Jeanette Winterson impressed me last year when I read her magical tale of historical fiction, The Passion. Her poetic, interior style really resonated with me. Her work lays deep in the physical heart while also sparkling on an ethereal plane.This book knocked me out. Her sheer artistry had me in admiration. A bit slack-jawed, actually. For example, the main character is not only nameless (I've seen that before) but is an 'every-person': Winterson doesn't tell us if they are male or female. Quit...

****************************Listen along (please): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7JPH-...****************************When you fall in love with someone, I mean really fall, you become obsessed with the things that are written on the body. The scar on her elbow from when she tripped over the curb, the chip in his tooth from when he fell from his skateboard… that tiny birthmark behind her knee. Each mark tells a story. Knowing the story brings you closer. The burn mark on her hand from when she

Her artistry makes my mouth drop open. The most poetic, passionate, erotic book, it sits on my shelf with Duras' The Lover and Rikki Ducornet's The Word Desire and Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband. But it could also be shelved with Proust's Swann's Way for the sensual cling of memory and Chekhov's Lady with the Lapdog for its sadness. The poetry of its prose is incomparable. A meditation on sensual life and the meaning of love. As Carson said, 'Beauty is what makes sex, sex." A lover of u...

You know how it is when your friends fall madly in love with someone (a new girlfriend), or something (Guitar Hero, Battlestar Galactica), and wear you out during the honeymoon phase babbling on about his/her/its awesomeness, sometimes in excruciating detail? If you're not in a similar situation, or worse, wish you were, it's damn near unendurable. For God's sake, don't read this book unless you can stand to read about sheer, uninhibited passion, often in graphic detail. The pointedly genderless...

"Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid""Written on the body" is a captivating and beautifully written story of all the pleasure and in turn, the heartache, loving someone can cause. The way Winterson writes, is actually almost magical. Her words are almost like silk, but they are at the same time, so, so powerful.I have to admit...

I tried really hard to like Jeanette Winterson, because most of the women I respect think she is amazing. But I just think she is fumbling and kind of incompetent. And for me her charisma, great passion, and several devastating one-liners don't compensate for her imprecision, scattered incoherence, or the clamminess of her authorial 'I.'Can't do it.(Wait, don't leave! I like Anais Nin. Seriously...)

“The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.”I got completely lost in this book, in a good way. I was wholly wrapped up in the writing, basking in the beauty of the prose. I’ve not read a lot of Jeanet...

On the surface, this is a sensual, reflective, and sometimes humorous recollection of the narrator’s loves won and lost, compared with the current one. Unwelcome news triggers a difficult choice, with huge ramifications. It was made with love, but was it the right decision, and did the narrator even have the right to make it? It’s a curious amalgam of styles, yet unmistakably Winterson, including a set of short, more abstract sections, and the fact the bisexual narrator’s gender is unspecified.

An interesting, sometimes funny, moving meditation on love and loss. The narrator, a translator of Russian fiction, is never named and his/her gender is deliberately ambiguous - he/she describes relationships with a number of lovers, mostly female but some male. The first half is fairly light in tone, as he/she describes the various affairs leading up to and including the dominant one which forms the main theme of the story, with a married woman called Louise, whose husband Elgin is a cancer spe...

Very intimate. The protagonist is sexless, a human in full capacity of the senses--& it is quite a feat to have a plot-less book revolving around sex and love. All of Winterson's novels are unique & original. This one is the least magical and least memorable--but still pretty darn remarkable.

It is hard to review Jeanette Winterson. Every single one of her short novels is a work of art, beautiful and painfully true while magically exploring the limits of reality.I read The Passion and thought I would not like it, because I don't do historical fiction. It was breath-taking, unbelievable, eye-opening. The recurring theme accompanies me ever since: "Somewhere between fear and sex, passion is."I read Sexing the Cherry and thought I could not possibly like it more, because The Passion mad...

It is so terrifying, love In less than 200 pages, Winterson has written something both light and profound, immensely intimate and yet somehow public, replete with humour and anguish, selfishness and care, and which moves from high comedy (wit, satire, absurdity) to something very moving. The writing is lush and sensuous, but always intelligent as connections are made via words and language to join ideas that don't traditionally belong together. In lots of ways this is a story that has been do

I was reading thru some of the reviews for this book. I'll just say that it's beautifully written. This book moved me. I cried with about twenty pages to go. My heart expanded and ached a little bit. I felt for the narrator (who we have to guess woman or man?) and for Louise. I love the narrator. This book is about love, relationships, loss, and is a bit hope filled at the end. The opening sentence: Why is the measure of love loss? and the book takes you from there. I finished it in a day. Not a...

Gah -- I found this insufferably narcissistic and eye-rolling to read, devoid of any sympathetic characters save the zoo-lady Jacqueline, and incredibly unsatisfying in every way. The only reason I gave it two stars is because Winterson obviously has talent -- there were a few places where the imagery was striking enough to pierce my annoyance -- and clearly this is a matter of taste and preference. It's technically and emotionally proficient, but just doesn't resonate with me personally.

A genderless narrator leafs through past affairs with men and women, contrasting them with his/her present relationship with Louise, a married woman. What I most admired about Winterson’s approach to this tragic romance is the naturalness with which she approaches homosexual and bisexual relationships, which makes a case for the idea that gender is but a sociocultural construct, a concept that certainly shouldn’t define the traits of any relationship, or in this case, of the narrator, who seems

I think that Jeanette Winterson is the author I've rarest the highest while reading her books. I've read a bunch yet only one three stars. Her stories is so emersive and the writing is such beautiful and intriguing to read. It's an author I want to revisit more and hopefully find more books by her to read for the first time

Can love have texture? It is palpable to me, the feeling between us, I weight it in my hands the way I weight your head in my hands. It gives me a loose-limbed confidence to know you'll be there. I'm expected.There's continuum. There's freedom. Written On The Body is more than a book, more than a story, more than anything even remotely quantifiable. Written on the Body is an accurate study on the power of consequences, a retrospection on pure and unconditionate love, written with the passion

This was an amazing book. It starts out as a story of an affair, but the second half is more of a memory about or a lovestory to the lover's body. It's impossible to tell whether the storyteller is a man or woman, but this is so well written - sad, reflective, happy, joyful - it works through every emotion. I will have to buy it for myself.A few quotes that were meaningful to me:"I will taste you if only through your cooking.""When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond

Remember that time you tried to abandon yourself, leave off a part of you behind? Behind what, though? The self as a continuity seems so illusory sometimes. It's one of the ways in which time tricks us. So we look into others to mark our own transcendency. The self is porous and the other is diaphanous. Written on the Body's self-proclaimed unreliable narrator falls in the kind of love that is an exile from the self, a love that's like a violet bruise. The kind of love that you try to leave befo...

Winterson goes deep. This is a story of a woman obsessed with love and intimacy, and yet so terrified of commitment that she finds herself in a pattern of falling for women who are married to men. She sees her pattern, knows she must fight against it for her health and happiness, and so commits to a sweet, steady woman who gets all the boxes checked in the healthy relationship department. Of course, this isn’t an authentic connection, but rather a rejection of herself, squelched because she beli...