Book Review: Written on the Body

Book #45

“Why is the measure of love loss?” — Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

[This is going to be a long review, bear with me.]

I loved this book. From the very first sentence (quoted above) through. I kept jotting down my thoughts on the nearest notebook lying around, which I don’t often do. I write these reviews, I think about a lot of things as I read a book, but I rarely so desperately want to remember what I’m thinking that I have to find a notebook and write it down (this is actually a really great habit that I should get into). 

For me, there were three things that made this book. One was the style in which Jeanette Winterson decided to write it in. It is positively full with metaphors, and the protagonist draws from his/her life to make different points about love, about relationships and loss. I just loved the format. Another thing she did, very subtely but with big sentences was to repeat them later in the novel. For instances, her killer first line, why is the measure of love loss? is repeated halfway through the novel. As is it’s the cliches that cause the trouble and is happiness always a compromise? It linked the entire novel back together and the full circle made me rethink how I felt at the beginning of the novel.

Second was the ambiguity of the protagonist’s gender and sexuality. I began the novel thinking it was a woman — mistakenly assuming, I suppose, that because it was a female author a female protagonist was the most probable. As we were introduced to past flames — “I once had a girlfriend” — I read on, trying to figure out whether it was a man or a gay woman. Then, just as I had decided the circumstances and language meant it was a man, Winterson introduces more past flames, this time “I once had a boyfriend”. You’re left wondering about the gender of the protagonist the entire way through. The most wonderful thing about this is that it didn’t preoccupy the story. In the novel itself it wasn’t overt, so in my mind it became incidental. Halfway through the novel it really didn’t matter to me what the gender of the protagonist was supposed to be. 

Third was my previous reading and the books I’m currently reading. We are the culmination of our reading and our experiences. As I was reading it, having recently finished Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther I felt a definite similarity between the characters. I don’t mean it was a cardboard cutout of Werther placed in new context; rather, it was the sensibility of a person hopelessly in love, a person who was almost in love with the idea of love. I’m also currently reading Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Eggers’ How We Are Hungry. As I make my way through To The Lighthouse, its opening pages have been exploring the idea of marriage and the different viewpoints of husband and wife quite a bit. It was interesting to have that difference of perspectives in my head as I was reading this, understanding certain things about adultery, marriage, and companionship. As for Eggers, one of the short stories in How We Are Hungry is called Quiet. In the narrator describes his need to be close to the character Erin, who has only one arm as, “I wanted to be closer to her because she seemed like the future to me, like a new sort of person, a new species.” This sentence popped into my mind when I was reading Written on the Body. This complete disregard for gender and sexuality, moving seamlessly, taking with you only your experiences and a new idea of love, is like “new sort of person, a new species”. 

It’s a beautiful book.