Product Description

Is it possible to fully comprehend a person when you don't grasp the intricacies of their culture, when you don't share a homeland or a voice, when you have different definitions of the past and conflicting commitments in the present? What future is there for love when you find yourself the other side of language - a place where everything feels slowed down, reduced to gestures, as if under water? When Joseph meets Marta, who has come to the UK to research the forgotten histories of remarkable women from across Europe, he is captivated, and Marta feels the same; when she returns to her previous life, their relationship continues through letters and phone calls. Then Joseph decides to visit Marta in her native Poland. His subsequent journey, across a continent, through the cold and dark of an unfamiliar country, proves as much a search for understanding - of a person, a place, a language - as it does a struggle against isolation. Interlinking Joseph's often strange experiences with Marta's letters to him, "Winter Under Water" is a book of Europe, of myriad identities, of love and language. It is also, ultimately, a book that suggests you only truly know a person or a place when you can sit in silence and not feel compelled to break it - in any language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #410240 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 292 pages

The Times
'Hopkin beautifully conveys the sense of being a stranger in a
strange land'

Independent on Sunday
'a winningly confident debut...There are few first-time novelists
who have an ability to conjure language to such magical effect'

Easy Living Magazine, February issue
'An interestingly written, emotional debut. Absorbing.'

Customer Reviews

Wonderful!
This is one of those books that makes you see the world differently - and not only because of the beautiful language, with its startling and vivid descriptions. The characters also offer unique perspectives. Marta gives us a sense of what it is like to be a woman caught between upholding family loyalties and the quest for personal happiness. Her own courage and ambition and passion come out through the biographies she narrates of gifted but forgotten women. I really liked the way you very easily learned about some different historical figures during the course of the story.

Joseph's impressions of Poland are surprising and often funny. You really feel like you're in the country, going through the streets and pubs with him, and also feeling what it is to be an outsider in a place where you don't speak the language. What I loved most of all was the intensity of the book and the suspense about what will happen to the two lovers. I found myself reading faster to see how it would end. This is a brilliant book. I couldn't believe it was a first novel - it felt so wise and witty and polished. You have to read it to know what I mean.

Great read.
I picked up this book because I heard it was set in Krakow, a city I visited for a weekend and loved. I was not disappointed. Winter under Water brilliantly captures the beauty and the atmosphere of the city. Little bits of history are thrown in with the anglo-Polish love affair, too, and it's also quite funny in parts. I recommend it to anyone who has been or wants to go to Poland. But it's still a good read if you've never been there.

Out in the cold, in the cold
On one level, this novel is about not knowing and that which can't be known; it's about the barriers and obstacles (most obviously language, nationality) that render things, places, people, mysterious - at once troublingly and alluringly other: "A person can't be fully explained...to attempt such a thing is to sharp-knife slices off the soul". This opacity, this sense of being on the outside, is, Hopkin seems to suggest, the price we pay for a perspective on the world that is irreducibly, ineluctably individual. What the novel lives for, however, are moments of transcendence when, without losing ourselves, we feel a connection or communion with the object world and other people ("he trusts only her to tell him what the back of his head is like"). It is tempting to add that the novel is partly a love story, but in fact Hopkin is interested in all emotions; it is a novel as much about nausea as euphoria, sadness as desire.

Hopkin is cognizant of the horrors of twentieth century history (those who "died in the most inhumane way possible"); he looks squarely in the face of life's existential givens (isolation, mortality, responsibility, freedom), yet, without forcing, persuades us that "It is good to be in the world". Indeed, in Hopkin's highly metaphorical, poetic style, objects, people, places resonate and reverberate - pregnant with myriad possibilities. Aesthetic creation and perception ("silent receptivity"?) - Joseph's, Hopkin's - bear witness to this enchanted mode of being in the world; a record of a possible way of living with its roots, or at least its aspirations, in "equanimity" and "goodness" (more than a trace of which lives on in - and is enacted in - this book).

Hopkin's eye for the nuances of national character, local custom, cultural idiosyncracy is singularly sharp; his evocation of Poland - its people and places - is subtle, symapthetic and wholly convincing; as is his sense of what it is like feel that "I am not from round here". "Winter Under Water" is a great, humanistic "European" novel, though, in its sense that what separates people and peoples is not, perhaps, as important as what unites them. This novel may contribute to a better understanding of the Polish by the British, for example, but Hopkin's enlightened credo might be summed up as "Personality before nationality"; a "hyphenated being", belonging nowehere (and everywhere?), for Hopkin what is important is "that you are a human being in the world", not "where you're from".

Hopkin's overriding loyalty, then, is not to any nation, but to "individuals" of all nations - "all the souls who see"; those searching for "a different order of things"; people engaged in "solitary resistance" against "the fatal flow of media and fashion and sales, where people talk about objects and not ideas"; those who have it in them to nurture a "subterranean self" - "something vulnerable yet indestructible that might suggest the spirit".

The novel is animated by a passionate striving to turn away - or to turn in ("Everyone's outside, let's go inside") - from the culture that, to borrow Fromm's famous dichotomy, puts "having" above "being"; however, the novel's fundamental realism, maturity, optimism and pathos all stem from its acknowledgement of the highly attenuated possibilties for escape: "Is it possible to be of our times, but not like our times?...is it possible to live through a system...and not be tarnished by it forever?...Perhaps it is only love or some other delirium...that can free us from our times and from all kinds of censors".

"Winter Under Water" affords the reader copious intellectual stimulation and aesthetic pleasure; technically outstanding, it is a rare repository of humanity, authenticity, gentleness and wit. Needless to say, I would recommend this novel very highly.