Product Description

A 21st-century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. Set in London, Paris, Capri and cyberspace, using fairy tales, contemporary myths and popular culture, it works at the intersection between the real and the imagined. Its territory is you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114331 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review

"What happened to the omniscient author?"

"Gone interactive."

While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, Jeanette Winterson's The.PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, The.PowerBook travels with ease. It casts the net of its love story over Paris, Capri and London. Interactive narrator Ali is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation. All you have to do is decide who you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. Like all the best video games you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware, you can enter and play the game, but you cannot determine its outcome.

Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. Ali/x wants to make love as simple as a song. But even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.

The.PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humour, snappy dialogue and good jokes, several of which are at the author's own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of the The.PowerBook are stored a variety of stories which the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of a Roman Governor in Spitalfields Church or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.

"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson wrote in "A Work of My Own". The.PowerBook answers these needs. Winterson's prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of co-ordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked noughties. With The.PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly got there first. --Rachel Holmes

Review
On the surface, Winterson's latest novel is another attempt to cash in on the Internet revolution. Sensitive readers will cringe at chapter names such as 'Search', 'View as Icon' and the 'dot' in the novel's title. Those who still think that everything connected with the Internet is cool (rather than merely exciting and useful) will join Winterson's many fans in wading through The.PowerBook's irritating surface in search of a story. Once there, they will still have to tackle the usual problems associated with metafiction, such as attempting to relate to characters who don't seem to exist or follow events that don't actually happen. At the novel's heart is a retelling of Stephen Phillips's 1898 play Paolo and Francesca, a medieval story of the murder of two adulterous lovers. Winterson positions it somewhere between reality and cyberspace, where it flits between past, present and future, stopping off in Paris for the odd stroll down the banks of the Seine. Ali (also known as Alix) is an e-writer, someone who writes stories to order, stories that allow you to 'go deeper than disguise'. Unfortunately, the pretentiousness of this concept infects almost every sentence. 'I can change a story,' Ali tells us. 'I am the story.' Quite what the story is will remain a puzzle to all but the most patient of readers. Review by: DAREN KING Editor's note: Daren King is the author of Boxy An Star. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
A 21st-century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. Set in London, Paris, Capri and cyberspace, using fairy tales, contemporary myths and popular culture, it works at the intersection between the real and the imagined. Its territory is you.

Customer Reviews

Pretentious, pseudo-philosophical bilge
If I didn't have to read this for one of my modules this year, I wouldn't have continued past page 50. Although I loved 'Oranges...' and all of the short-stories of Winterson's I have encountered, there wasn't much to like about 'The.PowerBook'.

The characters are unlikeable, uninteresting and unengaging. Although the elements of repetition in the lovers' meetings are obviously intentional, they make for tiresome reading. The long passages of bare dialogue are unrealistic and I was left at times not knowing or caring whose lines were whose.

The book is crammed with what are intended to be deep, poetic musings on life and love, but the contrived nuggets of pseudo-wisdom have all the imagery and depth of a collection of fortune-cookies or discount pseudo-spritual self-help tomes.

There's not much point wasting the few hours it takes to read 'The.Powerbook'. There are countless much better examples of Winterson's skill and insight, which I would recommend to anyone.

Beautiful
Jeanette Winterson never lets you down with her beautiful and explorative prose. This is an original concept - so many stories within a story that you will, at times, find yourself confused about the relations between them. But the confusion takes away none of the enjoyment.

Beautiful, honest and intelligent, this has only increased my love for Winterson yet further. But as much as I may have adored this book, it will not be for everyone. Unfortunately, I feel that those who do not question everything and those who doubt the power of language and fiction will quite probably not understand it's magic.

A reward in the reading.
I had never read anything by this author before and came across the book by accident from another Amazon readers recommendation. I was simply carried away by her ability to write with such descriptive and emotionally powerful language. I understood the feelings of the main story so well and this was supplemented by the other tales in a near seamless tapestry. There seems to be some divided reviews on this book, possibly this is due to the challenge of the subject and, or the often poetic writing style. If you have ever truly loved, particularly if it was someone you should have not; this book is a reward to read.