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Kunst & Leugens
Handel is a failed priest but abiding Catholic with elitist tendencies whose work as a doctor forces him to consider social questions that he would probably rather avoid. Picasso, as she calls herself, is a young artist who has been sexually abused by her brother but whose family thinks she is at fault for her dark moods. Sappho is, indeed, Sappho, the lesbian poet of ancient Greece, who here proclaims herself a sensualist and then proceeds to dissect "the union of language and lust." The three converge in a place that may be England in a not-too-distant future made ugly by pollution and even uglier by greed. This is not a novel but an extended rift on art, sex, religion, social repression, the dangers of patriarchy, and everything that is wrong with the contemporary drift to the right. As such, it will be hard going for most readers, but those with some patience will discover exceptionally evocative writing and a vivifying review of some much-discussed contemporary issues.
245 pages
First published January 1, 1994
177 people are currently reading
5584 people want to read
About the author
Jeanette Winterson
126 books7,698 followersNovelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
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August 26, 2025
A novel from a favorite author is a treasured companion when you are in desperate need of a friend. Jeanette Winterson has always been there to sustain me in such times of need, always crafting such scorchingly sublime sentences that send the heart and mind soaring on the winds of her incredible intellect. This has been one of the most difficult reviews to attempt to write, but Art and Lies was the solitary companion I needed recently. This tale of three voices—and the “bawd” as the full title A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd states with sex worker Doll Sneerpiece interjecting in each section—is an introspective collage of people attempting to escape themselves, a familiar feeling as this was the book I had on hand during the long week I spent after checking myself into a psychiatric clinic. Like Winterson’s characters, Handel, Picasso, and Sappho (representing music, painting, and poetry despite only Sappho being the actual figure associated with their name), myself and those interned with me were also trying to escape ourselves and, in our daily sessions, also spoke in a rotation of voices about the seemingly insurmountable shocks to our systems. While the memories of this book instill a warm glow to my heart, they also flood me with the hazy memories of days on days shuffling around like wilted flowers through a single hall in the sanitized sterility of a sixth floor hospital wing. It was as if I, too, were among the invisible ‘ Third City’ of the novel, ‘ the city of the vanished, home to those who no longer exist,’ yet discovering, as Winterson examines in poetic detail, how art is a therapeutic and transformative resource ‘loosening all the grey years into one bright line.’ Reinventing what a novel can be and, while admittedly a bit didactic, Art and Lies is a deviously brilliant polyphony of art and voices confronting the artlessness of a modernity that confuses market value with true value and probes the realities of imagination and redemptive powers of love that shape the world.
‘Two things significantly distinguish human beings from other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art.’
Winterson’s sixth novel, Art and Lies from 1994, is an aesthetically ambitious and allegorically driven novel that deviates from novelistic conventions in order to allusively examine how inadequate conventional form is at capturing the intricacies of human existence and emotion. An introspective novel that cycles between voices, it breaks from the Aristolean notions of progressive plot while still achieving an impressionistic narrative told through an utterly gorgeous lyricism that feels like Winterson has wrangled the wonderment of the cosmos into sentence level poetics. ‘I need the dark places to get outside of common sense,’ a character states and the novel functions in similar fashion, taking its time meandering through philosophical musings and extolling the virtues of art in what can sometimes feel directionlessly obfuscating, yet this manner of storytelling only enhances the emotional resonance. ‘Let go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone,’ Winterson writes, and the same can be said of the act of reading the book. It is steeped in literary history and lore, with frequent allusions to writers like Ovid, Jorge Luis Borges, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and more. My copy is now highly marked up as Winterson plants poetic perfection upon nearly every page, a real balm for my weary heart as I spent visitation hours watching the door for someone I guessed wouldn’t bother showing and never did. Being right for once because there is a first time for everything, but unable to celebrate it. But this novel was a celebration and companion enough.
‘The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.’
The format of the novel left critics rather divided upon its release, particularly in wake of Winterson having selected her own novel, Written on the Body, as Best Book of the Year (she was correct though), a novel deemed “inadequately feminist” by those who rejected Winterson embracing trans identities such as the non-binary narrator. A rather unimaginative reader for a review in the New York Times discounted Art and Lies writing that ‘if Ms. Winterson brings Virginia Woolf to mind, it is the unreadable Woolf of The Waves rather than the magnificent Woolf of To the Lighthouse’ (a reference to Winterson having cited herself as the natural heir to Woolf, which is just a badass thing to say since, well, she’s correct). Personally I find that The Waves is a masterpiece and easily a favorite novel of mine, and while this was meant as a slight it is also a rather perceptive comparison because, like The Waves, the format becomes part of the allegorical process. Simply put, every aspect of Art and Lies is pointed towards an allegorical examination of the liberating powers of art to grow the self, community, and reimagine society. Sappho reviving Picasso upon her leap from the window is described as a ‘victory of art, its healing power,’ for instance, and even the physical realities of this dream-like novel-reality are readily recognized having a metaphorical life beyond their linguistic sign. The train each character ends up on is less a train and more a line guiding them to the future as they flee the self and unite timelines.
‘I am a warrior and this is the epic of my resistance.’
