Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A story about storytellers telling stories about stories... I found this short book unfortunately too self-conscious, too carefully academic, too much trying too hard. I wanted to lose myself in the world of Winterson, but this book felt too shallow to dive into.

I don't have any specific complaints, but nothing here evoked much feeling for me. The great number of mostly-blank pages seemed a bit of a waste, too.

Hoping my next Winterson is more lively! I still think she's absolutely amazing as an author. Suggestions?

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Sexing the Cherry

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This magical tale defies easy description. From the first, Winterson destabilises time and place so that all we know is what we see --

My name is Jordan. This is the first thing I saw.

We follow Jordan the foundling from the smelly banks of the Thames where he lives with his mother, the Dog-Woman, out to sea, around the world and back again. Our hero is the first to deliver a pineapple to the shores of Great Britain. This is the 1640s -- an age of political unrest, seafaring discoveries, plagues and superstitions.

But we are not solidly grounded in one time or place. We float off into the realm of the fantastic, as if gravity just doesn't apply in Winterson's writing. There is a household of tightrope dancers who never let their feet touch the floor and who eat their dinner in midair, suspended on chairs hanging around a table, with a pit of hungry alligators below (into which the leftovers are scraped).

We visit a town that is loosed, in its entirety, from its earthly ties and floats away, anchoring from time to time like a sky-borne ship to hamlets far below. There is a town where everyone dies in a plague of love.

Our heroines, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, come and go from these magical places and speak matter-of-factly about their exceptional lives. The first princess, we learn, lives in a well with her lover, a mermaid. Another princess was blinded and beaten when she and her lover, Rapunzel, were tricked by the prince who threw them out of their tower.

We experience this queering of history as well as of fairy tales as a violent, mythic and invisible history that seems to run parallel to our recorded, received history.

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time. (9-10)

I was out of my depth with the historical references to the Civil War period -- Puritans, Royalists, parliament, the beheading of a king, Oliver Cromwell, God's Elect, John Tradescant, etc., etc. Luckily, I don't think Winterson is going for historical fiction here, not in the traditional sense. Most of the historical scenes have a distinctly alternative flavour (Winterson's speciality?).

The brothels are full of Puritan preachers. Dog-Woman, encouraged by a Royalist gang, works to avenge the King's death by collecting eyeballs from the living.

And we become sufficiently untethered in time to make it up to the present day, where characters very much like Jordan and Dog-Woman encounter the shadows of their former selves.

The river runs from one country to another without stopping. And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light. (144)

This is a wonderous, mysterious book that I will need to read a few more times to make any more sense of. Despite not understanding all of it, I was entranced by Winterson's language and playful philosophising.

There were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night. (38)

On love, creative endeavor, myth and the uniqueness of our own experience of the world -- Winterson's thoughts are worth listening to.

I read this for the GLBT Reading Challenge.

Passages from Sexing the Cherry

I've always loved copying favorite passages from books. Here are a few I'd like to share from a recent read:

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.


I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. (21)

I have noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other. (31)

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever. (35)

He asked me if I knew the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I said I had heard it, and he told me they were still living just down the road, though of course they were quite a bit older now. Why didn't I go and see them? (43)

She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove. (79)

Above me the gulls burst in white battalions, and ahead of me the tall rocks loom. To the north of this tiny island is a tract of sand where the sea cuts through like a tongue. I will pull up my boat at this deep divided shore and see what signs of life there are. Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. (80)

Now the future is wild and waits for us as a beast in a lair. (83)



Photo by J. Steuben

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this book at the library because of its adorable squat shape, like a roast beef sandwich on rye.

THEN... How is it that I never knew about Jeanette Winterson!?! This book is an absolute jewel of a story of a girl growing up and coming out in a religious fanatic family in Lancashire and all the bizarreness that entails.

I can't help but read it as a memoir, which is what I assumed I was reading, I suppose because the first-person narrator's name is Jeanette. Then I discovered that it is considered a novel and was Winterson's first.

Glancing at her biography on her website, though, I gather that a lot of Oranges is based, however loosely, in reality. So, I wasn't totally wrong about that.

My reading of this started out fitfully, curious but not very involved. Then I started liking it and then I realized that I was in the middle of an astoundingly unique story with a mesmerizing narrator who was NOT NEARLY telling us the whole story. She leaves us to imagine the details, which I think is a wholly successful strategy in this case.

This is a talented, imaginative and outrageous writer whose other books I will certainly pursue.

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