Scan barcode
cavernism's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Absolutely gorgeous prose, which kept me spellbound to the end. However, the content was decidedly Not For Me, at least not for me in this point and time. I think people who have felt the ache and longing for someone could really sink profoundly into these 200 pages of yearning. I personally didn't find the main character likeable, and the intensely fatphobic descriptions of one of their lovers didn't help matters. It might be that this book will land its emotional arrows in me at another point in time, but that wasn't the experience right now.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia
Moderate: Cancer
san_dra's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Fatphobia, Infidelity, and Grief
Minor: Miscarriage, Vomit, Antisemitism, Medical content, and Abandonment
emilylouise's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
'This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?'
pertiwi6's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
Jeanette Winterson wields words in ways that seem to unlock entire universes hidden in plain sight, her meditations always blossoming into poetic beauty that keeps the reader in a state of literary rapture. Though there is no blossom without thorns, and her fourth novel, Written on the Body, emotionally stings as much as it seduces. More straightforward than her previous works, constructed more through poetic musings than narrative while still feeling very forward moving and not overly ponderous. In Written, Winterson has no need for her usual magical realism as every sentence is magic in its own right as she writes through a narrator with no gender indicators having a passionate love affair with a married woman. Written on the Body is a deep meditation on the body and frequently forces the reader to examine their own assumptions while playing with both genre and gender in a novel where language is employed as both sexual and subjective as Winterson seizes upon cliches in order to construct something wholly new and unique.
‘The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.’
There is a noticeable shift upon embarking into Winterson’s fourth novel. It is as if suddenly all the elements she cultivated in her previous three novels slid into place, like shards of a broken crystal in fantasy stories, and their union creates a beam of pure poetic light. Each sentence feels effortless yet teeming with power, as if she found the shortcut directly to perfection, and her prose cuts into heady subjects with such grace to let all the philosophical ideas rain down upon the reader. While this novel hits with heavy emotional punches, it is also laugh out loud funny, with Winterson gleefully examining bad relationships and mishaps with gems of lines like ‘She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings,’ or more biting wit such as ‘she was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.’ As one should expect with Winterson, nothing is simplistic and Written on the Body subverts or resists being pigeonholed at every turn, even breaking away from the formal narrative just over halfway through into a series of near-prose poems about the body, love, and the destructive grip of cancer.
For many, when it was released in 1993, the novel was most notable for its lack of gender identification of the narrator. Winterson brilliantly teases expectations and forces the reader to confront their own ideas of gender and sexuality (though it was also criticized as being “inadequately feminist” for presenting a non-specific and likely non-binary narrator). The narrator details many past relationships, most often affairs with married women, before settling down in a passionless but routine and safe relationship with an unremarkable zoo keeper (it manages to not feel like an overly heavy handed metaphor through how blithe and zany the streak of previous relationships are told). Later we learn of their previous relationships with men. This is all a literary game to examine expectations of performing gender, instead discarding gender to focus purely on the emotions of love. As well as a statement on gender as being fluid, not unlike Villanelle in The Passion, or how a character lives as a woman for awhile in [b:Sexing the Cherry|15827386|Sexing the Cherry|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344914795l/15827386._SX50_.jpg|922184] to gain a better insight into gendered society and finds they prefer it as a woman, or an identity shared by myself and Winterson. When questioned about gender fluidity in an interview with The Paris Review, Winterson responded ‘I no longer care whether somebody's male or female. I just don't care,’ and that ‘ I don't think that love should be a gender-bound operation.,’ while more recently saying she finds for herself that ‘gender identity is more fluid.’ As her novels tend to resist singular interpretation, any readings of the character as subverting gender performance expectations, being bisexual, or gender fluid are all likely valid and not necessarily mutually exclusive.
‘You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?’
What is certain in this novel is the pure beauty and passion. This is a novel about love, but it rejects being a romance novel. This is a novel about illness and long investigations into how cancer and the body works, but this is not a medical novel. This is a novel about grief, but it is not a grief novel. ‘It’s the clichés that cause the trouble,’ the narrator writes, and Winterson revels in transforming cliched moments into something uniquely hers. ‘I don't want to reproduce, I want to create something entirely new.’ There is something so ineffably charming that the narrator is, in fact, a translator (from Russian to be precise), not only translating the traditional narrative into something post-modern and dynamic but simultaneously finding themselves translated in their lover’s hands.