In her companion book to Art and Lies, the non-fictional Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Winterson states that ‘the rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.’ This rebellion permeates the novel as Winterson champions the ‘truth of the imagination’ over the inadequate “facts” of reality, showing how ‘art does not imitate life,’ as she writes in Art Objects, but that ‘art anticipates life.’ Winterson speaks about this at length in her essays:
The three principal voices each represent a form of art: Handel, Picasso, and Sappho being music, painting, and poetry respectively. While the first two simply share the name, there is more than a mere tenuous thematic connection between the imaginary character and their namesake that makes them a sort of metaphorical being alive and moving through the streets of the novel. The target of Doll Sneerpiece’s affection (the character from a bawdy 18th century novel each character picks up to browse on the train) is named Ruggerio, a reference to a character from an opera composed by Handel, which teases further connection. Sappho, however, is the Sappho of ancient Greece, still existing in an abstract space, much like how Winterson describes art as being like ‘a foreign city’
The characters are thematically united, each encountering their individual ways in which ‘myself imprisons me,’ while turning a critical eye on modern society’s bastardization of art by replacing beauty with money and value with cheap, marketable entertainment. ‘There is nothing a priori about market forces, nothing about the market that isn’t a construction and that couldn’t be deconstructed,’ Handal states, mocking the belief in markets as a vapid construct and a pathetic metric from value. Or, as Winterson writes ‘Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it,’ yet this becomes a flawed way to see the world that only perpetuates suffering. A major metaphorical symbol throughout the novel is the expensive cancer hospital going up in the impoverished district of the city, displacing the poor and driving up rent, effectively causing more pain and death. That it is a cancer ward seems a sly reference to money as a form of moral cancer, one that leads humans to cruelty and division. I particularly enjoyed her mention on how money dehumanizes, such as the way framing the unhoused as criminals allows people to turn off their empathy:
Handal, who has been dismissed from his hospital position for amputating the wrong breast, considers how science and a career that puts one face to face with endless misery can also dehumanize us:
The answer, it would seem, is art. To embrace the imagination, to allow the abstract emotions to shape us, shape society, unite us and build empathy together.
‘Why should I not live the art I love?’
I’m reminded of Michel Foucault’s belief on ‘a self that had to be created as a work of art.’ In his essay What is an Author?, the French philosopher wrote ‘one should try to make oneself a work of art, an artist of oneself,’ and we see that principal applied to the characters in Art and Lies. Winterson shows that we, all of us, can be art and our bodies are the medium for time to create art with:
Sappho, who also finds love to be the ultimate form of art, is especially introspective on these ideas, she who is remembered today for being an art of self more than her actual poems since most have been destroyed and lost to time.
There is Picasso, too, a young woman painter rejected by her family and traumatized by the assaults from her brother who finds art to be a solace. Especially when nobody understands, art is her companion, which hit me really hard while reading this. ‘Often, when she liked a picture, she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture.’ Winterson guides us to see how art becomes a way to understand the self in the abstract, and a way to guide us towards love of ourselves and each other.
‘Rhythm of words passed from life to life. Mouth to mouth of language uncoded by time…Love recorded against time.’
While more abstract that her previous novels, Art and Lies has all the hallmarks of what makes Winterson such a fantastic experience. There are even little clever intertextual nods to her previous works, such as ‘a silent toddler who would not understand that bananas are the only fruit’ pointing our minds towards her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. As is often the case, the characters are amalgamations of fiction and the Wintersonian mythos, being not quite autobiographical because ‘There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies.’ But, as always with Winterson, love is the primary theme and she is always at her finest when depicting love:
While love, like art, can be corrupted by society and used against you, such as Picasso describing love as ‘the murder weapon of family life’ not unlike the way Mrs Winterson is portrayed in Oranges, Winterson shows how love and art in their pure form are redemptive and liberating. A crown to commemorate our being. ‘Crown me. You do. You weave the dubbing stems, incoherent, exuberant, into a circle of love. I am hooped with love.’ In reading Winterson, we all find ourselves hooped in love even if we can’t feel it off the page in our daily lives.
‘It’s awkward, in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied…Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual but out of his effacement.’
Jeanette Winterson continues to be a beacon of light in an often dark world and Art and Lies is an impassioned achievement that arrived right when I needed it most. A brilliant examination of art and love through an allegorical vision that combines the various forms of art and casts them in a final chapter in glorious chorus together, this was a moving and intellectually stimulating book that through a hermeneutic analysis of the work certainly reveals it to be greater than the sum of its parts. A tribute to art and the way it can shape us, Winterson always delivers and this moved me to the core.
4.5/5
‘What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?’
‘Two things significantly distinguish human beings from other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art.’
Winterson’s sixth novel, Art and Lies from 1994, is an aesthetically ambitious and allegorically driven novel that deviates from novelistic conventions in order to allusively examine how inadequate conventional form is at capturing the intricacies of human existence and emotion. An introspective novel that cycles between voices, it breaks from the Aristolean notions of progressive plot while still achieving an impressionistic narrative told through an utterly gorgeous lyricism that feels like Winterson has wrangled the wonderment of the cosmos into sentence level poetics. ‘I need the dark places to get outside of common sense,’ a character states and the novel functions in similar fashion, taking its time meandering through philosophical musings and extolling the virtues of art in what can sometimes feel directionlessly obfuscating, yet this manner of storytelling only enhances the emotional resonance. ‘Let go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone,’ Winterson writes, and the same can be said of the act of reading the book. It is steeped in literary history and lore, with frequent allusions to writers like Ovid, Jorge Luis Borges, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and more. My copy is now highly marked up as Winterson plants poetic perfection upon nearly every page, a real balm for my weary heart as I spent visitation hours watching the door for someone I guessed wouldn’t bother showing and never did. Being right for once because there is a first time for everything, but unable to celebrate it. But this novel was a celebration and companion enough.
