The PowerBook [Paperback]

Jeanette Winterson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage International | Publication Date: October 9, 2001

Adding to an already astounding body of work that explores the nature of love and desire, Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion) presents a stunning novel that probes the boundaries of the Internet.

Ali writes stories on email for anyone who wants them. She promises “freedom just for one night,” but she does not do so without a warning: the story might change you. Ask for an epic love story and you will get one, but Ali will be cast in it, too, and the lines between the real and imagined may blur. Plucking characters from history and myth, Winterson journeys through time and stops in London, Paris, and Capri, all the while melding the language of love with that of computers. In The PowerBook she has found a brilliant conceit through which to showcase her increasingly bold voice.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel (or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the outcome.

Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.

The PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.

"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375725059
• ISBN-13: 978-0375725050
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #667,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grand Tour, November 4, 2000

By 

Mr. K. Mahoney "Kevin Mahoney" (Punked Books, London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The PowerBook (Hardcover)

This new book navigates the seas of fiction and love. As a piece of internet prose, it easily surpasses Matt Beaumont's entertainment 'E'. Jeanette Winterson explores the opportunities offered by the net, the wardrobe door that leads to many a magical land. The heroine of this novel flits here and there, choosing exotic locations as she pleases. However, much of this book is also based in the real as much in the imaginary.

There's an ongoing plot in 'The Powerbook', a very modern love affair. It's the beauty of the prose that is really outstanding though. Winterson goes to Capri and uses the funicular railway as a metaphor in a manner that seems entirely natural, unforced, but prone to gravity. For me, there was a certain amount of nostalgia, as Winterson explores the settings of my own adolescent vacations, from the Isle of Capri near Sorrento, the romantic flirtation with Paris, the exhilarating adventure of seedy London. 'The Powerbook' lives up to its ambition of being an internet novel, since we can all attempt the Grand Tour via the Net nowadays. It's always a delight to follow in an author's footsteps, see the world through their eyes. For instance, you can find the painting of his wife Saskia as Flora on the net by Rembrandt. At first sight, this picture seems too dark to be the image that Winterson describes, but it's a delight to look at the picture again through her prose.

There's a section here where Winterson seems to return to the 'real life' of 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit', and it's very compelling to find a horror of nothing, the fear of having to invent, the burden of having to create. It does seem, though, that Winterson has been following current literary trends, borrowing and embellishing what she fancies. The Tulip trade is very much in fashion now, and Winterson has a faction devoted to George Mallory. Yet there are also much older, traditional tales. Lancelot and Guinevere, and Paolo and Francesca reading of their love, doomed to a much more bloody fate in the pages of Dante's Inferno. I had never come across the tale of Paolo and Francesca before, but it thrills me to find that it had been the subject of a variety of paintings, including one by the Pre-Raphaelite 'Dante' Rossetti.

This isn't a very weighty book in terms of page count. You'll find that you'll be able to finish off 'The Powerbook' in one sitting. Some might find the book a little costly in hardcover format. There is very little drama. Instead, there are some quite modern truths and observations. Winterson discusses the fact that nobody really seems to be content now, and that they always want more. That nobody wants to settle. Just waiting for the next opportunity, the next love affair. A society where everyone wants love, but wants to be left alone. So, this book is perfect for of a generation of short attention spans. Yet, if used in the right way, 'The Powerbook' can stimulate you a great deal; make you highly active as you seek out its subtle meanings, to compose your own story as you weave a path through the web, following the footsteps of Ali and Sebastian Melmoth. Maybe the Reformation and the Tulip trade brought the immortal Arabian Nights to us? Winterson also covers the theoretical debate of author/reader - which of these two really creates the fiction? Winterson comes down on the right side, and reveals fiction in its true light, as a dialogue between author and reader (literally). She conveys how some fictions will never die; will be forever revived by future artists. This poetic novel deserves to be kept on the bookshelf, and referred to whenever your heart desires.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There is no love that does not pierce the hands and the feet, October 30, 2000

By 

Christos Polydorou (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The PowerBook (Hardcover)

Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook manages to accomplish in only 289 pages what other books cannot accomplish in 1000...suggesting that all time is one. Winterson has made it perfectly clear elsewhere ("Art Objects: Essays on Ecstacy and Effrontery") that "all art belongs to a single period". Winterson interweaves myth, fact, history, drama, comedy, charm, wit, all in a mesmerizing voice that carries itself in a blend of rhythm, logic, revelation, beauty.

