A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.


Contents:
Main
the Best
the Rest
Review Index
Links

weblog

crQ

RSS

to e-mail us:


support the site



In Association with Amazon.com


In association with Amazon.com - UK


In association with Amazon.ca - Canada


the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



let me tell you

by
Paul Griffiths


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase let me tell you


Title: let me tell you
Author: Paul Griffiths
Genre: Novel
Written: 2008
Length: 196 pages
Availability: in: let me tell you / let me go on - US
let me tell you - UK
in: let me tell you / let me go on - Canada
from: Bookshop.org (US)

- Return to top of the page -


Our Assessment:

B+ : neat idea; well done

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Rev. of Contemp. Fiction . Spring/2009 Mark Tursi
TLS . 15/12/2023 Nina Allan


  From the Reviews:
  • "Expanding the explicit theatricality already in place in the play, Griffiths further subverts convention by interweaving fiction, poetry, and drama via significant -- and self-imposed -- artificial constraints: incredibly, the entire novel uses only the words Ophelia speaks in Hamlet (...) Because repetition is the modus operandi, there are moments of tedium, although Griffiths is adept at maintaining narrative as well as imagistic momentum. His range is extraordinary and includes allusions as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexandre Dumas, and an ironic twist on the Beatles' "Love Me Do"" - Mark Tursi, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  • "(A) short, intense, evocative novel in which the character of Ophelia steps forwards from the subsidiary role allocated to her in Hamlet to tell her own story. (...) There is a danger with devotees of the Oulipo school -- of whom Paul Griffiths is one -- that their works will seem merely "clever", lacking the passion and spontaneity that mark out, for example, the propulsive psychological dramas of Shakespeare. But Oulipians insist that the rules they set themselves are simply a deliberate manifestation of the constraints all writers struggle with, and that the success of any work of art must finally be measured by how effectively it surmounts its own limitations." - Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -


The complete review's Review:

       let me tell you has an inspired premise: Paul Griffiths has Hamlet's Ophelia tell her story -- doing so using only the words Shakespeare gives Ophelia in the play (apparently 483 different ones -- a small fraction of the extraordinary number of words Shakespeare famously used in his work -- in the Second Quarto and the First Folio; see). One might imagine that a nearly two-hundred-page novel employing such a limited vocabulary would be rather simple and bland, but Griffiths shows how great the possibilities are, even using what seems like so few different words.
       Griffiths even plays some with form: while the basic outline of the novel is Ophelia telling her life-story, it includes letters from her father; a play featuring her father, brother, and herself (along with the observation that: "We had done All's Well That Ends Well before this"); and poetry -- sonnets and haiku (!).
       let me tell you has Ophelia tell her life-story in her own words -- itself one of the things she muses over: "What words do I have ? Where do they come from ? How is it that I speak ?" Griffiths gives Ophelia some awareness of her being merely a character: she sees them as: "words given me by some other, as if I had no hand in what I say, as if all I may do is give speech, let the words come and go" -- and part of let me tell you (as the title suggests) is her wresting control over her words, and her story. Words are of course central, as she is warned about Hamlet (who figures in her story but is never named -- though the word 'hamlet' appears ("to this hamlet where she had left her daughter")):

     As to the what, here it is:
     'Words are what he will say.
     '"Words" is what he will say.
     '"Words, words, words."
       (Which, of course, Hamlet famously does say.)
       Ophelia tells of her close relationships with her brother and her father, and the difficult one with her mother, "the lady of this little home that was no home for as long as she stayed there". It is her mother, too, that leads to her finding herself: "sucked in to a play, made to show a false face". (Yes, the word 'into' appears frequently in Hamlet, but it is not a word ever spoken by Ophelia.)
       And, of course, Ophelia also gets to: "Him -- let me speak now of him: the young lord". She speaks of her passion -- finding, too: "But I cannot tell you what I most wish to tell you, for there are no words for what I would say" (reminding also again of the constraint here, limiting the words she can work with ...). And: "How little they seem to me, the words that I have !"
       The story continues to her and its end -- to the point where, she realizes and insists: "I must go", and:
I know that what was me will have to come to an end, an end that I will have made. Not death ! By no means. But this: I will have left that 'me' and gone.
       (Neatly -- if only fifteen years later -- Griffiths allows her a continuation -- a 'not death' --, in the companion volume let me go on.)
       To the end, Ophelia is empowered in Griffiths' telling of her story, she is the one determining her fate, the novel closing:
     I could do that: go home and not go on.
     I could go on, and find what I still do not know.
     This way, that way.
     I have stayed here to think, and then:
     I choose.
       As grounded as let me tell you is in Hamlet, the novel is not some simple re-telling. Griffiths fashions something new out of it, with Ophelia very much the central character of this -- her -- story. Doing so just with these borrowed words is a remarkable achievement -- but to Griffiths' credit, the novel never feels too constrained by it constraint.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 November 2025

- Return to top of the page -


Links:

let me tell you: Reviews: Paul Griffiths: Other books by Paul Griffiths under review: Other books of interest under review:

- Return to top of the page -


About the Author:

       British author Paul Griffiths was born in 1947.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2025 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links