‘The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.’
The format of the novel left critics rather divided upon its release, particularly in wake of Winterson having selected her own novel, Written on the Body, as Best Book of the Year (she was correct though), a novel deemed “inadequately feminist” by those who rejected Winterson embracing trans identities such as the non-binary narrator. A rather unimaginative reader for a review in the New York Times discounted Art and Lies writing that ‘if Ms. Winterson brings Virginia Woolf to mind, it is the unreadable Woolf of The Waves rather than the magnificent Woolf of To the Lighthouse’ (a reference to Winterson having cited herself as the natural heir to Woolf, which is just a badass thing to say since, well, she’s correct). Personally I find that The Waves is a masterpiece and easily a favorite novel of mine, and while this was meant as a slight it is also a rather perceptive comparison because, like The Waves, the format becomes part of the allegorical process. Simply put, every aspect of Art and Lies is pointed towards an allegorical examination of the liberating powers of art to grow the self, community, and reimagine society. Sappho reviving Picasso upon her leap from the window is described as a ‘victory of art, its healing power,’ for instance, and even the physical realities of this dream-like novel-reality are readily recognized having a metaphorical life beyond their linguistic sign. The train each character ends up on is less a train and more a line guiding them to the future as they flee the self and unite timelines.
‘I am a warrior and this is the epic of my resistance.’
In her companion book to Art and Lies, the non-fictional Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Winterson states that ‘the rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.’ This rebellion permeates the novel as Winterson champions the ‘truth of the imagination’ over the inadequate “facts” of reality, showing how ‘art does not imitate life,’ as she writes in Art Objects, but that ‘art anticipates life.’ Winterson speaks about this at length in her essays:
‘I see no conflict between reality and imagination. They are not in face separate. Our real lives hold within them our royal lives; the inspiration to be more than we are, to find new solutions, to live beyond the moment. Art helps us to do this because it fuses together temporal and perpetual realities.’
The three principal voices each represent a form of art: Handel, Picasso, and Sappho being music, painting, and poetry respectively. While the first two simply share the name, there is more than a mere tenuous thematic connection between the imaginary character and their namesake that makes them a sort of metaphorical being alive and moving through the streets of the novel. The target of Doll Sneerpiece’s affection (the character from a bawdy 18th century novel each character picks up to browse on the train) is named Ruggerio, a reference to a character from an opera composed by Handel, which teases further connection. Sappho, however, is the Sappho of ancient Greece, still existing in an abstract space, much like how Winterson describes art as being like ‘a foreign city’
‘There is another city too, but we don’t like to mention it, because officially it doesn’t exist. People vanish everyday. That’s where I live.’
The characters are thematically united, each encountering their individual ways in which ‘myself imprisons me,’ while turning a critical eye on modern society’s bastardization of art by replacing beauty with money and value with cheap, marketable entertainment. ‘There is nothing a priori about market forces, nothing about the market that isn’t a construction and that couldn’t be deconstructed,’ Handal states, mocking the belief in markets as a vapid construct and a pathetic metric from value. Or, as Winterson writes ‘Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it,’ yet this becomes a flawed way to see the world that only perpetuates suffering. A major metaphorical symbol throughout the novel is the expensive cancer hospital going up in the impoverished district of the city, displacing the poor and driving up rent, effectively causing more pain and death. That it is a cancer ward seems a sly reference to money as a form of moral cancer, one that leads humans to cruelty and division. I particularly enjoyed her mention on how money dehumanizes, such as the way framing the unhoused as criminals allows people to turn off their empathy:
‘Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.’
Handal, who has been dismissed from his hospital position for amputating the wrong breast, considers how science and a career that puts one face to face with endless misery can also dehumanize us:
‘I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.’
The answer, it would seem, is art. To embrace the imagination, to allow the abstract emotions to shape us, shape society, unite us and build empathy together.
‘Why should I not live the art I love?’
I’m reminded of Michel Foucault’s belief on ‘a self that had to be created as a work of art.’ In his essay What is an Author?, the French philosopher wrote ‘one should try to make oneself a work of art, an artist of oneself,’ and we see that principal applied to the characters in Art and Lies. Winterson shows that we, all of us, can be art and our bodies are the medium for time to create art with:
‘Time, whose thing I am, writes on me. What to do with the parchment? What to do with the bloody ink? What to do with the lines on my body. ’
Sappho, who also finds love to be the ultimate form of art, is especially introspective on these ideas, she who is remembered today for being an art of self more than her actual poems since most have been destroyed and lost to time.
‘Her body is an apocrypha. She has become a book of tall stories, none of them written by herself. Her name has passed into history. Her work has not…The history of the future has been written and her work isn’t in it. Where are her collected poems, that once filled nine volumes, where are the sane scholarly university texts?’
There is Picasso, too, a young woman painter rejected by her family and traumatized by the assaults from her brother who finds art to be a solace. Especially when nobody understands, art is her companion, which hit me really hard while reading this. ‘Often, when she liked a picture, she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture.’ Winterson guides us to see how art becomes a way to understand the self in the abstract, and a way to guide us towards love of ourselves and each other.
