The Passion - Hardcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871131838 ISBN 13: 9780871131836

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988

Synopsis

Passion consumes Henri, a chef with Napoleon's army, and Villanelle, who has lost her heart to a married noblewoman, until the two meet at the gates of Moscow and form a bond based on bitter loss

About this title

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."

From the Back Cover:

"An explosively imaginative writer." — The London Free Press

"A historical novel quite different from any other...written with a living passion, an eyewitness immediacy.... Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides." — Vanity Fair

"Recalls Garcia Marquez.... Magical touches dance like highlights over the brilliance of this fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness, and androgynous ecstasy." — Edmund White

"The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk.... As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down."— The New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0871131838
• ISBN 13: 9780871131836
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160