The Passion Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Jeanette Winterson Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0871131838 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later,
The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses, and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This arresting, elegant novel by the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit uses Napoleon's Europe as the setting for a tantalizing surrealistic romance between an observer of history and a creature of fantasy. Henri is a naive French soldier who works in Bonaparte's kitchen and worships the conqueror until his starving and diseased army begins to crumble. Disillusioned and longing to escape a desolate posting in the Russian winter, the young man meets and falls in love with Villanelle, a mysterious Venetian hoping to retrieve her own heart, which has literally been stolen and imprisoned by a noblewoman she once loved. Passiondescribed by the manipulative Villanelle as "somewhere between fear and sex"leads Henri on a desperate quest away from his beliefs and into an emotional labyrinth from which he may be unable to return. The slender story is sometimes lost in the strange brew of myth, fact and modernism, but British author Winterson's assured proseparticularly her stunning evocations of a glacial Russia and a decadent nighttime Venicedoes much to unify her unsettling tale.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Books with free ebook downloads available Download The Passion
- Hardcover: 160 pages
- Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr; 1st edition (May 1988)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0871131838
- ISBN-13: 978-0871131836
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
Jeanette Winterson's short novel, THE PASSION, is not as simple as its plot suggests. Henri, a Frenchman who has dedicated his young life to Bonaparte falls in love with Villanelle, a Venetian woman who cannot love him because her heart belongs to another woman. In her clear but poetic language, Winterson delves deeper - into the issues of the soul and the heart, of knowing when to cast aside passion and when to embrace it, of the heartless of both war and love. As she does so, she takes the reader through her own kind of passion play, where web-footed Villanelle can walk across water and a prophet with green slime in her hair speaks the truth. A defrocked priest, able to see across miles and into houses, is destroyed by "the spirits" - alcohol, to be precise - and in his death gives Henri a miracle. Bonaparte becomes the people's "little Lord in his simple uniform" who convinces thousands of men to follow him to their deaths. The question arises, what is evil and what is saintly? Where is the salvation in all the heartlessness? That these character can find any peace at all in the midst of chaos is the novel's final miracle, though it might not be the calm readers expect.
Despite the rampant symbolism and religious references, Winterson's grasp of language, imagery, and rhythm gives this a lighter touch than might be expected. After all, both Henri and Villanelle readily confess to "telling stories." And how can one take seriously a fat cook who, after passing out in a drunken stupor just before Napoleon arrives to inspect the kitchen, is rigged to an upright position by Henri and a friend? Who cannot laugh at Villanelle donning a codpiece to protect herself from lascivious men?
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