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Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson β€” book cover

Sexing the Cherry

by Jeanette Winterson
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Overview

In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child is rescued by the Dog Woman, a murderous gentle giant who names her newfound trophy Jordan and takes him out for walks on a leash. When he grows up, Jordan, like Gulliver, travels the world, but finds that the strangest wonders are spun out of his own head. The strangest wonder of all is Time. Does it exist? What is its nature? Why does every journey conceal another journey within its lines? What is the relationship between seventeenth-century Jordan and twentieth-century Nicholas Jordan, a naval cadet in a warship? And who are the Twelve Dancing Princesses? With a story full of shimmering epiphanies, Jeanette Winterson again demonstrates the keenness of her craft and the singularity of her vision.

Winterson's best-selling novel yet, this is a fabulous combination of history, surrealism and feminism.

Synopsis

In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the world like Gulliver, though he finds that the world’s most curious oddities come from his own mind. Winterson leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan’s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that shoots the reader from epiphany to shimmering epiphany.

San Francisco Chronicle

Sexing the Cherry is a dangerous jewel...a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino.

About the Author, Jeanette Winterson

A novelist whose honours include England's Whitbread Award and the American Academy's E.M. Forster Award, Jeanette Winterson burst into the literary community as a very young woman in the eighties with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and soon won the praise of such masters as Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

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Editorials

San Francisco Chronicle

Sexing the Cherry is a dangerous jewel...a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino.

Washington Post Book World

Sexing the Cherry is a firecracker....Those who care for fiction that is both idiosyncratic and beautiful will want to read anything [Winterson] writes.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Evoking modern physics and antique metaphysics, Winterson's ambitiously eccentric narrative challenges her readers to rupture the boundaries of conventional perceptions and linear experience of time. Her narrative voices, alternating between a Rabelaisian giantess and her foundling son, collapse at times into one another and the characters plunge vertiginously through time and space. On the one hand reworking fairy tales, and on the other evoking the filth, squalor and exuberant bawdiness of 17th-century England in the throes of civil war, Winterson The Passion eventually locates her characters in present-day London. Graced with striking similes and poetic cadences, the author's prose is clean and strong, and the disjunctive elements of her narrative are integrated elegantly. But the novel's freakish characters and flights of surreal fancy are insufficient to redeem its overwrought artifice. The work is further limited by its stridently dogmatic feminism, which, contemptuously belittling all men as arrogantly stupid bullies who are vastly women's inferiors in maturity and moral fiber, vitiates its ostensible intent to transcend the narrowness of human perception.

Library Journal

Bizarre images and bawdy laughter galvanize this splendid English farce about a prodigious giantess and her explorer son in 17th-century London. Jordan fetches the first pineapple to the court of Charles II, while his mother, The Dog Woman, wreaks vengeance upon Puritans in a brothel. The plague; the flying princesses who defy laws of the courts and gravity; Jordan's travels to the floating city and the botanical wonders of the New World -- the tale nips easily in and out of history and fantasy. The two characters eventually merge into the grievously polluted life of modern London. Metaphors abound with polemics on environmental concerns and politics of past and present. Not for the Jackie Collins set: readers need a background in surrealism to follow this story.-- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.

Book Details

Published
August 1, 1998
Publisher
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Pages
192
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780802135780

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