I read Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places before the busy week at work. The World and Other Places is a collection of short stories, including Psalms, Orion, The World and Other Places, and The Poetics of Sex. I read her first novel a while back, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which was a riveting read that got somewhat rambly at the end.
Winterson's work is full of sentences that take you by surprise at the precision of truth in them. Her images are often biblical, requiring a profound sense of the metaphors in the Bible to understand. For example this, when she describes calling a puppy by its name: "The moment between chaos and shape and I say his name and he hears me."(4) This of course reminds me of the moment of creation, where God brings order out of chaos with a spoken word. Other sentences also captivate me, such as this: "She is painting today. The room is orange with effort. She is painting today and I have written this."(45)
I enjoyed the story of Orion and Psalms. Orion is a myth explaining why the Orion constellation cannot be seen in November, the month of Scorpio. In Psalms, the conflict between obedience and rebellion is played out in the conflict between Psalms the turtle and Ezra the imaginary rabbit. Psalms the turtle is eventually drowned, leading to a stream of other biblical pets: "the Proverbial fish, Ecclesiastes the hen, who never laid an egg where [they] could find it, Solomon the Scotch terrier, and finally Isaiah and Jeremiah, a pair of goats who lived to a great age and died peacefully in their pen." Ha ha! Actually I find the story sad, but still, it is very funny.
Posted
on Wednesday, June 01, 2005 at 10:29 AM.
:)
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