PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson, review

The title says it all. This book has narrative power and the magical power of striking, simply-stated, insightful images. It has the old-fashioned addictive power of story for the sake of story, but in a modern Internet-savvy frame.

In the frame, two people who have met on the Internet relate to one another through the liberating disguises they try on and the stories they tell one another.

The stories themselves have the arbitrary freedom of tales from the Arabian Nights, and yet are full of wisdom, gently and convincingly stated.

I'm reminded of Barth's Arabian Nights tales -- The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and The Chimera. This book also hearkens back to the days of Boccaccio and Ariosto, and even retelling the love stories of Paolo and Francesca and of Lancelot and Guinevere, simply and beautifully.

The clever and convincing philosophic-poetic rumination about the meaning of life and love and death reminded me of The Incredible Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. And the author plays with that resemblance, "I was happy with the lightness of being in a foreign city and the relief from identity that it brings." (p. 52) "There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle ..." (p. 149)

Through the power of imagination we live in all time and all space.It matters little whether this is narrative whim or an aspect of quantum theory -- with all possible worlds existing simultaneously.

Also, like O'Leary's The Gift, The Powerbook is a story about the magical power of storytelling.

As I read, I typically mark memorable passages. In a good book, I might make half a dozen or even a dozen such notations. In this book, I made marks on nearly every other page -- sometimes highlighting every word on a page.

"Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things." (p. 52)

"What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.... The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down." (p. 60)

"In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps bearing in on us, but only reachable by wormholes we can never find. If we do find one, we don't come back. In those other worlds events may track our own, but the ending will be different. Sometimes we need a different ending. I can't take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing -- my future." (p. 63)

Lancelot thinking: "But I wondered how it could destroy us when it was us? We had become this love. We were not lovers. We were love." (p. 80)

"The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room... It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet." (p. 108)

"These lives of ours that press in on us must be heard. We are our own oral history. A living memoir of time. Time is downloaded into our bodies. We contain it. Not only time past and time future, but time without end. We think of ourselves as close and finite, when we are multiple and infinite." (pp. 120-121)

What exists and what might exist are windowed together at the core of reality." (p. 129)

Francesa da Rimini thinking: "The castle is a pause between dark and dark. It fills the space between a man's thoughts and his deeds. May father made the design for the castle himself. It is as though we are living inside him." (p. 145)

"Her desire told itself as memory. Her past was a place that none of us could visit without her. It was the only kingdom she could control." (p. 166)

"The past is magnetic. It draws us in. We cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations, to chant away the powerful things that don't belong to us." (p. 197)

"... life is not a formula and love is not a recipe. The same ingredients cook up differently every time." (p. 217)

"We walked through the city with its Sunday feel of a sudden spaceship that has taken everyone to Mars." (p. 218)

"I wanted to make a slot in time. To use time fully I use it vertically. One life is not enough. I use the past as a stalking horse to come nearer to my quarry." (p. 247)

"... St. Augustine had said that the universe was not created in time but with time... Stories are simultaneous with time." (p. 254)

The power is not in the plot, not in the many interweaving stories, but rather in the telling.I could listen to this Scheherazade for hundreds of thousands of nights ... To learn more about her, check her Web site at www.jeanettewinterson.com/

Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

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