Customer Reviews

Sexing the Cherry

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

One of the first things that struck me about this book is how it was so similar to Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando'. Both books are based on the premise that time is flexible, rather than a linear progression, and both combine fantastical elements with historical fiction. They even both use the Thames as an allegory for main themes. Whether this similarity will put off other readers, I don't know, but I felt that it did not detract from the merit of 'Sexing the Cherry'.

This is foremostly a grown-ups fairy tale - there are dancing princesses, a giant woman, magic, towns dying of love. Set (mainly) in England at the time of Cromwell, the tale is told in alternating sections by Dog-Woman (the giant woman) and Jordan. Dog Woman, who is a loner living with her many dogs, discovered Jordan as a child on the bank of the Thames. They have some amazing experiences, though this is what you would expect to happen to such an amazing woman. This is a grown-up's fairy tale in that there is a lot of sex and violence (this book is not for the squemish!) Winterson explores some very 'heavy' topics, such as the construction of identity and reality, and the realities of time. However, this doesn't read as a deep book - it is beautifully written in places, and could be enjoyed for the prose alone.

There are modern day characters included in this story, and I didn't feel that this worked as well as the historical characters. However, this is a very good book. It is not particulary long, so even if you don't enjoy it, at least you haven't wasted your time wading through a thick tome! I would definately suggest that anyone interested gives it a go.

Sexing the Cherry has a fabulous title and compelling conceit. But the book's sparseness and "drop off" ending are a disappointment. As a feminist tract, the book is more disturbing in its descent into fantasy violence against the characters (read villains/hypocrites) perceived to be championing the status quo. Rape and physical intimidation have always been the weapons used by the empowered to maintain their domination. Witherspoon's celebrations of force are not an anti-thetical "turning of the tables" but just a reaffirmation of violence as a way to get one's point across. Please, we do not need a Dog Woman to kill for us but a wise woman to overcome these cycles of violence. The works of Rachael Pollack seem a more holistic and a far less pretentious emobidement of feminism "on the barricades." As far as a fantastic novel of early modern England's mythic past, Wendy Walker's marvelous and challenging novel Secret Service is a much more satisfying literary experience.

I love Jeanette Winterson, and this probably my favorite of her novels. She's really brilliant in this one. It's worth reading the whole book just for her poetic descriptions of lofty metaphysical ideas of time and recurrence. The author conjures such an incredible vision in this book. It's startling.

I like her as an author, but this was not one of my favorites.

"Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of our time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain." -Jane Winterson

This work is an exploration of fantasy and reality -- and of which may be which. Starting out at a certain point in time, veering backwards and forwards from that point, and all along the way, sampling little vignettes about the situation at that point and of how fantasies might come to bear. What a magical journey of discovery there is in this wonderfully written work. What sparkling characters there are inside, with multi-faceted dimensions to each one. What a thought-provoking odyssey this book is, and what a fresh way to present these travels.

This author is exquisitely talented, and is eminently capable of producing wonderfully beautiful prose. Reading her words is a joy in and of itself. Her settings are bold, her characters are compelling, and she does not fill either her pages or her plots with minutia. This work is very much like an opera -- breathtakingly beautiful arias abound, strung together with plot-enhancing threads which glitter and glimmer. Take the journey, and savor it -- and think about the inherent themes and concepts. Highly recommended!

Winterson has already stunned the readers with the blend of her power of imagination and lesbian narrative in the first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (winner of Whitebread Prize for the best first fiction). In Sexing the Cherry, she extends her talent and keeps giving the readers surprises. The beginning of the novel is set in the early seventeenth century with two major characters: Jordan, a young man in Renaissance England, and the Dog Woman, who is gigantic in size and adopts Jordan in the way Mosses is in Bible. With the author's fantasy, the closure of the novel brings the readers to the late twentieth century. Winterson uses less than two hundred pages of words to tell an amazing story which lasts for over three hundred years.

