Written on the Body

I loved everything about this book/ I enjoyed how her writing made me feel every emotion. I couldn’t put it down.

This is an extraordinary narrative that focuses on the pleasure and the pain associated with being in love. An individual who has no name, no gender and no age tells the story to us. We as readers can easily relate to the narrator's feelings despite the fact that there is nothing distinctive or tangible about the narrator for us to relate to. The fact is the narrator is swimming in a sea of beautiful emotions where I'm sure many of us would love to drown. We hear about the narrator's intense relationship with Louise, a beautiful woman with flaming red hair who is married to a stodgy, fuddy-duddy named Elgin. The writing is so descriptive and captivating, one can really understand how it must feel to love someone with every last ounce of their existence. Jeanette Winterson takes us to a sensual place where many of us have visited at one time or another or would love to visit again. With beautifully descriptive and insightful writing, wry wit and splashes of comedy, "Written on the Body" is a book you'll want to read over and over again! Highly recommended!

This is one of the most powerful and magnificent love stories I have ever read.  Winterson, a young British writer, has crafted a tale in which her narrator is genderless and the lover is a married woman.  Impossible you say?  It says on the back cover, "The narrator...has neither name, nor gender; the beloved is a married woman...as Winterson chronicles their consuming affair, she compels us to see love stripped of cliches and categories, as a phenomenon as visceral as blood and organs, bone and tissue..."  What makes the novel such a powerful love story is just that.  Love without the "cliches", the boundaries set by the culture and the society.  The bigger question that is raised by this book is one of the writing 'voice'.  Can a woman successfully write in a man's voice?  Or a man in a woman's?  Charles Dickens was once derided by a friend for having written "Bleak House" in a woman's voice.   Because my sister (an English teacher at U. Mass, Amherst) teaches a class on Men and Women in Literature, she asked me to read this with an eye for any written clues that might identify the narrator's gender.   Winterson is so clever and such a brilliant writer that there were both many and none!  The reader is left not so much with the beauty of the love story or the lyrical prose, but rather with the question of literary voices.  A fascinating book

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book." -Jeanette Winterson Set in England, a Russian translator speaks about the preoccupation that this person has with women -- a series of women, until Louise comes into this person's life, transforming it forever. Their Love Story is beautifully detailed and lovingly chronicled in heartstopping prose. This writer can create unforgettable paragraphs. Her book is refreshingly put together, and she has used abundant creativity in constructing loving passages, one after another, written on the body -- or rather about the body, and the protagonist's insatiable longing for Louise. Poignant, pensive, and beautiful, this book is a joy. The Love Story is magical and wondrous and makes one's heart flutter to read about it. Highly recommended!

Wintersen is a story teller. She does not write in the bland narrative most authors use. If you are looking for a book that hands you the plot, this is not the one.Personally, I don't understand why anyone would whine about not knowing the gender of the narrator. If you read the book, you'll find it isn't important to the story. If you find it bothers you, I would ask yourself why. I think part of why the narrator's gender is not revealed is to get the reader to examine personal gender assumptions and biases. What exactly is it that is so disturbing about not knowing?This book will also challenge your assumptions about what concepts such as love, lust, passion, and emotion truly encompass. I think it will also make most readers question their assumptions concerning those concepts, at least to the extent that they clash with those held by the characters. (An old zen saying, "the pear is not as the observer wills" comes immediately to mind.)If you're prone to being swept away by romantic lyricism, I would read this book twice; once to indulge in the feeling, and once to indulge in the thinking.

Assigned this book in a Recent British Literature course, I can't tell you how disappointed I was that I had to wait all the way until the *end* of the semester to read it. I was so eager, I had to finally learn patience just to wait three weeks before we discussed it. This has to be one of (I should say *the*) best books I have ever read. I suggest it to everyone. For its writing, its content, its beauty, its magic. To use the art of a genderless narrator is absolutely divine and original. I can't think of any other piece of literature that has even tried to break from the stereotypes of love, of gender. Instead of getting the stereotypes, we really get to experience *LOVE* for what it truly is: an intense emotion. Rather than worrying if the boy is going to "stand up" the girl, or the girl is going to be late, Winterson analyzes love by tissue. By the body. By the spirit. So many books have tried to tell love stories, whether it be a Disney Cinderella, or a Dickens Pip and Estella. But they have not succeeded completely, impeded, stopped by the normal beliefs of everyday society. Rather than boring the life out of anyone that reads this review, I'll stop at this, the first line of the book:"Why is the measure of love loss?"Tell me, do you know? Either way, you should read this book and truly experience love in a way you never thought possible: with purity.