The World and Other Places (20 page)

‘We could go straight on to Proverbs. What kind of a pet would be Proverbial?’

‘What about a snake?’

‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘snakes are wily not wise.’

‘What about an owl?’

‘Owls are too demanding. Besides, when your Uncle Bert parachuted into the canal by mistake, it was an owl I saw just before we got the telegram.’

Death by water seemed to be a feature of our family so why not have something that was perpetually drowned?

‘Let’s get some fish, they are proverbial, and they will be quiet like Psalms, and they will remind us of the Flood and of our own mortality.’

My mother was taken with this idea, especially since she had just eaten a fine piece of cod. She liked it when she could experience the Bible in different ways.

As for me, I was confronted by my own black heart. You can bury what you like, but if it’s still alive when you bury it, don’t hope for a quiet life.

Is this what the tea board wants to know? Is it hoping to read of tortoises called Psalms?

My mother bought some brown ink and sketched Psalms on a square of stiff card. She caught his expression very well, although I still feel the burden of being the only person who has seen what emotion a tortoise can express when
about to drown. Such things are sobering and stretch down the years. I could have saved him but I felt he limited my life. Sometimes I take out the sketch and stare at his mournful face. He was always mournful but maybe that is a characteristic of the species because I never have seen a jubilant tortoise.

On the other hand perhaps I never made him happy. Perhaps we were at emotional odds like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Perhaps a briny end was better than a gradual neglect. I ponder these things in my heart.

My mother, always philosophical in her own way, enjoyed a steady stream of biblical pets: the Proverbial fish, Ecclesiastes the hen, who never laid an egg where we could find it, Solomon the Scotch terrier, and finally, Isaiah and Jeremiah, a pair of goats who lived to a great age and died peacefully in their pen.

‘You can depend on the prophets,’ said my mother, when anyone marvelled at the longevity of the goats. The world was a looking glass for the Lord, she saw him in everything. Though I do warn her from time to time, never to judge a bunny by its pelt …

Jeanette Winterson lives in London and the Cotswolds.

A train hurtles through the future with three passengers on board: a disillusioned surgeon named Handel, whose humanity has been sacrificed to intellect; a woman artist named Picasso, cast out by a family that drove her to madness; and the lesbian poet sappho, who has propagated her subversive gospel through centuries of censorship and exile. Out of their interwoven stories comes an impassioned, philosophical, and daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.

Fiction/Literature

One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh,
Gut Symmetries
is a thrillingly original novel by England’s most flamboyantly gifted writer.

Fiction/Literature

The narrator of
Written on the Body
has neither name nor gender; the beloved is a married woman. And as Winterson chronicles their consuming affair, she compels us to see love stripped of clichés and categories, as a phenomenon as visceral as blood and organs, bone and tissue—and as strange as an undiscovered continent.

Fiction/Literature

Ali writes stories on e-mail 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 the imagined may blur. Plucking characters from history and myth as well as her imagination, Ali journeys through time and stops in London, Paris, and Capri, all the while weaving stories that question the boundaries of cyberspace, the human heart, and the novel.

Fiction/Literature

Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous as an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the
Mona Lisa
and Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves
, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us. Whether she is writing about the demands paintings make on their viewers, the subversive “autobiography” of Gertrude Stein, the ghettoization of gay and lesbian writers, or the origins of her own defiant love affair with language, Winterson continually reminds us that the term “art objects” denotes not only things but acts. Art objects to the lie that life is small, fragmented, and mean; it instead proclaims the opposite. And so does Winterson’s wise and fiery book.

Criticism/Literature

With language as dazzling as the wondrous visionary landscapes they evoke, these seventeen works transport the reader to worlds in which sleep is illegal, the lives of lonely department store clerks are transformed by fairies, the rich wear coal jewelry on an island of diamonds, and the living laminate their dead. Here is a universe where rooms go missing, women give birth to their lovers, and the young contemplate God’s creative powers through pet tortoises. These beguiling stories, by turns startlingly passionate and cannily satirical, chart an extraordinary writing career.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70236-5

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