The book is about different kinds of timeless loves including the passion between a woman and an adopted son, the hidden gay desire between Tradescant and Jordan, the elusive but beautiful heterosexual love between Jordan and Fortunata, and also the lesbianism found in the reconstruction of fairy tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The novel is like a dream told with interruptions. The author alternates the narrative with two different points of views, which exposes the readers to the deeper thoughts of the characters while we are also shifting between different times and spaces. Sexing the Cherry is more ambitious more Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in representing lesbianism. The reconstruction of The Twelve Dancing Princesses offers a feminist perspective in reading the novel. The dancing princesses are empowered by the author during the process of reconstruction to choose their own fates and rewrite the their predetermined heterosexual endings. Men are no longer the final destination of women's romance. Women can either be independent or seek the same-sex for love. The frequent allusions and to characters in Greek mythologies, like Castor, Pollux and Sappho, strengthens the centrality of homosexuality in the narrative. Winterson, as a postmodern novelist, breaks down the narrative and fills the gaps with the power of intertextuality. She brings the ancient Greece lesbianism and gaiety back to her own story, which is set in the early seventeenth century, and the story itself expands and stretches towards modernity. Sexing the Cherry is, therefore, a book witnessing the evolution and developments of history of homosexuality that gives us a fictional account on how this 'alternative' passion lives through different times.

Winterson is smart in presenting different points of view in her novel. in Sexing the Cherry, she uses the images of a banana and a pineapple to represent the voices of Dog Woman and Jordan respectively. The images help alert the readers that there will be a shift in narrative voice and they should prepare to read the passages from the perspective of that particular character. When the story reaches the contemporary setting, Winterson presents the voices of modern Jordan and Dog Woman with a split banana and pineapple. So the split signals the transformation of time, and her fictional imagination goes beyond the level of words. The split images also lead the readers to think whether there is connection between the deformed food with the deformed narrative or characters. Brevity and concision should be the right words to describe Winterson's writing style. She aims at presenting the deepest thoughts with the simplest words, which is why she is canonical author in contemporary British, or maybe World, literature. Different from any realist novels in the Victorian period whose authors tell as much as they can for fear that they may miss any uninteresting details, Winterson tells as less as she can. When she is not telling all what she wants to say ...the words leave space for the readers to think. Though it is demanding to read to Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, it is absolutely pleasurable as nothing is the truth in her book.

Winterson is a bohemian going against convention in Sexing the Cherry. Apart from the heterosexual norm I have mentioned, she also challenges other conventions, like truth and lies, and also the idea of time and space. "Time has no meaning, and space and place have no meaning". This quote from the novel may self-explain why the story is not fixedly set at a time and why the author brings back Greek homosexual mythologies to her narrative with Britain as the setting. Winterson is also troubling what are truth and time. She denies all the institutionalized concepts in our minds. The narrator puts a list of lies in the novel, renouncing that, for example, "time is a straight line" and that "we can only be in one place at a time". These denials fit the style of the novel, which is a fantasy across different times and spaces. Winterson rejects all the preoccupied conventions and addresses them directly to the audiences. ... with her power of imagination and might of words on paper and give readers an incredible contemporary masterpiece.Jeanette Winterson is the queen of fantasy and imagination. She links the impossible together and makes them possible in her books. She rejects the right and makes them seem wrong that demands a second of consideration before taking them for granted. Sexing the Cherry is a must to read and should be listed as an important text in contemporary lesbian or fantasy fiction.

Amazingly lyric and poetic. If you loved this, you'll love I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn. And vice versa.

Anyone who enjoys magical realism as was made famous by Garcia-Marquez will find Winterson infinitely more lush in her style, and human in her subjects. I have not been so delighted with the raw talent and imagery of a writer since JK Huysmans. The fact that this woman is writing, publishing, and being appreciated in the modern age is gratifying.

The story is of Jordan, a young man drawn to adventure and seafaring ways (who helps Tradescant bring the first pineapple back to England), and his feisty, larger-than-life mother. Alternately told through the two viewpoints, this pre-Colonial work of historical imagination and loving sensitivity is not to be missed. It may revolutionize your ideas of what heights imagistic (and postmodern) writing can achieve.

This has got to be the most overrated book I have ever read. Thankfully it's only about 160 pages. The entire book I kept waiting for something to justify the lofty reviews and high praise. Instead I found myself laboring through a murky mess of occasionally interesting prose halfheartedly woven with blurred story lines and unappealing characters. I had a headache half way through and it never got any better. I have a hunch that people say they love this book because it's the PC thing to do simply because it is an author who writes about gender/sexual identitiy issues. This book was too tedious to read for me to even care about trying to find her message...

Read this book to see the author vomit her arrogance. The book is a frustrating, misinformed, pedantic flurry of anger, which leaves neither space for enlightenment about gender problems nor a sense that the reader is better prepared for the social realities of the issue. Still, Winterson is fearless and is taking herself VERY seriously.