The body is central to this novel, with frequent passages detailing the delights of or desires for the body—particularly her lover, Louise’s body&mdash. In one of the many reflections on the body that allude to the Song of Solomon of the Bible, Winterson meditates on how the part of the body we touch are the dead skin cells, ‘the dead you is constatnly being rubbed away by the dead me,’ acknowledging the body as the vessel, fragile, temporary, through which we love one another.
'Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you, it’s my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard’s chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls. Thus she was, here and here.'
Winterson uses specific language to the interactions of the body, frequently terms like ‘discovery’ and ‘voyage’ that recall ships at sea headed to new lands. However, love, we find, is not one of colonization—something that could be argued is Louise’s husband, Elgin’s, interpretation of love and his desire to own and control her—but one of mutual discovery and collaboration.
In a passage that recalls a central theme to her earlier novel, [b:The Passion|15047|The Passion|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187737l/15047._SY75_.jpg|864738], the narrator reflects ‘There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.’ Their discovery of Louise opens the possibility of lack of Louise, and just when they unite most, the narrator unattached and flees (for complicated reasons you’ll have to read the novel to discover yourself) in the belief that their sacrifice of love is made for love because they truly value Louise.
There are several nods to [b:The Passion|15047|The Passion|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187737l/15047._SY75_.jpg|864738] here, even beyond the love interest being characterized by untamed, fiery red hair such as Winterson’s direct shoutout to the refrain ‘trust me, I’m telling you stories,’ and adding ‘I can change the story. I am the story.’ This is the metafiction territory I really enjoy and where Winterson manages to border into magic without her use of magical realism. Confronted by their boss, Gail, a woman who openly asserts her desire for the narrator in the face of the narrator’s relative disinterest (a great line about how even when you lose your looks you don’t lose your desire for another ensues here), the narrator is accused of considering Louise less as a person and more as a character they have created. A character in their own story of useless martyrdom. ‘It's as if Louise never existed,’' the narrator muses, ‘like a character in a book. Did I invent her?’ In a novel so tuned into language and its many forms, this becomes a story less about the impact of love but the flaws of language to properly reproduce love, all questioning if our language of love creates a character out of the beloved or if we, truly, love them as being-in-itself to riff on Heidegger. Yet, ‘love demands expression.’ She quotes Caliban from [b:The Tempest|12985|The Tempest|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546081115l/12985._SY75_.jpg|1359590]: ‘You taught me language; and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse./The red plague rid you/For learning me your language! ’ This novel is about the possibilities of giving linguistic life to love.
‘Is this the proper ending? If not the proper then the inevitable?’
Sadly, this novel is also about giving life to the grief that follows the absence of love. The narrator goes through a stage-of-grief of sorts, even visiting a church to be in the presence of other people’s faith, or attending a random funeral they stumble upon in which the reader is treated to some jaw-dropping and heartbreaking philosophizing about death of a loved one, the end of the body:
In her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson states ‘There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.’ She adds that ‘Revenge and tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.’ This novel is the possibility of all three in one. There is the revenge scene, deliciously wicked and violent (I love it when Winterson chooses violence) all in the face of tragedy. Yet there is hope, a letting go of the past that aims directly towards the future. The narrator has gone on a journey of discovery, gone into exile, and has now returned with a lesson learned and a horizon to continue chasing. It is the hero's journey as a romance novel, it is the fairy tale of love and language.
‘You deciphered me and now I am plain to read. The message is a simple one; my love for you. I want you to live. Forgive my mistakes. Forgive me.’
I could rant about Winterson all day, as I’ve basically done patchworking this review together over the span of 24hrs. She speaks to me though, and each work is a unique and dazzling display of both heart and mind eager to create, to style, and to show it all to you. But mostly, Winterson has a direct prose that soars. Written on the Body is a fantastic work that teases expectations only to subvert them, taking you to the precipice of the cliche and through a magical portal into a brilliant realm of literary extravagance. She exposes constructs and dismantles them, such as gender performance, genre narratives and even marriage (‘marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.’) and embarks with the reader on a love affair with language and experimentation. This is a showstopper of a novel and one that will live rent-free in my heart.
