Rating: 
Summary: Inspiring philosophical meditation
Review: "There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies," Winterson reports in this philosophical narrative which intertwines three lives. The surgeon Handel is running away from the mistake he made on the operating table. Self-named Picasso is a painter whose life has been constricted and nearly destroyed by her family, until her current escape. Sappho has wandered the ages following her poetry and reflecting on her loves and on how the world omits parts of her life. These stories, along with a fourth that is about a prostitute looking for her lover, cohere in Winterson's sparkling language and form a mosaic that explores art and love, living and sexuality, identity and consequences. "Art & Lies" defies the structure of storytelling and instead vividly illustrates the human condition. I didn't feel that the ending brought the narrative to any sort of completion, but overall I found the book inspiring on several levels.
Rating: 
Summary: truthful art
Review: "There's no such thing as autobiography; there's only art and lies." (page 141)Winterson's work is to be read firstly for pleasure, and secondly for enlightenment. No: the pleasure *is* the enlightenment! What a lush rush this book is -- it is not for the faint-hearted. Winterson reminds us again and again that only art and lies exist, by changing the "autobiography" of all the characters. The facts of their lives are sublimated into fiction, and the intensity of their subjective experience is all that matters. Time becomes meaningless as Sappho shifts between past and present, Handel becomes a doctor and we find ourselves mourning for a pederastic Cardinal with a beautiful mind. Confused? You shouldn't be -- the book carries you on its strong currents, past any and all obstacles. This is a fantastic book -- it is a fantasy. It reveals to us why we fall again and again for lies, because they are too beautiful to refuse... "God has not made such things." "God has made everything."
Rating:
Summary: Essential Truth found in "Art & Lies"
Review: A friend gave "Art & Lies" to me saying that the book was "most definitely for me." It has become one of my favorite books. Jeanette Winterson is by far one of these most imaginative and cutting-edge writers today. While most other young authors are jumping on bandwagons, Winterson is loudly beating her own drum. "Art & Lies" is full of evocative langauge, sensual details, witty word-plays, and multi-dimensional characters. Moreover, Winterson is a "smart" writer. She touchs, steals, grabs, and nods to classic and modern literature, music, and art without showing the least amount of effort or pretension. I most highly recommend "Art & Lies" for someone who is looking for something completely different to read, who is tired of the same story-lines on the best-seller lists, and who is willing to take the plunge into Winterson's beautifully fragmented word.
Rating:
Summary: Genius
Review: Art & Lies is one of the most unique and profound works of the twentieth century. The New York Times was known to say that Jeanette Winterson redefined the novel with Gut Symmetries, but I believe it is this earlier work that transcends convention, blows apart contrivances of traditional plot and character development, and offers some of the most sublime and beautiful writing I have ever seen: writing that is both poetic and meditative. "I hope. And the hope that is in me is from the soul is for the soul. Not present, actual, superficial life, but the real solid world of images. I hope that the real solid world of images will prevail." Art & Lies is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it will prevail. It is for readers who wish to go beyond, to reflect deeply on questions of the soul and to participate fully in the struggles of the characters, and to embrace the magical and healing and star-lit universe of poetic images. Jung said that poetry and all art compensates for the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. All of Jeanette Winterson's cutting edge books make this sublime compensation, and Art & Lies shimmers and shines in the consciousness of the reader.
Rating:
Summary: .........................................
Review: Art and Lies is in my humble opinion the best work of fiction (or is it?) I have ever read. It's dense, profoundly intertextual, and at times absolutely poetic. Please don't be fooled by Publius' obviously misguided review (for example, the comparison between Sophokles and Sappho is flawed from the start, and one might consider reading a bit about the historical reception of Sappho's work before making such bold statements); if Winterson will enter literary history as a footnote to a footnote, it will be one that disrupts the entire textual frame itself.
Rating:
Summary: .........................................
