The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a retelling of Hamlet, Wroblewski does a fairly good job modernizing and looking at it through new eyes.  The new eyes being that of Edgar, who is mute, but has a gift working with dogs in his fathers kennel.  As a stand alone story however, it struggles to make all of the characters actions linked with plausible emotion or motivation.  Some characters and actions seem put there solely to match up with Hamlet and does nothing to reveal or change the existing characters.  The ending especially seems forced and Trudy's motivations, sketchy throughout, are dumbfounding.  The writing, while lyrical and penetrating at times, tends to get muddled especially during action scenes.  Several times I had to reread scenes to understand the sequence.  It was an interesting read, something I would recommend as a companion to Hamlet, just to illustrate what an adaption/retelling might be like, and hopefully trigger  a better retelling someday.


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