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Summary: Great Read
Review: Not for everyone--it's a stretch on your concepts of time & space, but well worth the effort if you can make it. A very sensitive author.
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Summary: Lost within myself
Review: This book opened a whole new world to me. I was especially fond of it because of the way the author described Venice, the city I adore. The characters are well developed yet they all have something misterious about them. I think this novel demonstrates the perfect ballance of reality and fantasy. Reading it allows a person to enter into oneself and to discover that the most hidden thoughts and feelings are also familiar to other people. It is a very intimate novel which easily enters a person' s thoughts until you feel lost within yourself...
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Summary: The Passion Will Leave You with a Passion for More Winterson
Review: Apart from the "classics" (Dostoevsky and such), Milan Kundera is the only (fairly) contemporary writer where I read one book, (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), and enjoyed it so much, I sought to find/read other novels the author had written...until Jeanette Winterson. I knew nothing about Winterson before reading this book, so my comments are based on my "first acquaintance" with Winterson and her writing. Appreciated by many for her poetic and enchanting use of language, this novel summoned to my consciousness the feeling of *wonderment* I experienced listening to the fairy tales my mother read to me as a child. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that many of the fairy tales my British mother read to me were written by British authors?) Sometimes I have vaguely recollected this wonderment walking alone through the woods with a late evening sun slanting through the trees, but what a pleasant surprise to experience the wonderment based on contemporary writer's words. Winterson provides a believable and very human explanation for why men have gone to war throughout the ages, without her reader being aware that she is trying to accomplish this. Her characters are described in a very rich and vivid manner, yet somehow without the reader being necessarily aware of the act of description. This is perhaps a tribute to Winterson's poetic use of language. Fewer words are necessary. If other authors use words to describe the most beautiful garden, Jeanette Winterson's words ARE the garden, complete with ALL things that grow in a garden, not just the flowers! The obvious meanings ordinarily ascribed to an author's words are left behind, or are somehow redundant, because Winterson's words skillfully succeed at leaving much to the reader's imagination. (Which may be why many comment that they read this book multiple times!) I read The Passion and immediately went on line to purchase two more of Winterson's novels. You most likely will do the same when you read this book!
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Summary: A Passion for Tale-telling
Review: There is only one way to give this novel the praise it deserves: buy it, and then read it again and again and again. ...THE PASSION, in my opinion, is Winterson's most accomplished novel, for in it she intertwines the fantasies of a French peasant and the tale of a Venetian woman--without missing a beat. She experiments with this polyrhythmic structure in other novels--SEXING THE CHERRY and ART & LIES--but not with so much ease. One will not bore of the prose, either, or of Winterson's tight, matter-of-fact style of describing even the most violent and bizarre moments of her characters' lives. THE PASSION resembles a poem as well. Many "lines" appear throughout the text. Among them: "I'm telling you stories. Trust me." and "You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play." Storytelling and gambling....what more do we need? As another reviewer rightly points out, every paragraph offers wisdom--so much wisdom, in fact, that I frequently stopped reading to lift my eyes and contemplate precisely what she "means." Winterson writes delicious fiction for the consumer of words. She writes dark moments; she writes light moments. But always, she writes with a peculiar comic and poetic grace found nowhere else. Unlike many writers of the day, but like Stein, Pound and Co., Winterson pushes against conventions to tell enduring tales. THE PASSION is her most enduring tale to date, and should not be neglected by serious lovers of literature.
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Summary: Heartstopping paragraphs on every page!
