The Passion (Contemporary classics)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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." --Amazon.com
Review
"An explosively imaginative writer." -- "The London Free Press
""A historical novel quite different from any other...written with a living passion, an eyewitness immediacy.... Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides." --" Vanity Fair
""Recalls Garcia Marquez.... Magical touches dance like highlights over the brilliance of this fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness, and androgynous ecstasy." -- Edmund White
"The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk.... As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down."-- "The New York Review of Books"
""A historical novel quite different from any other...written with a living passion, an eyewitness immediacy.... Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides." --" Vanity Fair
""Recalls Garcia Marquez.... Magical touches dance like highlights over the brilliance of this fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness, and androgynous ecstasy." -- Edmund White
"The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk.... As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down."-- "The New York Review of Books"
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read this again and I recognise where I go wrong with Winterson. I read her, like I would read an Agatha Christie, but these books demand more. I'm not a clever boy but it's funny I spent more time struggling with this than I would reading a 500 page book. It's the same as climbing a mountain and looking back at the view and I felt different having read it. This, by the way, in my opinion, is how Winterson is a genius. It's one thing enjoying a story and being distracted but it's quite different when a book changes the way you feel. She is, in short, an extrodinary writer.
I think before I sound really stupid, I should just list why this book needs to be read.
- Language here has a texture, like a silk or something.
- It's an amazing story
- "It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working round the clock," is the best opening line of a book ever.
- The twist at the end, which I think is saying the absence of freedom can be chosen.
- Etc. Etc.
Really buy it. The Passion is a demanding mistress but a rewarding one.
Okay so now I'm a Winterson fan. I'll stop now.
I think before I sound really stupid, I should just list why this book needs to be read.
- Language here has a texture, like a silk or something.
- It's an amazing story
- "It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working round the clock," is the best opening line of a book ever.
- The twist at the end, which I think is saying the absence of freedom can be chosen.
- Etc. Etc.
Really buy it. The Passion is a demanding mistress but a rewarding one.
Okay so now I'm a Winterson fan. I'll stop now.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Love. When you mean it, when you really feel overwhelmed by someone there is pain as well as plasure. That is one aspect of this brilliant book. How faith in one human being can lead thousands to war, how nine days and nights can be the most important of your life. The book looks at how one person can completly alter your life and way of thinking. How love for another can make you look at yourself and the world differently. When love isn't returned it can lead to genuine pain and grief, but when returned the notion of happily ever after and a wonderful world seem within reason. Jeanette Winterson has written a beautiful book. It has a strong fantasy element but there is truth on every page, and we will all recognise feelings and fears we ourselves have experienced though we may never have been in war or walked on water. Reading a book like this makes you feel less lonely, and I would recommend it to anyone. Nicola.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Bridges join but they also separate.'
'I like the collision between different realities', she says, as she prepares two mugs of Irish tea. 'It's exciting at the level of the imagination, because it allows for an expansion of perspectives. For example, you are walking down a real street and you also in a street in your mind that hardly exists.' ( Winterson)
'Villanelle'
Winterson's narratives play with the tension between connnection and rupture. She invests in narratives which 'interrupt' their coherence and sequencing through epigrammatic phrasing , thereby exposing the falsity of linearity, and the way that 'history' tries to impose 'grand narratives' which suppress the anomalous and individual.
Hence Winterson narrates The Passion from the persepctive of two 'minor' voices from History: these ordinarily voiceless narrators offer their views of Napoleon and his Russian catastrophes in personal and idiosyncratic registers whcih dismantle the supposedly 'original' Historical truth.
'Villanelle' wears a name which bears witness to her duality; 'villain' and 'elle' , the peasant and the poem. She is a hybrid subject whose adpatability serves to save her life and her heart through the graphic traumas of 'history.'
Henri too embraces both 'masculine' and 'feminine' behaviours opting in the end to preserve the sanctity of his love and heart through the solitude of San Servelo, an island's exile which echoes that of his hero Napoleon .
Do our choices make us mad or sane?
Hybrid narratives abound. We 'hear' echoes of other texts throughout the novel, we recognise the ways in which 'Venice' itself is a hybrid city, a place where boundaries between this and that, between past and present, between fear and sex blur and encounter each other, again and again.
And who would we choose to be? The pragmatic Villanelle or the idealistic Henri ? A bit like the Clash song: 'should I stay or should i go?'