Review: Art and Lies is in my humble opinion the best work of fiction (or is it?) I have ever read. It's dense, profoundly intertextual, and at times absolutely poetic. Please don't be fooled by Publius' obviously misguided review (for example, the comparison between Sophokles and Sappho is flawed from the start, and one might consider reading a bit about the historical reception of Sappho's work before making such bold statements); if Winterson will enter literary history as a footnote to a footnote, it will be one that disrupts the entire textual frame itself.
Rating:
Summary: From the Publisher and Reviewers-----
Review: Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd, American Ed.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The novel brings together three apparently disparate figures on a single day in a single place - a high-speed train hurtling through the present or near-future (though the book itself ranges freely over the centuries). Handel is an ex-priest turned surgeon, a man whose humanity has been sacrificed to intellect. Picasso, a young woman cast out by the family that drove her to madness, is comforted only by her painting. And Sappho is the famed lesbian poet of antiquity, as alive as her immortal verse. Each is at once beguilingly symbolic and painfully real, alienated from a brutal technological world and united by Winterson's narrative, which directs them together towards a single end of satisfying inevitability. A story of lust, the unloved and loss, Art & Lies is also a jeremiad upholding the virtues of culture against the cold numbness of modern life. Erudite, impassioned, philosophical and, above all, daring, Winterson enfolds her characters in the ageless beauty of art - with a depth of feeling every bit as dazzling as her rich prose and fierce intellect.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publisher's Weekly
Set on a train traveling through a dystopian future England, Winterson's latest novel is a patchwork meditation on identity and artistry.
_______________________________________
To read Jeanette Winterson's 'Art & Lies' can and should be compared to the process of eating a glazed cream éclair. It is rich, it is melancholically sweet, it is pleasurable. Conjuring, her work strikes the reader with its clarity, its lucidity, its beauty. A delicious delirium. While the plot remains in the background, the nudity of confessional tone and stylistic voice lulls you to sleep only to slap you awake in the following paragraph. The price of each paragraph is a petal, as Emily Dickinson once wrote. A remarkable poetic novel, these words should keep you up nights and days in daze.
Rating: 
Summary: An unfortunate exercise in crepuscular obfuscation.
Review: I really do like Jeanette Winterson and have read several of her novels, all of which have been very good. Books like Sexing the Cherry, Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Passion and Gut Symmetries were well written, insightful, truly unique and well constructed stories told in a bold, clear & decisive voice. This book, however. is an unfortunate mess. I hate giving authors I truly like such a lousy rating, but in this case it's unavoidable. One of the blurbs on the book cover speaks to a "writer writing about something terribly important", which may in fact be the case, if only one could figure out just what it is. It's really a shame as the concept is intriguing-the execution is the problem. Winterson is a master of the use of language, usually leaving the reader painting vivid-though often very unsettling-mental pictures to accompany the text. Here however the text is so dense, the characterizations so obscure, the thought process so complex that one can-and often does-- read and reread a passage several time, still emerging with no real idea what is going on. Everyone has a bad day now and then-and with this effort, Winterson has definitely had hers. This is truly an author worth reading but this effort should be skipped.
Rating:
Summary: Don't approach lightly, but by all means, approach.
Review: If you plan to read this book as you've read other books of Winterson's--that is, as a wildly creative and erotic romp (Sexing the Cherry) or as a humid, introspective examination of relationships (Written on the Body, GUT Symmetries, The Power Book)--prepare to be disappointed. It is, to some extent, a formal experiment; so this book falls into the love-hate category: those who love it force it on all their friends; those who hate it go on holy crusades to prevent others from reading it. It may seem as though I'm damning with faint praise. On the contrary, I can't say enough good things about this book. It's a scorching, wild, gorgeous thing, but it's not a beach read. Find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted, try to remember all the junk you learned about the Greeks in philosophy class, and prepare to emerge changed from the experience. It's THAT kind of book. "Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses, never red."
Rating:
Summary: Marvelous
Review: Jeanette Winterson cloaks her dark and mystical gems in bright, shiny trappings. I have added this one to my permanent collection, as well as given out several copies to friends.
| 
