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Jeannette
Winterson weaves a luminous tale of love and betrayal in
The
Passion,
her slim 1987 novel which one returns to just for the dazzling prose. A novel
which has something of fairy tale and dream: a world of
boundless love and untold cruelty, of pleasure and chance.
At the heart of things the desire to transcend the banality of the
quotidian, to feel with unrequited intense passion:
“This
is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about
passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk
happiness with a philosopher."
Henri, a
French soldier, serves in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, having pledged
obeisance to the Emperor, until the eventual reality of the
infamous Russian winter and defeat unveils the madness behind the
grandiloquence. And then there is Villanelle of the fiery
red hair, daughter of a legendary web-footed Venetian boatman,
whose flight from the cruelty of a husband has also set her on roads East with
Napoleon’s men, into the frigid tundra where smoke from burned
villages darkens the air. And here, from a desolate destroyed land
of fire and ice, Villanelle and Henri undertake an almost
unthinkable adventure, returning on foot from Moscow to Venice.
There is much poetry in this book, in its faceted imagery and
prose, and in names as well—the villanelle a poem of nineteen
lines (five tercets and a quatrain -- think Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night!)
Physical
geographies and cartographies of the soul, uncharted and
unknowable in Venice, a city in constant mutation, androgynous,
ephemeral, and fleeting. The city of Satan as it is referred
to in the book, where casinos are a metaphor for lives
spent gambling at love and war. There is something cosmic in
this view of life as passion and adventure, no two destinies or
paths ever the same, each one a shooting star tracing its own
luminous, brilliant arc:
“This is the
city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same
place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so it
will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you
here. Your course in compass reading will fail you.
Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to
squares they have never heard of, over canals not listed in the
notes.”
Magic
is everywhere in Winterson’s Venice, in hearts that can be stolen
metaphorically and literally, where madness and reason are one,
where anything is possible as long as one is willing to imagine
the unimaginable. And a refrain through the novel:
"I'm
telling you stories. Trust me."
Read:
The Passion,
Jeanette Winterson
From the
eCognoscente
Archives:
Jeff in
Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
Read:
Death
in Venice, Thomas Mann
Tags:
literature
library
venice
books
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