane. while violent insurrectionists had flooded into the nation’s capital.

The previous week Covid-19 cases had peaked in the U.S. In January I lost my 18 year old son, Owen, to sepsis the infection swept in like a wildfire, ravaging his body and snuffing him out in under forty-eight hours. Imagine my surprise when an Elizabethan odyssey became a roadmap through a year like no other. A New Memoir by Gabriel García Márquez's Son.How a Father Held on to Hope in the Wake of Loss.

Hamlet manga