New York Times Brings St. Aubyn's Contemporary King Lear to Light

For the New York Times's Books section, Alexandra Alter introduces (and interviews) Edward St. Aubyn, who recently authored a "modern retelling of Shakespeare's 'King Lear.'" In St. Aubyn's version, Alter explains, "Lear is an 80-year-old Canadian corporate titan whose global media empire and legacy are under threat from his rapacious daughters, Megan and Abigail." Let's pick up there: 

The pair have him drugged and committed to a sanitarium in rural England as they plot to take over his empire. Meanwhile, Dunbar, blinded by pride, greed and paranoia, has alienated those most loyal to him, including Florence, his third daughter, who attempts to rescue him and foil her sisters’s plot. After he flees the asylum, with the help of his fellow patient, the unhinged alcoholic comedian Walker, he starts to grasp the depth of his daughters’ treachery, and the magnitude of his own ignorance and arrogance.

“Dunbar” is the latest entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which pairs contemporary novelists with Shakespeare’s timeless dramas and has attracted a parade of prominent writers, including Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, Howard Jacobson, Jo Nesbo and Anne Tyler.

Plenty of towering literary figures — among them Balzac, Turgenev, and the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley — have taken inspiration from King Lear. But few writers are as well equipped as Mr. St. Aubyn to tackle the tragedy, a dark, twisted and violent family drama about a megalomaniacal monarch’s dysfunctional relationship with his heirs. He’s covered similar emotional and psychological territory in his Patrick Melrose series, which chronicle the violence and sexual abuse he suffered as a child, his descent into alcoholism and heroin addiction, and his struggles as a husband and parent.

Continue at the New York Times.