Do we choose to cut our losses and move forward embracing eros and the 'kinetic' or do we retreat to an island, a rock of peace and thanatos, viewing reality from the security and sanctity of distance- and await an end?
'Passion is for the singleminded...'
'So you refuse and then discover that your house is haunted by a leopard.'
Who would dare to be Orpheus?!
'I like the collision between different realities', she says, as she prepares two mugs of Irish tea. 'It's exciting at the level of the imagination, because it allows for an expansion of perspectives. For example, you are walking down a real street and you also in a street in your mind that hardly exists.' ( Winterson)
'Villanelle'
Winterson's narratives play with the tension between connnection and rupture. She invests in narratives which 'interrupt' their coherence and sequencing through epigrammatic phrasing , thereby exposing the falsity of linearity, and the way that 'history' tries to impose 'grand narratives' which suppress the anomalous and individual.
Hence Winterson narrates The Passion from the persepctive of two 'minor' voices from History: these ordinarily voiceless narrators offer their views of Napoleon and his Russian catastrophes in personal and idiosyncratic registers whcih dismantle the supposedly 'original' Historical truth.
'Villanelle' wears a name which bears witness to her duality; 'villain' and 'elle' , the peasant and the poem. She is a hybrid subject whose adpatability serves to save her life and her heart through the graphic traumas of 'history.'
Henri too embraces both 'masculine' and 'feminine' behaviours opting in the end to preserve the sanctity of his love and heart through the solitude of San Servelo, an island's exile which echoes that of his hero Napoleon .
Do our choices make us mad or sane?
Hybrid narratives abound. We 'hear' echoes of other texts throughout the novel, we recognise the ways in which 'Venice' itself is a hybrid city, a place where boundaries between this and that, between past and present, between fear and sex blur and encounter each other, again and again.
And who would we choose to be? The pragmatic Villanelle or the idealistic Henri ? A bit like the Clash song: 'should I stay or should i go?'
Do we choose to cut our losses and move forward embracing eros and the 'kinetic' or do we retreat to an island, a rock of peace and thanatos, viewing reality from the security and sanctity of distance- and await an end?
'Passion is for the singleminded...'
'So you refuse and then discover that your house is haunted by a leopard.'
Who would dare to be Orpheus?!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Passion
The Passion is a quirky novel, part historical and part a look at love from different perspectives. The book is split into four sections which by the end form a whole. Read more
Published 13 months ago by N. A. Spencer
A highwayscribery Book Report
Three readings of this slim tome in the past ten years do not yield a conclusion that each time it gets better, but it certainly holds up well. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Stephen Siciliano
Initial Zing but fades quickly,
This book started with much promise as Henri embarks on his adventures as a young soldier in Napoleon's army but when Winterson changes narrators to Villanelle my interest started... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Kiwifunlad
One of the most original books I've ever read.
The Passion' is one of the most original books I have ever read!
Though it is set during the Napoleonic era, it is a book where 'the laws of the real world are... Read more
Though it is set during the Napoleonic era, it is a book where 'the laws of the real world are... Read more
Published on 16 July 2009 by BL Chapman-allan
Read this if you're visiting Venice
I already like this writer's work but chose to read this because I knew there was a link with Venice which I was about to visit. Read more
Published on 4 Jun 2009 by Garden reader
An Adventure of the Passions
I read Oranges are not the only Fruits a long time ago and was impressed. Since then I have always wanted to read a second novel by Jeanette Winterson. Read more
Published on 12 Mar 2008 by Herman Norford
Great!
This book was recommended to me by a good friend and is definetly not the kind of book I would normally dwell into; about love, passion... Read more
Published on 21 Sep 2007 by Erik Cleves Kristensen
The madness of passion.
I found the whimsical content of this short story haunting. The two principal characters inhabit a twilight reality, coalescing into dreamscapes and fantastical imagery. Read more
Published on 23 Aug 2006 by Room For A View
Cruel and Unusual...
... that's not to say it's not a good read, just not what I expected.
Set against the background of the Napoleonic wars, this book blends historical references with the... Read more
Set against the background of the Napoleonic wars, this book blends historical references with the... Read more
Published on 25 Jun 2006 by maria1971
An excellent political read!
I'll admit first off that I had to read this book for my degree, but I was impressed with the very beginning, and what becomes almost the book's 'catchphrase' - "I'm telling you... Read more
Published on 17 May 2004 by Joe Payne
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