Rating: 
Summary: Amazing
Review: This book is a great journey in literature and really explores love as a concept and strips to down to the primal, essential parts. A great work.
Rating: 
Summary: lovely prose, mundane topic
Review: This tale is derivative -- see, for instance, The End of the Affair, which is the same thing, only different. But it is a skillfully done soft porn tale of obsession and intellectualized lust. The voice of the narrator, self absorbed and libidinous, is nicely unisexed, so even at the end of the book the reader is still wondering ... though, of course, we know, don't we -- because the London tabs have told us.Still, certainly a lovely bedtime read and a book to share with a lover.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful -- another work of art from Winterson!
Review: Jeanette Winterson's novels read like an epic poem. The beautiful prose and poetic undertones mean that reading between the lines is called for. I loved The Passion and The Powerbook, and now I adore Written on the Body. In Written, Winterson chronicles the sexual escapades between the unidentified narrator and a complex married woman. The protagonist's ambiguous gender is disturbing and thought provoking. Is Winterson trying to convey a message by doing this? Is the narrator's gender academic in the story? Is having the reader, whether male or female, relate to the story important to the author? Again, reading between the lines is rather important. I love novels that are thought provoking and literary. Winterson hasn't let me down. I duly recommend this beautiful novel.
Rating:
Summary: Great literary moments.
Review: On the whole "Written on the Body" is a great novel. It has a fresh perspective, a good story, great descriptions, and a real personal feel. Underneath all of that are a multitude of great moments. There are paragraphs that alone could be short stories, or better yet pure poetry. And there are lines in this book that are amazing. There's one line that's so wonderful that it has become one of my favorites in all of literature. To quote it now and rob you of the opportunity to read it in its context would be a sin. I've read several other Winterson books, and this is by far my favorite. The story is a genderless, nameless narrator has trouble in love by falling for the wrong women. After a series of affairs with married women he/she tries to break the pattern but again falls for another married woman. The narrator has to decide for herself if this woman is just another part to a destructive cycle, or finally the real thing. The narrator and Louise are people in their own right with complexities and personality above just mere characters. As for suspense, I've always been pretty good at guessing the ending halfway through the book, but this time I was unsure until the very last page. In "Written on the Body" Winterson never gives it all away, is never patronizing, and is always honest.
Rating:
Summary: I appreciated it more as the story progressed
Review: I admit that for the first third or so of this novel I was not particularly enamoured with the storyline. The "novelty" of not knowing the gender of the narrator never really did it for me, (perhaps as I had convinced myself of the sex of the narrator fairly early on). But as the story progressed I became more and more involved, not so much with any of the secondary characters including our narrator's love interest, but with the narrator him/herself. The depth and pain associated with their love was palpable and very real. I'm not quite sure whether I actually enjoyed this book, but I'm still thinking about it, and that in and of itself says something.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book Ever!
Review: I read this book for my British Literature class, and fell in love with Winterson's novelette immediately. The story revolves around the genderless, nameless character, who falls in love with a flaming red hair married woman. It's the story of love and loss (to some extent). I don't want to ruin the story for anyone, but it is brilliantly written. I ended up buying all of Ms. Winterson's books, except for Art Objects, which I plan to buy soon. If you love Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", you will surely enjoy this book. I did, and currently am writing my thesis on it.
Rating:
Summary: Complete Satisfaction!!
Review: I have thought of myself as a "reader" all of my life, but I feel as though I did not truly read until I read this book. Every page, every line was simply profound and breathtaking. I laughed out loud, and at times, felt completely helpless as the plot unfolded---but all for good reasons. I highly recommend this book to anyone, Winterson puts into words what we all wish we could.Brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: Astounding, perceptive
Review: Winterson shows an astounding understanding of human nature. While love - physical and emotional - the the focus of this book, even short episodes such as seeking succor in an evensong service demonstrate a perceptiveness for human nature rarely seen in an author. Not to mention that the same scene shows a wicked sense of humor. The narrator, clearly bisexual, has a history of love affairs that last about six months. Narrative time in this book is not sequential but it effectively begins with the narrator's attempt to "settle down." This effort fails as the narrator falls in love again - but this time with a woman who demands honesty in the relationship. The slow movement towards honesty - hastened by a middle-aged female boss - forms the core of the plot. The self-deception and the slow recognition of the truth behind "benevolent" actions gives the novel a sense of truth rare in contemporary literature. The first few pages have a deliberately roughness in syntax that initially put me off. Eventually the novel hits its stride and syntax reads with a rhythm appropriate to the content. An excellent novel for your "to-be-read" stack.
Rating:
Summary: Boring!
Review: I bought this book because of a reccomendation in Oprah's mag. It repeats similar events over and over.
Rating: 
Summary: And the last age should show your heart
Review: In the mid 17th century, Andrew Marvell wrote: "An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze/Two hundred to adore each breast/But thirty thousand to the rest;/An age at least to every part/And the last age should show your heart." In Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson seems to have embarked on a similar descriptive program, but decided to skip the last (and to my mind critical) section of it. Written on the Body is a work of paradoxes. As its title suggests, is a story about the physical. Throughout, the narrator describes body parts more than relationships, sometimes in a style that explicitly blends love poetry and an anatomy text book. Yet, paradoxically, the narrator also maintains that the relationship which is the focus of the book is something more than mere physical lust: it is love. If there was more personality and emotion in the story, perhaps this would ring true, but the personality never emerges. Again, although the story is largely about the physical, it is also cold and sterile. The narrator describes his lover Louise as a pre-Raphaelite woman, but there is nothing sensuous and evocative in the story unless you're so peculiarly constituted as to get a buzz from reading the more clinical parts of the Encyclopedia Britannica. For the rest of us, from the point of view of titillation, there is little to recommend this work. Finally, the characters in Written on the Body strike me as cartoonishly polarized. The former lovers of the narrator--Bathsheba and Inge and Crazy Frank with rings through his nipples and midget parents--are all ridiculous in their own way. Elgin, Louise' husband is equally cartoonishly drawn--an unloveable lout who deserves to lose the beautiful wife who is no more than a trophy to him. In the end, what should we take from this book? Will the narrator go on to love again, to break up another marriage, to wallow satisfyingly over the loss of another lover or to lament his (or her) human frailty? Why should we believe otherwise? I found it difficult, ultimately, to imagine that Louise, however tragically absorbing at the time, would be more than just another notch on the belt, as she was afraid she would be. And, in the end, I didn't really care.
| 
