Product Description

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run. "The PowerBook" is twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price. Ali discovers that she too will have to pay it. Death can take the body but not the heart. Set in London, Paris, Capri and Cyberspace, this is a book that reinvents itself as it travels. Using cover-versions, fairy tales, contemporary myths and popular culture, "The PowerBook" works at the intersection between the real and the imagined. Its territory is you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5832 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

About the Author
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including children's books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d'argent at Cannes Film Festival.

Customer Reviews

fantastical; precisely beautiful; but nothing new.....
Prose as we've come to expect from Jeanette Winterson - often breath-takingly lovely, hardly a wasted word and deft use of the magical and the bizarre to make sense of the real and the unreal. But, the novel, although markedly superior to much of what's currently being produced, serves only to augment themes and metaphors expounded time and again in her other literary offerings. As Winterson says, she's a "preacher" - and knows only too well how to use the 'motif' to good persuasive effect. But enough already. It's time for Winterson to shed the evangelical robes because her art is suffering. She may be able to climb out of gender, out of this time, through her fiction, but she needs to climb out of her pre-occupations and tell us a little less about herself. She need write no autobiography. 'The Powerbook' is not essential reading, unlike 'The Passion' and 'Written on the Body'.

Something for the pseudo-deep
My copy has a quote from the Mail on Sunday review on the cover: "Buy it for someone you really love". I'd recommend that as no-one else is likely to forgive you for it.

It attempts to make something significant about different aspects of our lives - past, present, real and virtual, but doesn't really say anything except the obvious, which we all already know (that different aspects of our lives are linked because they are part of life). Worse, it overcomplicates in an attempt to imply meaning.

Some of the stories within the story are good and are the most interesting part of the book. But the bigger story, a love story, is cold and dull whilst attempting to be deep and exciting.

I found this book such a waste of time that it incensed me to write this review - my first as I am usually too lazy. Normally I would give my finished books away to friends or to a charity shop - but this is the first book I've thrown away. This is an extreme sign.

Ultimately, this is shallow and pretentious rubbish.

The pitch sounds so good
The pitch sounds so good: "An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else."
Set everywhere and nowhere (London, Paris, Capri and cyberspace) The PowerBook does contain some powerful images and concepts that may stay with you, but in the end it feels like a complete con.
Instead of really exploring themes like identity, love, relationships and the nature of writing in the 21st century, it goes on to read like a collection compiled from the author's notebooks - half finished short stories, ideas, paragraphs, character studies.
Yes, this 'modern' structure mimics a kind of web (or internet), but it could also be seen as symptomatic of what is wrong in publishing today. Under pressure to produce another title, writers rush manuscripts and editors balance the time required to turn it into something worth reading with how many copies the author's name will sell before word gets out that it's really not that good. (If this is actually Winterson's way of saying something about the nature of writing in the 21st century, then it's very clever...)
Generally agreed to be a disappointment all round, those who had read other Winterson titles (I haven't) recommended 'Sexing the Cherry' and 'Written on the Body' as far more representative of her skills.
The Writer