The World and Other Places: Stories
Winterson, Jeanette
ISBN 10: 0375702369 / ISBN 13: 9780375702365
Published by Vintage, 2000
Bibliographic Details
Title: The World and Other Places: Stories
Publisher: Vintage
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Soft cover
Book Condition: Good
About this title
Synopsis:
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.
Review:
Her first short story collection exhibits the multitude of talents that have made English novelist Jeanette Winterson not just admired but beloved by her
many fans. There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There's the humor, fierce
and sly but always kind. There's the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters
themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very
diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work.
In "Atlantic Crossing," Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin
with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances
of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer's hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion's
story from Artemis's point of view: "When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw.... His reputation hung about him like bad
breath." In "The Poetics of Sex," she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters' personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. "The 24-
Hour Dog," the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it
plumbs: "I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine." Read The
World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. --Joyce Thompson