‘Rhythm of words passed from life to life. Mouth to mouth of language uncoded by time…Love recorded against time.’
While more abstract that her previous novels, Art and Lies has all the hallmarks of what makes Winterson such a fantastic experience. There are even little clever intertextual nods to her previous works, such as ‘a silent toddler who would not understand that bananas are the only fruit’ pointing our minds towards her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. As is often the case, the characters are amalgamations of fiction and the Wintersonian mythos, being not quite autobiographical because ‘There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies.’ But, as always with Winterson, love is the primary theme and she is always at her finest when depicting love:
‘Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family’s claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battleground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be the healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or life. Let me see you as you are.’
While love, like art, can be corrupted by society and used against you, such as Picasso describing love as ‘the murder weapon of family life’ not unlike the way Mrs Winterson is portrayed in Oranges, Winterson shows how love and art in their pure form are redemptive and liberating. A crown to commemorate our being. ‘Crown me. You do. You weave the dubbing stems, incoherent, exuberant, into a circle of love. I am hooped with love.’ In reading Winterson, we all find ourselves hooped in love even if we can’t feel it off the page in our daily lives.
‘It’s awkward, in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied…Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual but out of his effacement.’
Jeanette Winterson continues to be a beacon of light in an often dark world and Art and Lies is an impassioned achievement that arrived right when I needed it most. A brilliant examination of art and love through an allegorical vision that combines the various forms of art and casts them in a final chapter in glorious chorus together, this was a moving and intellectually stimulating book that through a hermeneutic analysis of the work certainly reveals it to be greater than the sum of its parts. A tribute to art and the way it can shape us, Winterson always delivers and this moved me to the core.
4.5/5
‘What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?’
September 12, 2024
As lyrical, imaginative and sometimes joyful as Orlando, but messy in execution and quite a chore as a reading experience, even if its a slim book
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. What do you do? is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none.
In Art and Lies Jeanette Winterson takes us on a train journey of sorts with three characters called Handel, Sappho and Picasso, the later two being female.
The book is highly lyrical and associative, with fireworks of prose, and an especially sad story emerging from the perspective of Picasso, who fled an environment of child abuse and emotional neglect. Handel is a strange mixture of priest and surgeon, who apparently did something wrong, while Sappho her sections are so wild that its hard to say anything definitive, except that it seems that the ghost/spirit/soul of the poetess is speaking to us.
En passant modern day capitalist society (This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now) with its focus on achievement and tidy little boxes (still as much, if not more, applicable to today) is criticised. And there is an opera with some erotic encounters and a beautiful imaginative rendering of the Library of Alexandria. The first chapter of Art and Lies is eclectic, erudite and impressively woven together, although the goal of Jeanette Winterson is obscure to the reader, a problem becoming more apparent when progressing further into the work. The Sappho part is so lyrical that there seems no plot between its bouncy and sensual/sexual sentences, making this quite a hard read for a work so short.
Still Winterson her word craft is very enjoyable, and even though I did not enjoy this book as much as I imagined upfront, I'll close of with some gems of quotes:
Those who know it well will admit that they hardly know it at all.
The more she looked at pictures the more she saw them as extraordinary events, perpetual events, not objects fixed by time.
The history of the future has been written and her work isn’t in it.
Myself imprisons me.
I will not be wat I was.
I have to be a home to myself
Anyone to whom he paid money became a friend; it was a way of getting the next thing free.
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. What do you do? is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none.
In Art and Lies Jeanette Winterson takes us on a train journey of sorts with three characters called Handel, Sappho and Picasso, the later two being female.
The book is highly lyrical and associative, with fireworks of prose, and an especially sad story emerging from the perspective of Picasso, who fled an environment of child abuse and emotional neglect. Handel is a strange mixture of priest and surgeon, who apparently did something wrong, while Sappho her sections are so wild that its hard to say anything definitive, except that it seems that the ghost/spirit/soul of the poetess is speaking to us.
En passant modern day capitalist society (This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now) with its focus on achievement and tidy little boxes (still as much, if not more, applicable to today) is criticised. And there is an opera with some erotic encounters and a beautiful imaginative rendering of the Library of Alexandria. The first chapter of Art and Lies is eclectic, erudite and impressively woven together, although the goal of Jeanette Winterson is obscure to the reader, a problem becoming more apparent when progressing further into the work. The Sappho part is so lyrical that there seems no plot between its bouncy and sensual/sexual sentences, making this quite a hard read for a work so short.
Still Winterson her word craft is very enjoyable, and even though I did not enjoy this book as much as I imagined upfront, I'll close of with some gems of quotes:
Those who know it well will admit that they hardly know it at all.
The more she looked at pictures the more she saw them as extraordinary events, perpetual events, not objects fixed by time.
The history of the future has been written and her work isn’t in it.
Myself imprisons me.
I will not be wat I was.
I have to be a home to myself
Anyone to whom he paid money became a friend; it was a way of getting the next thing free.
February 16, 2009
"The doctor said he could find nothing wrong. She was healthy, she had work, she came from a good family. Her heart beat was normal. Was it? Well, perhaps a little too fast.
Heart attack. Had her heart attacked her? Her heart, trained at obedience classes from an early age? Her heart, well muzzled in public, taught to trot in line. Her heart, that knew the Ten Commandments, and obeyed a hundred more. Her disciplined dogged heart that would come when it was called and that never strained its leash. Her heart, that secretly gnawed away it's body's bones. Her heart, too long kept famished now consumed her. Her heart turned.
