Product Description

Winner of the 1987 John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, this psychological fantasy is about two disillusioned young people who seek to revive their former passions. The book is concerned with gambling, madness and androgynous sexuality amidst the dark, deceptive canals of Venice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11809 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges are not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy-tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." --Amazon.com

Review
This novel is quite remarkable. It is the story of Henri, Napoleon's chicken chef, and Villanelle, a Venetian girl born with webbed feet. While Henri endures the horrors of the retreat from Moscow, Villanelle falls in love with a woman whose fortune she tells. There are some scenes in literature which one cannot forget. Such a scene is Henri's literal search for Villanelle's heart, which is hidden in the house of her lover. This novel beautifully combines historical fact and fantasy. Here Winterson is in control of her material, achieving a rare poetic intensity that persuades the reader to accept the impossible. At one point, Villanelle walks on water. 'I'm telling you stories,' Winterson writes. 'Trust me.' (Kirkus UK)

An exhilarating tale of lust, love and magical transformations of the heart during ten years of the Napoleonic Wars, first published in England in 1987. Three of four sections of this slim, crisp, dreamy novel are narrated by Henri, a young French foot-soldier whom Napoleon chooses over a fat cook one fateful day in 1805 to be the keeper of his personal larders as the French army begins its forced march east to the "zero" Russian winter of defeat: the third section is told by Villanelle, a cardsharp in conquered Venice whose marriage to (and betrayal of) a grotesquely fat, sinister foreign gambler ends in her being sold to Napoleon's officer corps as a traveling whore. In Russia, she and Henri meet as the French army is collapsing and the Russian countryside is erupting in flames; with Patrick, a wildly visionary defrocked Irish priest, they flee, making their way back to Venice. Patrick dies in the cold: Henri falls in love with Villanelle, whose marriage to the fat gambler (as well as a previous love affair with a queenlike Venetian matron) causes trouble for both of them once they reach Villanelle's old home. Henri is dispatched by gondolier to steal back Villanelle's living heart from the palazzo of "the Queen of Spades," and having replaced it in her breast, murders her fat husband (the cook whom he bested in France) to keep it there. Then he goes mad, and, like Napoleon himself, is locked away in an island prison to contemplate his "passion," and Napoleon's and human kind's, evermore, while Villanelle rows below daily in a boat. The moral: One doesn't know what he or she loves best until it has been risked in a final, deadly gamble - by a fascinating, Robertson Davies-like writer in full possession of her considerable powers here. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Jeanette Winterson is the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, Gut Symmetries, The World and Other Places and a collection of essays, Art Objects