Jeanette Winterson
Auteur de Les Oranges ne sont pas les seuls fruits
A propos de l'auteur
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford. Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was afficher plus the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. (Bowker Author Biography) Jeanette Winterson lives in London & the Cotswolds. (Publisher Provided) afficher moins
Crédit image: Jeanette Winterson. (Source Lesbian of the Day)
Séries
Œuvres de Jeanette Winterson
Fit for the future: The guide for women who want to live well (Pandora Press handbook) (1986) 11 exemplaires
The Myths (A Short History of Myth / The Penelopiad / Weight / Dream Angus / Helmet of Horror / Lion's Honey) (2006) — Contributeur — 6 exemplaires
The Dreaming House 6 exemplaires
The Psychometry of Books 1 exemplaire
The Spare Room 1 exemplaire
Ted Hughes 1 exemplaire
The Agony of Intimacy [short story] 1 exemplaire
Fuck the binary 1 exemplaire
The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson (2001-05-03) 1 exemplaire
The Poetics of Sex [short story] 1 exemplaire
Winterson, Jeanette Archive 1 exemplaire
A Green Square [short story] 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (1999) — Contributeur — 352 exemplaires, 6 critiques
The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991) — Contributeur — 261 exemplaires, 2 critiques
Erotica: Women's Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood (1990) — Avant-propos, quelques éditions; Contributeur — 169 exemplaires
Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories (2017) — Contributeur — 104 exemplaires, 4 critiques
The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them (2015) — Contributeur — 85 exemplaires, 2 critiques
The Selfish Giant and Other Stories (Folio Society) (2017) — Introduction — 55 exemplaires, 1 critique
1914: Goodbye to All That: Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art (2014) — Contributeur — 28 exemplaires
Andy Warhol at Christie's: Photographs; Paintings and Works on Paper; Prints (2012) — Contributeur — 9 exemplaires
Charleston press no. 1 : Orlando at the present time ; Zanele Muholi : faces and phases ; Famous women dinner service ;… — Contributeur — 2 exemplaires
Hogarth Shakespeare 6 book set — Contributeur — 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Winterson, Jeanette
- Date de naissance
- 1959-08-27
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Angleterre
- Pays (pour la carte)
- England, UK
- Lieu de naissance
- Manchester, England, UK
- Lieux de résidence
- Manchester, England, UK
Accrington, Lancashire, England, UK
London, England, UK - Études
- Accrington and Rossendale College
St Catherine's College, Oxford - Professions
- fiction writer
teacher - Relations
- Orbach, Susie (former spouse)
- Organisations
- University of Manchester
- Prix et distinctions
- E. M. Forster Award (1990)
Granta's Best of Young British Novelists
OBE
CBE - Agent
- Caroline Michel
Membres
Discussions
Oranges are not the only Fruit à Le Salon Littéraire du Peuple pour le Peuple (Mars 2012)
Critiques
Listes
Best Dystopias (1)
Women in War (1)
1990s (1)
Winter Books (1)
Short and Sweet (1)
Read This Next (1)
Epistolary Books (1)
Booker Prize (1)
100 Hemskaste (1)
First Novels (1)
Favorite Memoirs (1)
LGBTQIA Horror (1)
1980s (2)
A Novel Cure (3)
Magic Realism (3)
Five star books (4)
Female Author (4)
Women's Stories (1)
Teens (1)
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 53
- Aussi par
- 35
- Membres
- 34,088
- Popularité
- #559
- Évaluation
- 3.8
- Critiques
- 828
- ISBN
- 693
- Langues
- 26
- Favoris
- 219
La réponse totalement immodeste prête à sourire. Et pourtant, si c'était vrai?
'Why is the measure of love loss?.'
C'est sur cette question que Jeanette Winterson ouvre son magnifique roman qui effeuille les vertiges et les vestiges de l'amour. Les sommets de l'amour érotique avec la personne dont on est éperdument amoureux, le vide abyssal de sa perte.
'I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths.'
dit le narrateur du livre, très probablement une narratrice d'ailleurs, à y lire de près... C'est un des éléments très réussis du roman que d'avoir fait abstraction du genre de la personne qui évoque la femme aimée.
Mystère et universalité du sentiment amoureux.
Jeanette Winterson excelle à décrire, dans la langue poétique et éblouissante qui est la sienne, les trébuchements et la beauté sans pareille, la nuit et le jour de l'amour.
Car les douleurs que provoque l'amour peuvent être si intenses qu'on peut avoir envie de passer son chemin et mener une existence plus peinarde, sans les aspérités de la passion qui rend aveugle et imprudent :
'I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision.'
'Over the months that followed my mind healed and I no longer moped and groaned over lost love and impossible choices. I had survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold running water and regular visits from the milkman. I became an apostle of ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum, praised the gentle bands of my existence and felt that for the first time I had come to know what everyone told me I would know; that passion is for holidays, not homecoming.'
Mais quiconque ayant éprouvé le caractère sublime de la passion amoureuse pourrait s'en passer, vraiment?
Après avoir rencontré Louise, le narrateur dira :
'With Louise I want to do something different. I want the holiday and the homecoming together.'
'Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it's no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body wants is to be naked.'
La rencontre avec Louise, beauté pré-raphaélite, est un choc érotique et amoureux. L'amour nourrit autant l'éros que l'éros nourrit l'amour. On aurait tendance en effet à oublier combien le plaisir érotique développe le sentiment amoureux et accroît ses dimensions.
Et la sensualité de l'écriture de Winterson est à cet égard en tous points remarquable pour célébrer l'exaltation, le goût et le rayonnement des corps. Il n'est pas si fréquent, dans la littérature, de découvrir des pépites comme celle-ci :
'She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rock pools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing. [...] The light breaks colours under her eyelids. She wants the light to penetrate her, breaking open the dull colds of her soul where nothing has warmed her for more summers than she can count. Her husband lies over her like a tarpaulin. He wades into her as though she were a bog.'
'What other places are there in the world than those on a lover's body?
[...] Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.'
Le corps, vu comme une terre unique et infinie dans sa richesse, ne figurant sur aucune carte mais ne révélant sa géographie propre qu'aux yeux de la personne qui aime.
La romancière sait également évoquer le pouvoir des mots de la personne aimée que l'on garde en soi comme un trésor enfoui, le caractère narcissique de la passion amoureuse. On se mire, s'admire et s'abîme dans l'autre, probablement plus profondément encore lorsque la personne aimée est du même sexe :
'I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?'
Written on the body décrit remarquablement, par ses mots justes, son style concis et poétique, l'énormité, le caractère irréparable que peut représenter la perte de l'être aimé, situation pourtant "banale" que tout un chacun est amené un jour ou l'autre à traverser.
'You'll get over it...' It's the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit in. Why would I want them to?'
Written on the body est incontestablement un hymne à l'amour et au plaisir érotique. C'est un texte propre à aiguillonner et à injecter une piqûre de rappel à toute personne ayant perdu le sens de l'amour dans un quotidien tiède :
'I miss you Louise. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this : Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you and night. To crave another while pecking your neck. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.'
Le livre regorge de tant de phrases qui frappent par leur beauté d'écriture et d'évocation que l'on pourrait en extraire des citations à l'envi.
La lecture du superbe récit autobiographique de Winterson : Why be happy when you could be normal?, publié en 2011, peut utilement compléter son incursion dans l'univers de l'écrivain.
Written on the body, quant à lui, trône parmi ces livres à part qui ont la forme, le fond, la grâce. Incontestablement le livre de choix qu'il faut offrir à la la personne qu'on aime.… (plus d'informations)