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Amazon.co.uk Review
Written on The Body is a tender dissection of erotic love. The prose is like a poem, lush with wit and imagery, but behind the luxuriant relish of the words, there is a scalpel-sharp cut of emotions. Love and longing are the wounds through which Winterson's imagery flows. The novel begins with regret: "Why is the measure of love loss? It hasn't rained in three months ... The grapes have withered on the vine." The narrator is also suffering from a heart-stricken drought. She is grieving for the loss of her true love, Louise.
Louise has flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair, and a body besieged by leukaemia, her cells waging war: "here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight." But Louise is not dead, merely abandoned by the narrator with the best of intentions. As the lament continues, striking in its beauty and dazzling inventiveness, more of the love story is revealed. The narrator has been a female Lothario, falling in love, and out again, swaggering like Mercutio. But then she meets Louise, married to Elgin--"very eminent, very dull, very rich"--and is hopelessly, helplessly smitten: "I didn't only want Louise's flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together." Elgin persuades her to leave for the good of Louise's health, and all is undone.
Winterson does not shy away from grief, or joy. She has acutely described how love can transform a life, but also destroy it too. But, for Winterson, where there is love there is hope: "I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world ... I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields." Eithne Farry
Book Description
'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful prose that stays in the mind,
By A Customer
This review is from: Written On The Body (Paperback)
I read this years ago knowing nothing about Jeanette Winterson and devoured it in one session. As a lesbian I identified the narrator as female and one I could really relate to. I have reread the book a number of times and find it multilayered and as beautiful as good poetry, the fact that so few things are spelt out and so much is hinted at appealed to me rather than the reverse. It is the only book of hers I love perhaps because of those things, perhaps because despite the fact she chooses not to be straightforward in style, I find so many of the things she writes about love and the experience of it deeply accurate. People are not simple and nor are lives, I found in her writing revelations on human nature that touched me, made me think hard, and ultimately changed some ignorances I had about myself forever. It is a passionate book about a passionate love and to my mind one of the most successfully done, especially in the lesbian field of literature.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful book on the meaning of love.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Written On The Body (Paperback)
This is absolutely my favourite book ever. I've read it 100 times, and I always find something new there. The truths Winterson writes of love have the power to make me break down in tears, and I turn to this book again and again.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of her best,
By Phil O'Sofa (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Written On The Body (Paperback)
A beautifully written love story. Like other works I've read by this author, it is sometimes brilliant and sometimes less than that, but this is, for me, one of her easiest and most enjoyable novels. Much is made of the fact that we're never told if the narrator is male or female, but it could only really be a woman writing like this, which of course makes it a lesbian love affair. This is irrelevant in this book (don't bother buying this if you're looking for steamy lesbian sex) but I do sometimes wonder why such a high percentage of good writers just happen to be lesbians.
Well let's just be grateful for what they write. Jeanette Winterson is one of the best writers around today, and this is one of her best books.
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