I saw her heart turning over and over through the somersaulted air.
I saw her heart ignore its bounds and leap.
It was her heart I pounded with both hands, my knees across her, my mouth that shouted "Live! Live!"
This book is way beyond stars -- it is something else.
Heart attack. Had her heart attacked her? Her heart, trained at obedience classes from an early age? Her heart, well muzzled in public, taught to trot in line. Her heart, that knew the Ten Commandments, and obeyed a hundred more. Her disciplined dogged heart that would come when it was called and that never strained its leash. Her heart, that secretly gnawed away it's body's bones. Her heart, too long kept famished now consumed her. Her heart turned.
I saw her heart turning over and over through the somersaulted air.
I saw her heart ignore its bounds and leap.
It was her heart I pounded with both hands, my knees across her, my mouth that shouted "Live! Live!"
This book is way beyond stars -- it is something else.
March 12, 2022
Another find from the library, which I decided to read despite my last Winterson being a big disappointment. This one is much better - a playful exploration of art and beauty told through three main characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho.
The first two bear little relation to their famous namesakes, but Sappho speaks for the ancient Greek poet directly. The three strands interleave and eventually connect, and are also linked by the fourth character Doll Sneerpiece, whose book telling of her life as an eighteenth century bawd plays a part in all three.
The first two bear little relation to their famous namesakes, but Sappho speaks for the ancient Greek poet directly. The three strands interleave and eventually connect, and are also linked by the fourth character Doll Sneerpiece, whose book telling of her life as an eighteenth century bawd plays a part in all three.
November 28, 2021
I found Art and Lies to be the most glorious mess. Its patchwork, impressionistic form, three named characters whose sections, however, bounced from first to third person and introduced an overlapping fourth character, while being wholly artistically/aesthetically unacceptable, nevertheless worked for me. Rather than signaling incompetence or disorganization, it felt somehow organic in an artistic sense, instinctual, like some of the most unfettered writing I've ever read. Yet I felt none of the perplexity or boredom one is prone to when reading, say, automatic writing or listening to people's incoherent dream recitations. No, this is a novel that either so well hides its artifice that it gives the impression of absolute associative spontaneity, or a rare work of spontaneous associative brilliance. (Well, probably it's a combination of the two as it's hard to imagine an author today without writer's groups, beta readers, agents, and editors all chiming in through several drafts of a manuscript. Still.)
Well, whatever the process, I wholly loved the result here. Not that there aren't some clunky passages, or a few silly musings that fell short of philosophical brilliance, yet even these lesser or even silly passages fed the ad-hoc form and seemed to render the whole even more charming, true, and most importantly free. Ultimately the characters interweave their stories just enough. And the philosophical musings on art, sex, and truth were almost all, to me--who has obsessed for years over just these topics--wonderful. One small organizational principle was evident: the three characters are musician, painter, and poet--three forms of art--and the sex theme seems manifest in the "bawd," the fourth character who insinuates herself into all three narratives.
I've read four of Winterson's novels now--and this is my unreserved favorite.
Well, whatever the process, I wholly loved the result here. Not that there aren't some clunky passages, or a few silly musings that fell short of philosophical brilliance, yet even these lesser or even silly passages fed the ad-hoc form and seemed to render the whole even more charming, true, and most importantly free. Ultimately the characters interweave their stories just enough. And the philosophical musings on art, sex, and truth were almost all, to me--who has obsessed for years over just these topics--wonderful. One small organizational principle was evident: the three characters are musician, painter, and poet--three forms of art--and the sex theme seems manifest in the "bawd," the fourth character who insinuates herself into all three narratives.
I've read four of Winterson's novels now--and this is my unreserved favorite.
May 29, 2013
I couldn't help but read this slowly
To let the words surround me and fill me
I wanted to stay as long as possible within the pages
Resist the urge to devour every sentence, every word, letter, and period
Winterson has a way with words
They are dark, and rich, and beautiful
I wanted to live them, breathe them
Swim in a sea of her words.
I consumed the last word and now I am sad that it is over.
To let the words surround me and fill me
I wanted to stay as long as possible within the pages
Resist the urge to devour every sentence, every word, letter, and period
Winterson has a way with words
They are dark, and rich, and beautiful
I wanted to live them, breathe them
Swim in a sea of her words.
I consumed the last word and now I am sad that it is over.
April 14, 2013
Sex=Lies; Art=Transcendence (2012).
Winterson, Jeanette. (1994). Art & Lies. New York:Vintage
Idly, I picked up this book in a used book shop. The publisher’s blurb on the back said it was “…a daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.” I thought, “Yeah, sure.” I opened the book at random and to my amazement, every page I read burned with phosphorescent prose.
Is it a novel? Not in the Aristotelian sense. There is no plot, no storyline, no climax, no epiphany, no denouement. But there is life-drama, mystery, strong characterization and beautiful language. In fact the work could be read as a series of extended prose-poems.
Alternating chapters describe the lives of the three main characters, Handel, a physician-priest, Picasso, a young woman who paints, and Sappho, the pre-Socratic poet of sexuality. The three lives mildly intersect from time to time, unknown to the characters. A fourth, minor, enigmatic character who does not get her own chapters, is an aging prostitute searching for her boyfriend/john/pimp.
