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Amazon.co.uk Review
"What happened to the omniscient author?""Gone interactive."
While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, Jeanette Winterson's The.PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, The.PowerBook travels with ease. It casts the net of its love story over Paris, Capri and London. Interactive narrator Ali is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation. All you have to do is decide who you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. Like all the best video games you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware, you can enter and play the game, but you cannot determine its outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. Ali/x wants to make love as simple as a song. But even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The.PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humour, snappy dialogue and good jokes, several of which are at the author's own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of the The.PowerBook are stored a variety of stories which the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of a Roman Governor in Spitalfields Church or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson wrote in "A Work of My Own". The.PowerBook answers these needs. Winterson's prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of co-ordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked noughties. With The.PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly got there first. --Rachel Holmes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
fantastical; precisely beautiful; but nothing new.....,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Powerbook (Hardcover)
Prose as we've come to expect from Jeanette Winterson - often breath-takingly lovely, hardly a wasted word and deft use of the magical and the bizarre to make sense of the real and the unreal. But, the novel, although markedly superior to much of what's currently being produced, serves only to augment themes and metaphors expounded time and again in her other literary offerings. As Winterson says, she's a "preacher" - and knows only too well how to use the 'motif' to good persuasive effect. But enough already. It's time for Winterson to shed the evangelical robes because her art is suffering. She may be able to climb out of gender, out of this time, through her fiction, but she needs to climb out of her pre-occupations and tell us a little less about herself. She need write no autobiography. 'The Powerbook' is not essential reading, unlike 'The Passion' and 'Written on the Body'.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful to behold, but a familiar beauty.,
By Michael Colgan (Ayr, Ayrshire Great Britain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Powerbook (Hardcover)
I have lost myself in your words Jeanette, noone has done this to me before. But I fear that perhaps I have come to expect too much. My anticipation is too great, and I want to have my breath taken and my jaw to drop every time I read you. Indeed, all my well thumbed and much read Winterston volumes testify to the number of times my breath has been found wanting and my face gone slack-jawed. Alas The Power Book does none of these. The emotions and settings I know from you already, you taught them to me for goodness sake! Please teach me something new. I miss you.
28 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Something for the pseudo-deep,
By
This review is from: The Powerbook (Paperback)
My copy has a quote from the Mail on Sunday review on the cover: "Buy it for someone you really love". I'd recommend that as no-one else is likely to forgive you for it.
It attempts to make something significant about different aspects of our lives - past, present, real and virtual, but doesn't really say anything except the obvious, which we all already know (that different aspects of our lives are linked because they are part of life). Worse, it overcomplicates in an attempt to imply meaning. Some of the stories within the story are good and are the most interesting part of the book. But the bigger story, a love story, is cold and dull whilst attempting to be deep and exciting. I found this book such a waste of time that it incensed me to write this review - my first as I am usually too lazy. Normally I would give my finished books away to friends or to a charity shop - but this is the first book I've thrown away. This is an extreme sign. Ultimately, this is shallow and pretentious rubbish.
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