Product Description

A novel of loss and love, and a philosophical meditation on the body. The novel explores the body as a physical entity and as an image of our innermost selves in order to reveal more about the phenomenon of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17906 in Books
• Published on: 1993-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

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

Customer Reviews

Beautiful prose that stays in the mind
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.

A beautiful book on the meaning of love.
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.

The measure of love is loss.
I have read several reviews of this book, and a lot of them were written by people who were angry because Winterson did not lay out all necessary details to make the life of the reader easier: the narrator's gender (the clue is the gravedigger towards the end of the book, where his torch is, and what he says), the ending (with respect to the whole book, I found the ending precise), and, of course, the fact that Winterson claimed it to be the best book ever written. I couldn't give a t--s about what is said about Winterson, I have read all her work several times (I admit a bit obsessively), and in this case, the book sets out to answer the question that is the first line. With this piece, where love is revealed, I think, and with all her pieces, Winterson demands the reader's active participation...and heaven forbid that any of us as readers read with just a tad more effort than it takes to lift the remote towards the television.