All these characters are on a train, going to their future, fleeing their past. The train represents the arrow of time that moves each character through their lives. It’s not a real train and time is not real time. Sappho, the actual poet, represents herself, with a lifespan of 2000 years. Picasso is not Pablo, just a young woman with that moniker, and Handel is not the 18th century composer, just a guy named Handel, (Although the prostitute’s sought-after boyfriend is named Ruggerio, a character in one of the real Handel’s operas). In Handel’s life story, I had a sense of 19th century England, but other allusions, especially in Picasso’s story, place us at least in the 20th century. The location seems vaguely European (perhaps because there are more trains there). So: no fixed time or place.
All the characters are fleeing themselves. Handel is trying to escape and forget a tragic surgical mistake in which he amputated the wrong breast in a botched mastectomy. That cost him his career. He’s also trying to escape his childhood, which involved long-term sexual abuse by a Catholic priest who nevertheless genuinely loved and educated him.
Picasso, literally running away from home, flees a childhood of incest forced on her over the years by her brother, and a tyrannical, dismissive family, and attempted suicide. She seeks to lose herself in her painting but may be losing her mind.
Sappho is the most difficult character. She resents that her poetry has been misunderstood or bowdlerized through the centuries. She claims to be a pure sexualist, not a romantic, not a metaphorical poet. “Say my name and you say sex,” she says. Sex alone is her topic, including its inevitable deceptions. She pontificates, beautifully, on the nature of art, despairs at the lack of passion in modern life, but it is not clear what her “mission” is, or from what, if anything, she flees. Her chapters are dreamlike.
I should read this book again, two or three times. It is laden with allusions, historical, and inter-textual references. Alas, life is too short. Based on a single read, my thought is that the title reveals the controlling theme: Art and Lies. Those are the only two elements, that drive a life. The mundane, embodied life, is full of lies, lies mostly about sex. But the life of the flesh is transcended in art, which spiritually lifts one to another plane.
The three biographies demonstrate this theme. In Sappho’s case, the argument that life is lies, is well made, less so the argument for art; except that, in the Sappho chapters, the lyrical language is so intense, it intoxicates the reader, proving in fact, not by telling, but by direct demonstration, that art lifts one above the plane of flesh. That’s a brilliant innovation.
Here are samples, selected literally at random, of the kind of writing that drew me in:
Handel: “I like to look at women. That is one of the reasons why I became a doctor. As a priest my contact is necessarily limited. I like to look at women; they undress before me with a shyness I find touching…When a woman chooses me above my numerous atheist colleagues we have an understanding straight away. I have done well, perhaps because a man with God inside him is still preferable to a man with only his breakfast inside him.”
Picasso observes: "On the dark station platform, lit by cups of light, a guard paced his invisible cage. Twelve steps forward twelve steps back. He didn’t look up, he muttered in to a walkie-talkie, held so close to his upper lip that he might have been shaving. He should have been shaving. Picasso considered the guard; the pacing, the muttering, the unkempt face, the ill-fitting clothes. In aspect and manner he was no better than the average lunatic and yet he drew a salary and was competent to answer questions about trains.”
Sappho prefers: “To carry white roses never red. White rose of purity white rose of desire. Purity of desire long past coal-hot, not the blushing body, but the flush-white bone. The bone flushed white through longing. The longing made pale by love. Love of flesh and love of the spirit in perilous communion at the altar-rail, the alter-rail, where all is changed and the bloody thorns become the platinum crown."
The prostitute is described in third person: “Doll Sneerpiece was a woman, and like other women, she sieved time through her body. There was a residue of time always on her skin , and, as she got older, that residue thickened and stuck and could not be shaken off.”
Winterson, Jeanette. (1994). Art & Lies. New York:Vintage
Idly, I picked up this book in a used book shop. The publisher’s blurb on the back said it was “…a daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.” I thought, “Yeah, sure.” I opened the book at random and to my amazement, every page I read burned with phosphorescent prose.
Is it a novel? Not in the Aristotelian sense. There is no plot, no storyline, no climax, no epiphany, no denouement. But there is life-drama, mystery, strong characterization and beautiful language. In fact the work could be read as a series of extended prose-poems.
Alternating chapters describe the lives of the three main characters, Handel, a physician-priest, Picasso, a young woman who paints, and Sappho, the pre-Socratic poet of sexuality. The three lives mildly intersect from time to time, unknown to the characters. A fourth, minor, enigmatic character who does not get her own chapters, is an aging prostitute searching for her boyfriend/john/pimp.
All these characters are on a train, going to their future, fleeing their past. The train represents the arrow of time that moves each character through their lives. It’s not a real train and time is not real time. Sappho, the actual poet, represents herself, with a lifespan of 2000 years. Picasso is not Pablo, just a young woman with that moniker, and Handel is not the 18th century composer, just a guy named Handel, (Although the prostitute’s sought-after boyfriend is named Ruggerio, a character in one of the real Handel’s operas). In Handel’s life story, I had a sense of 19th century England, but other allusions, especially in Picasso’s story, place us at least in the 20th century. The location seems vaguely European (perhaps because there are more trains there). So: no fixed time or place.
All the characters are fleeing themselves. Handel is trying to escape and forget a tragic surgical mistake in which he amputated the wrong breast in a botched mastectomy. That cost him his career. He’s also trying to escape his childhood, which involved long-term sexual abuse by a Catholic priest who nevertheless genuinely loved and educated him.
