Each of Winterson's poetic, philosophical, and witty novels, from Sexing the Cherry (1990) to Written on the Body (1993), takes us by surprise, and her newest work is no exception. For instance, the characters in this metaphoric, historical, sensual, and often wrenching tale are named Handel, Picasso, and Sappho, but Handel is a doctor and Picasso a woman. Sappho is the much lauded yet vilified lyric poet of antiquity, but she also walks the streets of London at the bitter end of the twentieth century, and all three characters cross paths at odd or pivotal moments. The fourth character, the bawd alluded to in the title, is Doll Sneerpiece, the heroine of an old book Handel is reading on a train. This train, spanning the distance from the city to the sea, symbolizes time, just as a house is a metaphor for memory. As Winterson spins the intriguing, dramatic, and significant tales of each of her characters, she satisfies our craving for story but accomplishes so much more, articulating the meaning of time, art, passion, and hypocrisy in prose charged with the pulse and imagery of poetry. Donna Seaman
Review
"Winterson's most ambitious work...beautiful writing, shaped line by line into word sculptures....I salute Winterson's skill at word-turning and word-spinning, her ability to mint shining images in a few golden lines." —The Independent on Sunday, U.K.
"Several leaps forward in sophistication and technique from The Passion, which won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize....a smooth-running...piece of machinery, which throws out... brilliant sparks." —The Montreal Gazette
"Dazzling...truly exciting to read." —The Times, U.K.
"Powerful." —The Toronto Sun
"Winterson soars with Art and Lies." —The Calgary Herald
"Expands the gender game...hurtles along so breathtakingly...Intriguing...Profound." —Now magazine
"If words were diamonds and sentences necklaces, Jeanette Winterson would be the De Beers of literature." —Entertainment Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
ost audacious and provocative writers on either side of the Atlantic now gives readers a dazzling, arousing, and wise improvisation on art, Eros, language, and identity. "A series of intense, artful musings that are exhilarating and visionary. . . . Unsettling yet strangely satisfying."--Newsday.
From the Back Cover
One of the most audacious and provocative writers on either side of the Atlantic now gives readers a dazzling, arousing, and wise improvisation on art, Eros, language, and identity. "A series of intense, artful musings that are exhilarating and visionary. . . . Unsettling yet strangely satisfying."--Newsday.
About the Author
A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’ s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Written on the Body, and The PowerBook, have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. Her latest novel is Lighthousekeeping, heralded as "a brilliant, glittering, piece of work" (The Independent). She lives in London and the Cotswolds.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Art & Lies
By Jeanette WintersonVintage Books USA
Copyright © 1996 Jeanette Winterson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780679762706
The man lay with his head propped on the book. The back of his skull felt hot, not hot and sticky as his forehead did, but as though his head had been packed with embers. There were ashes in his mouth.
He opened his eyes and saw the neutral roof of the train. He breathed consciously, hating the flat air, and it seemed to him that every dead thing in his life was crouching over him, taking the air.
He got up suddenly, too quickly, saw the train in a whirligig out of the bullseyes of his sockets. Round and round the neutral patterned seats, round and round the faux wood tables, the still train spinning.
Twisted faces lurched at him as he was caught in a kaleidoscope of arms. Round and round, the sick of his stomach, and the rouletting train. He fell.
He fell at the window with both fists, impossible, against the safety glass. In his dream terror he saw the hammer, or was it the axe, strapped snug in a little red holder against the heave. He put his hand through the shattering plastic, and heard somewhere, a long way off, the dull ugly bell that warned him to go back to the schoolroom, back to the operating theatre, that the oxygen was low, that someone was at the door to see him. The door. He found the door, sealed in its protective, insulating rubber, and with all his strength, he brought the axe to cleave the seam.
The vacuum dispersed. The doors bounced apart, just enough for him to shove the haft between them, and then he thought that two angels came on either side of his wounded arms, and pulled the doors back, and off their runners.
He let the axe fall, and stepped off the loose steel plates, on to the concrete harbour. Ahead, the cliffs, the sea, the white beach deserted, and the light.
He was carrying the book.
Years ago he had been in a car crash. He had been driving steadily, the smooth road, clear, controlled, then, as he tried to turn the wheel, the car disobeyed. The servile box of leather and steel turned on him, turned over and over on him, the tarmac rearing up off the hard core and coming through the windscreen at his face. He had been listening to Turandot and the compact disc jammed but would not break; La speranza, La speranza, La speranza, why had he not died? He often thought of it and wondered what the grace was for and why he had never acknowledged it. A second life. For what? Only to do again what he had done before but this time blunted by repetition? When he had crawled out from under the molten car, he had walked purposefully for two miles, before a police car picked him up. He said, 'There's nothing the matter Officer. I am a doctor.' He had shown them the tattered ribbons of his driving licence.
Later, much later, well again, he had joked about the effects of shock on himself, effects he had handled in others so many times over so many hospital years.
'You know,' he said, 'the odd thing was that I truly believed myself well and whole. I had a broken arm, a fractured ankle, burns, and I was bleeding. Nevertheless, I believed myself well.'
He knew the physiology of it, of course he did, and yet it troubled him. In what other ways did he deceive himself out of his wounded life?
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Continues...
Excerpted from Art & Liesby Jeanette Winterson Copyright © 1996 by Jeanette Winterson. Excerpted by permission.
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