The Passion (Contemporary classics) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Passion (Contemporary classics) Book

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges are not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy-tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." --Amazon.com Read More

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  • Amazon

    Winner of the 1987 John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, this psychological fantasy is about two disillusioned young people who seek to revive their former passions. The book is concerned with gambling, madness and androgynous sexuality amidst the dark, deceptive canals of Venice.

  • ASDA

    Henri had a passion for Napoleon and Napoleon had a passion for chicken. From Boulogne to Moscow Henri butchered for his Emperor and never killed a single man. Meanwhile in Venice the city of chance and disguises Villanelle was born with the webbed feet of her boatman father - but in the casinos she gambled her heart and lost.

  • 0099734419
  • 9780099734413
  • Jeanette Winterson
  • 3 October 1996
  • Vintage
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 176
  • New Ed
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