Picasso, literally running away from home, flees a childhood of incest forced on her over the years by her brother, and a tyrannical, dismissive family, and attempted suicide. She seeks to lose herself in her painting but may be losing her mind.
Sappho is the most difficult character. She resents that her poetry has been misunderstood or bowdlerized through the centuries. She claims to be a pure sexualist, not a romantic, not a metaphorical poet. “Say my name and you say sex,” she says. Sex alone is her topic, including its inevitable deceptions. She pontificates, beautifully, on the nature of art, despairs at the lack of passion in modern life, but it is not clear what her “mission” is, or from what, if anything, she flees. Her chapters are dreamlike.
I should read this book again, two or three times. It is laden with allusions, historical, and inter-textual references. Alas, life is too short. Based on a single read, my thought is that the title reveals the controlling theme: Art and Lies. Those are the only two elements, that drive a life. The mundane, embodied life, is full of lies, lies mostly about sex. But the life of the flesh is transcended in art, which spiritually lifts one to another plane.
The three biographies demonstrate this theme. In Sappho’s case, the argument that life is lies, is well made, less so the argument for art; except that, in the Sappho chapters, the lyrical language is so intense, it intoxicates the reader, proving in fact, not by telling, but by direct demonstration, that art lifts one above the plane of flesh. That’s a brilliant innovation.
Here are samples, selected literally at random, of the kind of writing that drew me in:
Handel: “I like to look at women. That is one of the reasons why I became a doctor. As a priest my contact is necessarily limited. I like to look at women; they undress before me with a shyness I find touching…When a woman chooses me above my numerous atheist colleagues we have an understanding straight away. I have done well, perhaps because a man with God inside him is still preferable to a man with only his breakfast inside him.”
Picasso observes: "On the dark station platform, lit by cups of light, a guard paced his invisible cage. Twelve steps forward twelve steps back. He didn’t look up, he muttered in to a walkie-talkie, held so close to his upper lip that he might have been shaving. He should have been shaving. Picasso considered the guard; the pacing, the muttering, the unkempt face, the ill-fitting clothes. In aspect and manner he was no better than the average lunatic and yet he drew a salary and was competent to answer questions about trains.”
Sappho prefers: “To carry white roses never red. White rose of purity white rose of desire. Purity of desire long past coal-hot, not the blushing body, but the flush-white bone. The bone flushed white through longing. The longing made pale by love. Love of flesh and love of the spirit in perilous communion at the altar-rail, the alter-rail, where all is changed and the bloody thorns become the platinum crown."
The prostitute is described in third person: “Doll Sneerpiece was a woman, and like other women, she sieved time through her body. There was a residue of time always on her skin , and, as she got older, that residue thickened and stuck and could not be shaken off.”
January 7, 2014
I've given up. At about two-thirds of the way through this slim book, I just couldn't face carrying on. It's a shame, because I love Jeanette Winterson's other novels, but Art & Lies is so obtuse that it's practically unreadable. Halfway through the novel I had to look up what it was actually meant to be about because I still didn't have a clue - not a good sign. Taken in isolation, there a passages that are wonderful in terms of their sense of poetry and emotion, but these passages don't knit together into a coherent whole.
January 12, 2016
[Spoilers, disturbing ones at that, toward the end of this review.]
My first encounter with Jeanette Winterson went badly. In college, I read Written on the Body and found it ludicrously overwritten, an imprecise prose poem wearing the guise of a novel, and poorly. I almost wish my Livejournal from that period of my life were still extant so I could quote from my bad review; I remember that it turned on mocking the line from the novel, “Your clavicle is both keyboard and key” (honestly, I still think that is a stupid sentence).
But something about Winterson lingered—her aestheticism, her daring, her egotism (a trait I find wholly lovable in writers and artists)—and I decided to revisit her work. I am glad I did, because Art and Lies could almost serve as an example of the kind of fiction I have been calling for in my more polemical essays (see here, here, and here). It is a completely invented novel, set in a dream-world of its own, rather than dwelling in the merely social or autobiographical. It is a completely written novel, composed in an elevated register that enlivens rather than transcribing common speech, even as it is an echo chamber for poetry. It is a completely traditional novel, alluding to Sappho, Ovid, Shakespeare, Sterne, Blake, Wordsworth, Pater, Eliot, Woolf, and Calvino on almost every page, its sentences sinuous hooks for the eyes of the canon. It is a completely radical novel, both formally as it reinvents what a novel can do and be, and politically as it mounts a thoroughgoing critique of modern society that is both coherent and independent (i.e., it does not merely repeat the cliches of Right or Left). It is also, alas, a somewhat didactic novel—more about this later.
Art and Lies has three narrators: Handel, a Catholic surgeon who revisits in memory his moments of missed opportunity in love even as he laments the spiritual and physical state of modern London; Picasso, a female artist from a strict and sexually abusive household who has struggled to escape the physical and mental confines of her terrible family; and Sappho, the legendary poet, who seems to speak from beyond time, challenging the misrepresentations of her life and work, even as she wanders the streets of London. These three characters are distantly, tenuously united, and they come together as they board a train that seems to be headed to a symbolic sea (death or eternity). Interpolated throughout are passages from an eighteenth-century pornographic novel—their bawdiness and scatology function like the servants’ banter in Shakespeare, to let some of the air out of the novel before we are overcome by its poetic afflatus. All three main characters judge the present in one voice, a voice that occasionally overwhelms the fiction and threatens to turn this rather intricate literary construction into a political screed.
