The Passion (Vintage International) - Softcover

Winterson, Jeanette

4.11

23,806 ratings by Goodreads

9780679724377: The Passion (Vintage International)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679724370 ISBN 13: 9780679724377

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1990

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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

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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." --Amazon.com

Review:

'It's a fantasy, a vivid dream-inventive and brilliant' -- Guardian

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