Fiction, Fiction Subjects

The Powerbook

Name: The Powerbook
Author: Jeanette Winterson
ISBN: 9780676973358

by Jeanette Winterson

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Overview

Winterson enfolds her seventh novel within the world of computers, and transforms the signal development of our time into a wholly human medium. The story is simple: an e-mail writer called Ali will compose anything you like, on order, provided you're prepared to enter the story as yourself and risk 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, and Ali discovers that she, too, will have to pay it.

The PowerBook reinvents itself as it travels from London to Paris, Capri, and Cyberspace, using fairy tales, contemporary myths, and popular culture to weave a story of failed but requited love.

About the Author, Jeanette Winterson

A novelist whose honours include England’s Whitbread Prize, and the American Academy’s E. M. Forster Award, as well as the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene as a very young woman in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Her subsequent novels, including Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Written on the Body, and The PowerBook, have also gone on to receive great international acclaim. Her latest novel is Lighthousekeeping, heralded as "a brilliant, glittering, piece of work" (The Independent). She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

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Editorials

From The Critics

Winterson's latest novel is a treasure chest of metaphors, puzzles and aphorisms. The framing story is about a writer (the narrator) who imagines herself and various cyber-correspondents as figures in tales of love. The book's structure, open to various readings, could be seen as a nod to the interactive books gaining popularity among cyber-aficionados. The electronic correspondence may be interpreted as a dialogue—literal or symbolic—between the narrator/writer and her married lover. (Problematic love has occupied this rebel lesbian author before, and her point is clear: All love is flawed in its own way.) The narrator repeatedly re-imagines both lover and love affair, but the roles she chooses are always tragic. Some may see the storyteller as a counselor, philosopher or technical writer for the love-worn, holding a prism to the light of love, intending both to shatter it and to reveal its enchantment.
—Padma Viswanathan

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Composed in tight, spare prose echoing Web communications, Winterson's seventh novel takes its cues from the Internet, where reality is implied but never inherent. Like the protagonist of her previous novel, Written on the Body, narrator Ali is not defined by sex. An Internet writer, she/he creates stories for people, offering "Freedom, just for one night," allowing her e-mail clients to be whoever they want to be. In return, they are required to understand that, like customers at Verde, the famous old costume shop in London where Ali lives, they may enter as themselves and leave as someone else. Such is the transformation Ali undergoes after a brief liaison in Paris with a married woman. Falling desperately in love, Ali follows the unnamed woman to Capri and attempts to convince her to leave her husband. Entwining this love story with accounts of Turkish tulip bulbs disguised as testicles, and tales of Lancelot and Guinevere, Winterson treads a slippery slope between linear storytelling and multidimensional cyberfiction. Most conventional, but also most egregious, is a digression recounting Ali's childhood as the adopted daughter of scrap-yard owners who are terrified of straying out into the Wilderness (the real world), but still hope that one day their daughter will find the Promised Land that exists in the heart. Winterson's dashing, sensually stylish writing is marred by heavy-handed symbolism, but the concept of transformation is adeptly juggled throughout. The brightly colored jacket, featuring two suggestively limp tulips, plays directly to the sensibility of Winterson's many fans. (Nov. 3) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Winterson (The Passion; Art & Lies) here employs the vast protean realm of cyberspace, once again weaving a metaphorical flight of words and images, of love and longing. The plot that lines this slim but profoundly textured novel involves Ali, an e-mail writer who will compose anything you like--in the case that launches this tale, an aborted love story of tulips--whereas you may be any figure in your invented life. But, be warned, how you enter will not be how you leave, and Ali learns that not even the writer is immune to this caveat. Winterson captivates and engages, submerging the reader in her sure and golden prose and interspersing classical and contemporary myths and fairytales between love and loss in Paris and Capri--experiences that become flesh while the Internet is just an instrument analogous to pen and paper. Stirring and passionate, this volume is nevertheless light in bulk, belying the sensual body of the text and the intense power of its flow. The unconventional, though wholly Winterson, narration addresses the reader and proclaims the certainty of tides; it dares, "You can change the story. You are the story . Open it. Read it. This is the true history of the world."--Ann Kim, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

From The Critics

An email writer will compose any story line - provided the person is prepared to enter the story and be changed. That's the outline for the novel Powerbook, but the descriptions are far more surreal and fluid than the premise seems, and enthusiasts of literary works who seek complex plots with metaphor and innuendo will find Powerbook satisfyingly mysterious.

Rein Turn

There is in all of Winterson's books a stong, deep sense of purpose, a faith in beauty, order, clarity, and a talent for self-projection that is energising and exciting.
—London Review of Books