5/5
‘I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.’
Jeanette Winterson wields words in ways that seem to unlock entire universes hidden in plain sight, her meditations always blossoming into poetic beauty that keeps the reader in a state of literary rapture. Though there is no blossom without thorns, and her fourth novel, Written on the Body, emotionally stings as much as it seduces. More straightforward than her previous works, constructed more through poetic musings than narrative while still feeling very forward moving and not overly ponderous. In Written, Winterson has no need for her usual magical realism as every sentence is magic in its own right as she writes through a narrator with no gender indicators having a passionate love affair with a married woman. Written on the Body is a deep meditation on the body and frequently forces the reader to examine their own assumptions while playing with both genre and gender in a novel where language is employed as both sexual and subjective as Winterson seizes upon cliches in order to construct something wholly new and unique.
‘The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.’
There is a noticeable shift upon embarking into Winterson’s fourth novel. It is as if suddenly all the elements she cultivated in her previous three novels slid into place, like shards of a broken crystal in fantasy stories, and their union creates a beam of pure poetic light. Each sentence feels effortless yet teeming with power, as if she found the shortcut directly to perfection, and her prose cuts into heady subjects with such grace to let all the philosophical ideas rain down upon the reader. While this novel hits with heavy emotional punches, it is also laugh out loud funny, with Winterson gleefully examining bad relationships and mishaps with gems of lines like ‘She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings,’ or more biting wit such as ‘she was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.’ As one should expect with Winterson, nothing is simplistic and Written on the Body subverts or resists being pigeonholed at every turn, even breaking away from the formal narrative just over halfway through into a series of near-prose poems about the body, love, and the destructive grip of cancer.
For many, when it was released in 1993, the novel was most notable for its lack of gender identification of the narrator. Winterson brilliantly teases expectations and forces the reader to confront their own ideas of gender and sexuality (though it was also criticized as being “inadequately feminist” for presenting a non-specific and likely non-binary narrator). The narrator details many past relationships, most often affairs with married women, before settling down in a passionless but routine and safe relationship with an unremarkable zoo keeper (it manages to not feel like an overly heavy handed metaphor through how blithe and zany the streak of previous relationships are told). Later we learn of their previous relationships with men. This is all a literary game to examine expectations of performing gender, instead discarding gender to focus purely on the emotions of love. As well as a statement on gender as being fluid, not unlike Villanelle in The Passion, or how a character lives as a woman for awhile in [b:Sexing the Cherry|15827386|Sexing the Cherry|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344914795l/15827386._SX50_.jpg|922184] to gain a better insight into gendered society and finds they prefer it as a woman, or an identity shared by myself and Winterson. When questioned about gender fluidity in an interview with The Paris Review, Winterson responded ‘I no longer care whether somebody's male or female. I just don't care,’ and that ‘ I don't think that love should be a gender-bound operation.,’ while more recently saying she finds for herself that ‘gender identity is more fluid.’ As her novels tend to resist singular interpretation, any readings of the character as subverting gender performance expectations, being bisexual, or gender fluid are all likely valid and not necessarily mutually exclusive.
‘You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?’
What is certain in this novel is the pure beauty and passion. This is a novel about love, but it rejects being a romance novel. This is a novel about illness and long investigations into how cancer and the body works, but this is not a medical novel. This is a novel about grief, but it is not a grief novel. ‘It’s the clichés that cause the trouble,’ the narrator writes, and Winterson revels in transforming cliched moments into something uniquely hers. ‘I don't want to reproduce, I want to create something entirely new.’ There is something so ineffably charming that the narrator is, in fact, a translator (from Russian to be precise), not only translating the traditional narrative into something post-modern and dynamic but simultaneously finding themselves translated in their lover’s hands.
‘Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, meaning into my body.’
The body is central to this novel, with frequent passages detailing the delights of or desires for the body—particularly her lover, Louise’s body&mdash. In one of the many reflections on the body that allude to the Song of Solomon of the Bible, Winterson meditates on how the part of the body we touch are the dead skin cells, ‘the dead you is constatnly being rubbed away by the dead me,’ acknowledging the body as the vessel, fragile, temporary, through which we love one another.
'Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you, it’s my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard’s chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls. Thus she was, here and here.'
Winterson uses specific language to the interactions of the body, frequently terms like ‘discovery’ and ‘voyage’ that recall ships at sea headed to new lands. However, love, we find, is not one of colonization—something that could be argued is Louise’s husband, Elgin’s, interpretation of love and his desire to own and control her—but one of mutual discovery and collaboration.
‘Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets, I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another's boundaries and make ourselves one nation.’
In a passage that recalls a central theme to her earlier novel, [b:The Passion|15047|The Passion|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187737l/15047._SY75_.jpg|864738], the narrator reflects ‘There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.’ Their discovery of Louise opens the possibility of lack of Louise, and just when they unite most, the narrator unattached and flees (for complicated reasons you’ll have to read the novel to discover yourself) in the belief that their sacrifice of love is made for love because they truly value Louise.
There are several nods to [b:The Passion|15047|The Passion|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187737l/15047._SY75_.jpg|864738] here, even beyond the love interest being characterized by untamed, fiery red hair such as Winterson’s direct shoutout to the refrain ‘trust me, I’m telling you stories,’ and adding ‘I can change the story. I am the story.’ This is the metafiction territory I really enjoy and where Winterson manages to border into magic without her use of magical realism. Confronted by their boss, Gail, a woman who openly asserts her desire for the narrator in the face of the narrator’s relative disinterest (a great line about how even when you lose your looks you don’t lose your desire for another ensues here), the narrator is accused of considering Louise less as a person and more as a character they have created. A character in their own story of useless martyrdom. ‘It's as if Louise never existed,’' the narrator muses, ‘like a character in a book. Did I invent her?’ In a novel so tuned into language and its many forms, this becomes a story less about the impact of love but the flaws of language to properly reproduce love, all questioning if our language of love creates a character out of the beloved or if we, truly, love them as being-in-itself to riff on Heidegger. Yet, ‘love demands expression.’ She quotes Caliban from [b:The Tempest|12985|The Tempest|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546081115l/12985._SY75_.jpg|1359590]: ‘You taught me language; and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse./The red plague rid you/For learning me your language! ’ This novel is about the possibilities of giving linguistic life to love.
‘Is this the proper ending? If not the proper then the inevitable?’
Sadly, this novel is also about giving life to the grief that follows the absence of love. The narrator goes through a stage-of-grief of sorts, even visiting a church to be in the presence of other people’s faith, or attending a random funeral they stumble upon in which the reader is treated to some jaw-dropping and heartbreaking philosophizing about death of a loved one, the end of the body:
‘The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.’
In her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson states ‘There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.’ She adds that ‘Revenge and tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.’ This novel is the possibility of all three in one. There is the revenge scene, deliciously wicked and violent (I love it when Winterson chooses violence) all in the face of tragedy. Yet there is hope, a letting go of the past that aims directly towards the future. The narrator has gone on a journey of discovery, gone into exile, and has now returned with a lesson learned and a horizon to continue chasing. It is the hero's journey as a romance novel, it is the fairy tale of love and language.
‘You deciphered me and now I am plain to read. The message is a simple one; my love for you. I want you to live. Forgive my mistakes. Forgive me.’
I could rant about Winterson all day, as I’ve basically done patchworking this review together over the span of 24hrs. She speaks to me though, and each work is a unique and dazzling display of both heart and mind eager to create, to style, and to show it all to you. But mostly, Winterson has a direct prose that soars. Written on the Body is a fantastic work that teases expectations only to subvert them, taking you to the precipice of the cliche and through a magical portal into a brilliant realm of literary extravagance. She exposes constructs and dismantles them, such as gender performance, genre narratives and even marriage (‘marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.’) and embarks with the reader on a love affair with language and experimentation. This is a showstopper of a novel and one that will live rent-free in my heart.
5/5
‘I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.’
etiennevdgraaf's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
anna6carnegie's review against another edition
‘ I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out.’
chloeliana's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
The way I devoured this holy shit. What a sensual book I was literally hanging on to every word