Review: Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. -Jeanette Winterson * * * Henri, a poor country boy joins the French military to follow his passion: Bonaparte. His tour of duty takes him on Napoleon's marches, and one is treated to an inside of look at being a soldier in Bonaparte's army. Napoleon's passion for fighting has him take his armies into Moscow. Concurrently, a woman gives birth to a child in Venice. The child's father is a Boatman, and those children, according to legend, can walk on water. The child turns out to be a girl, but is nonetheless a Boatman's Daughter. She has a passion for gambling, and meets the love of her life and finds another passion, in the process losing her heart. After her heart has been broken, she marries a cruel, fat Frenchman and exults in his passion for debasing her. Her destiny takes her to Moscow, where she meets Henri. Henri's passion for the Boatman's daughter proves to be no small thing in his own destiny. Set in magical, eternal cities, encompassing a time which captivates the imagination, and written in beautiful prose, this work is emminently readable, and entirely riveting. There are beautiful heart-stopping phrases worth quoting on every page -- words which, by their beauty, make this spellbinding tale a lyrical journey of discovery. There are many kinds of passions in this piece, and following each to its end, and savoring each as it comes, is a bittersweet and very poignant experience. Do it! Highly Recommended!
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Summary: This is my ALL TIME favorite book
Review: I get woozy just remembering this book. The Passion starts off a little slow (in contrast to the beauty of "Written on the Body"s -my other Winterson favorite- opening), but it is the most richly complex and beautiful book I've ever read. I've never eaten such a meal, but I would equate reading this book to eating the best meal of your life in a warm and shadowy perch in the most exotic part of Italy and feeling rich and content the whole time. I've had to put this book down several times just to write down some inspiration born from reading. I feel that this book is a life changer. The gambling theme, the imagery, the madness, and the continuation of life all make me adore this book. I've even had my technical husband read this book, and he adored it.
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Summary: One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read!
Review: This novel is a work of art. The words are filled with poetry. It is a bittersweet love story that takes you to a whole other world. The story of Henri and Villanelle will touch you in many ways. There are many metaphors and foreshadows, which means that you'll have to pay close attention to the descriptions. I love the beautiful descriptions in the novel; they captured me. This is an incredible read; it blew me away! I highly recommend it.
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Summary: The Passion
Review: I've just finished reading The Passion, and I loved it! I could hardly put it down. The thoughts and images it conjured up were at once, simple and complex.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible Book!
Review: This book is one of the most amazingly spell-binding books ever written. On the surface it is a fairy tale but like a fairy tale it is so multilayered that it must be re-read. It is poetic, gripping, and truly passionate! This book is definitely in my top ten books of the century. Time will really be the one to judge this book, already her influence on other writers is obvious (I am thinking here of Geoffrey B. Cain, the author of "The Wards of St. Dymphna), and that is the true judge of great writing; the art that is created in response to great art.
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Summary: Is Winterson Creating Parodies of Her Own Work?
Review: I liked this book, but I didn't love it, and it's certainly not as strong as Winterson's book, Written on the Body. The Passion is about, well, passion... and not much else. Winterson's main characters examine their passions in beautiful, perhaps overdone, language. (I get the feeling that if someone else had written this novel, it would be considered a humorus parody of Winterson's style.) Winterson sets her story in a fantastical version of early 19th century Europe, but this book has little to do with Europe per se, and other to launch one character's infatuation with Napolean, the setting really serves no real purpose to the story. I mention this not because I'm particularly worried -- a novel has to be set somewhere -- but because earlier reviewers seem to love the "historical" aspects of the novel, when in fact there really aren't any of note. Furthermore, because the the story is told from the first person, and because the characters always dwell on their introspective passion problems, little is lent to the setting of the story -- they are simply places with names and a few lines of beautiful, overwrought description. Historical fiction readers, beware. The main players themselves do nothing more than worry about the loves of their lives and the obstacles in between -- their passions override characterization, making them rather one-dimensional. Perhaps this flat characterization is intended. If so, it's an interesting comment on what overriding passion does to one's character -- namely, passion destroy personality. However, such people do get tiresome, in real life and in this book. Still, I read the book and enjoyed it. While passion seems to be its only theme, it is a good theme nevertheless, and its presentation is compelling, if somewhat overstated. I'm glad it is a slim book, though.
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