Art & Lies (Vintage International)

Thank you, Ms Winterson, for this beautiful journey. It is truly extraordinary when a writer reaches into my past and puts words to emotions I've never spoken aloud. Art & Lies, while intensely personal, is also oddly easy to share. I miss the characters, so I keep a highlighted copy on my desk and refer to it whenever I need to feel...anything. A treat for anyone who lives outside the lines.

Almost anything this woman writes is good, great, wonderful. It's more like a walk through a forest of word-trees than reading a novel. The words and ideas drip tantalizingly from the branches but you mustn't stop to pick them as there are more, so many more. Best to start with Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and The Passion and work your way forward. Be prepared to lose your way, but Winterson will always deliver you at the edge of the forest, none the worse for wear, but changed.

Winterson is one of my favorite writer's and this is my favorite of her books. One of the most brilliant books I've ever read. She has a distinctive voice, rich and poetic.

Jeanette Winterson cloaks her dark and mystical gems in bright, shiny trappings. I have added this one to my permanent collection, as well as given out several copies to friends.

I loved the book apart from its historical significance. But, it's historical is nothing to sneeze at. The binding and overall condition was verey adequate.

Disturbing content and characters. A bore to read.

I loved her "Why be happy when you can be normal" but this was not at all to my liking...she was trying too hard to be a philosopher her autobiography was great.

I have read two of Jeanette Winterson's novels before reading Art and Lies. I thought both The Passion and her retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules were both highly enjoyable, full of vivid images and philosophical comments. However I was disappointed by Art and Lies. The novel tended to wander and become obscure and lost in dreamlike poetic language that was too vague to maintain a consistent storyline. There were places where the novel is brilliant. In one section, the former Catholic priest and surgeon Handel delivers a baby in a hovel with no running water and only two bottles of vodka to sterilize his hands and wash the newborn and the mother. The description of the surgeon removing his tuxedo jacket and tearing his dress shirt into bandages while helping the dirty frightened mother deliver the baby was sublime descriptive narrative. It shows Winterson at her best. Later in the book we meet a character, Picasso, a female artists who has experienced molestation and incest in the hands of her older brother throughout her childhood. The sense of alienation from her family after this trauma is very well expressed in Winterson's writing. Unfortunately the times that the novel is brilliant are fewer than the times the novel is obscure. In all fairness, when Winterson is at her best, she is brilliant. I give you two quotations from the novel: "The painted toy, held in the hands of the spirit, Logos, through whom God made all things and taught the void to speak." And "For Plato, the duty of the human being was the duty to remember. To remember all that we are in the face of the little we seem to be." This is the Winterson that I love and unfortunately the narrative thread, the armature, of this novel is just not there.