What is particularly fascinating about this novel is that there is no plot, but a series of themes that run through the fragmented novel. It is as though she has grabbed a whole of beauty, smashed it, and reassembled it. A few readings show that the otherwise unrelated characters do have some dependancy on each other, to continue the story where their mentioning ends, to reveal nuances that their actions would otherwise obscure. This book moves through several characters, through the eyes of women and men, and we find out what it is like to feel and act anf love like a man and as a woman. Francesca loves Paolo and we fall in love with him too (the haunting line "Paolo il bello" resonates) but through the story of Guinevere and Lancelot it is through Lancelot's eyes that we are, and the object of our affection is Guinevere.

This is a fully realised work, and if we compare Oranges and this we see vast differences...it makes me wonder what novels Jeanette Winterson will be composing for the next 30 to 40 years of her life. I, for one, will read them all upon moment of publication.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scheherazade for the 21st Century, May 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The PowerBook (Paperback)

If you're someone who loves the power of words, who loves lush, poetic prose and the images it can conjure, the magic it can work, then you will probably love Jeanette Winterson's beautiful novel, "The Powerbook."

"The Powerbook" explores Winterson's recurring themes of time, love and gender identificantion (or the lack of it) through the story of Ali/Alix, a woman living in cyberworld and reinventing herself at another's command. But reinventing yourself doesn't come without a price as Ali/Alix soon finds out. Will she pay it? And if she does, will it be worth the price?

For me, "The Powerbook" is Jeanette Winterson at her very best. Everything that was so wonderful in her previous novels comes together in this one. She tells stories, she writes the most lyrically divine prose, she uses linear time and circular time, she anchors herself in reality while letting herself soar on flights of fancy.

"The Powerbook" is art for the sake of art. Although some would argue that "art for the sake of art," especially in the literary realm, is nothing but conceit, Winterson herself, has stated differently and I agree with her. Art, she said, is our opportunity to get things right. To tell the truth. To find the ultimate reality. And she's right. Art doesn't deceive us, except on very rare occasions, and when those rare occasions do occur, we're angry with the artist.

I know that many people will read this book and wail, "But that's not real life!" Those who do should stop and reread the book once again. And even again and again if need be. It's life that tells us lies, either deliberately or by omission, life that deceives, life that denies us the rich world of fantasy and imagination and creative invention...the world that Winterson seeks and finds in her own strikingly original work.

In "The Powerbook," Winterson allows her narrator to become a part of his/her own stories, to become a character in them, to reinvent himself/herself to suit the needs of the receiver. While this book is not conventionally plotted, there are stories in "The Powerbook," and they are wonderful stories indeed. One of the best is a meandering, poetic discourse on the meaning of life and love and death. "I was happy with the lightness of being in a foreign city," Winterson writes, evoking Milan Kundera's wonderful "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "and the relief from identity that it brings." And later, "There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle..."

"The Powerbook" is set in London and Paris and on the beautiful island of Capri as well as in the world of cyberspace, employing both the world of reality and the world of fantasy in the very best mix possible. The lines between reality and fantasy begin to blur in this book, but they blur in real life as well. Who can say exactly how much of an experience is "real" and exactly how much exists in the imagination?

And, as she does in every book, Winterson mesmerizes us with her images of time, or the lack of time. She explores linear time, circular time, the absence of time, the impermeability of time, the transmutation of time, time without end and on and on and on. It's fascinating, but only if you want to make the effort.

Winterson is so often accused of being possesed of literary conceit and disdain for her readers. I think this is grossly unfair criticism. Her books can be difficult and they do demand the reader's attention; one cannot flip through a Jeanette Winterson book, speed-reading on a beach under the summer sun. However, if Winterson demands attention and time and effort from her readers she also gives. I judge a book's worth, in part, by what I take with me after reading it, what becomes lasting, what changes me. With Winterson's books I am always a different person when I finish than when I began...I'm richer, smarter, more enlightened. To me, that's high praise for an author rather than criticism.

In Winterson's wonderful book, "The Passion," she writes, "I'm telling you stories. Believe me." It is the wise reader who does believe Winterson and the rewarded one who listens to her stories...again and again and again. Jeanette Winterson really is a writer with something important to say.