Sexing the Cherry
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel.” —The New York Times
Winner of the E. M. Forster Award
In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the globe like Gulliver—though he finds that the most curious oddities come from his own mind. The spiraling tale leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan’s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that jumps from epiphany to shimmering epiphany.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Sexing the Cherry is “a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino” (San Francisco Chronicle).
“Those who care for fiction that is both idiosyncratic and beautiful will want to read anything [Winterson] writes.” —The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evoking modern physics and antique metaphysics, Winterson's ambitiously eccentric narrative challenges her readers to rupture the boundaries of conventional perceptions and linear experience of time. Her narrative voices, alternating between a Rabelaisian giantess and her foundling son, collapse at times into one another and the characters plunge vertiginously through time and space. On the one hand reworking fairy tales, and on the other evoking the filth, squalor and exuberant bawdiness of 17th-century England in the throes of civil war, Winterson ( The Passion ) eventually locates her characters in present-day London. Graced with striking similes and poetic cadences, the author's prose is clean and strong, and the disjunctive elements of her narrative are integrated elegantly. But the novel's freakish characters and flights of surreal fancy are insufficient to redeem its overwrought artifice. The work is further limited by its stridently dogmatic feminism, which, contemptuously belittling all men as arrogantly stupid bullies who are vastly women's inferiors in maturity and moral fiber, vitiates its ostensible intent to transcend the narrowness of human perception.