Art and Lies is a strange political beast, though perhaps not as strange as it looks at first glance. Despite Winterson’s early vote for Margaret Thatcher, Art and Lies decisively repudiates Thatcherism, not least for its indifference or hostility toward the poor and the working class:
But this Romantic assault on capitalist modernity, which is neither Left (too concerned about art and spirituality, too tragic in worldview) nor Right (too sympathetic to the poor and the colonized, too hostile to custom and religion), is a venerable tradition in British letters, encompassing Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, Pater, Woolf, Lawrence, and Eliot (if not, indeed, Shakespeare) before Winterson. And Winterson is easily able to reconcile her feminism and queer liberationism with this radically reactionary aesthetic because, in the person of Sappho, she persuasively identifies the artistic tradition itself with queerness and the feminine. Winterson’s polemic, in Handel’s voice, against the type of vernacular feminism that might now be labeled as Lean In feminism is quite timely:
But when Winterson writes about Handel and Picasso, her prose becomes inventive and precise. It takes a true and a bold narrative gift to imagine the novel’s final section, in which we revisit with Handel his childhood romance with an older Cardinal who castrated him. This long and disturbing passage will have conservatives, feminists, and many if not most others hurling the book across the room (it did not bring a smile to my face either!), because Winterson, in her nostalgia for the aesthetic past, tells the terrible story without moral judgment; its outlandishness becomes plausible, its outrageousness delicate, as Winterson submerges herself and us in true otherness—not the fashionable otherness of commercial multiculturalism, in which self and other shop together, but the true otherness that even the most open-minded will want to denounce as mere barbarism. And maybe it is. But when Handel’s family finds out what has been going on and decisively ends his relationship with the Cardinal, the novel shockingly invites us to wonder, “Which cut did the harm? His or theirs?” What is worse—the mutilations of art and sex or the mutilations of a society hostile both to art and sex? That strikes me as a real question, a question you could spend your whole life trying to answer, and not a rhetorical one—which is what I mean when I say I want novels that deal with genuinely intractable and tragic quandaries rather than giving easy answers in the name of right-thinking.
It occurs to me that another novel was published around the same time in the U.K. that was similarly experimental and similarly ill-received: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Ishiguro’s novel is as bold as Winterson’s, and as complicatedly involved with the modernist tradition (though Ishiguro’s agon is with Dostoevsky and Kafka, whereas Winterson’s is with Woolf and Eliot). But The Unconsoled, as befits its title, totally undermines any Romantic ambition on the part of the artist to redeem society. Ishiguro’s artist cannot even redeem himself—but for all that, the novel says, art is worthwhile, a deep and private pleasure. These are two novels to read together, in dialogue with each other. They also illustrate the importance of going back to work that has been too hastily dismissed. When the fog of the present lifts in the future, the supposed masterpieces of the moment may be revealed as flimsy cardboard, while some of those books derogated by their first readers will stand out as figures of depth and substance.
(By the way, say what you will about Winterson’s high style, but this is a novel you can learn new words from: retiary orphrey, epurate, aurum, and more.)
In conclusion, it is time to look past the vagaries of Winterson’s reputation and even the datedness of this novel’s packaging—the cover of the edition I read looks (charmingly) like a 1990s cover for an alternative CD—and read this enchanting, disquieting, and exasperating novel. Not all of its risks are rewarded, but, as they say, better the interesting failure than the boring success.
My first encounter with Jeanette Winterson went badly. In college, I read Written on the Body and found it ludicrously overwritten, an imprecise prose poem wearing the guise of a novel, and poorly. I almost wish my Livejournal from that period of my life were still extant so I could quote from my bad review; I remember that it turned on mocking the line from the novel, “Your clavicle is both keyboard and key” (honestly, I still think that is a stupid sentence).
But something about Winterson lingered—her aestheticism, her daring, her egotism (a trait I find wholly lovable in writers and artists)—and I decided to revisit her work. I am glad I did, because Art and Lies could almost serve as an example of the kind of fiction I have been calling for in my more polemical essays (see here, here, and here). It is a completely invented novel, set in a dream-world of its own, rather than dwelling in the merely social or autobiographical. It is a completely written novel, composed in an elevated register that enlivens rather than transcribing common speech, even as it is an echo chamber for poetry. It is a completely traditional novel, alluding to Sappho, Ovid, Shakespeare, Sterne, Blake, Wordsworth, Pater, Eliot, Woolf, and Calvino on almost every page, its sentences sinuous hooks for the eyes of the canon. It is a completely radical novel, both formally as it reinvents what a novel can do and be, and politically as it mounts a thoroughgoing critique of modern society that is both coherent and independent (i.e., it does not merely repeat the cliches of Right or Left). It is also, alas, a somewhat didactic novel—more about this later.
Art and Lies has three narrators: Handel, a Catholic surgeon who revisits in memory his moments of missed opportunity in love even as he laments the spiritual and physical state of modern London; Picasso, a female artist from a strict and sexually abusive household who has struggled to escape the physical and mental confines of her terrible family; and Sappho, the legendary poet, who seems to speak from beyond time, challenging the misrepresentations of her life and work, even as she wanders the streets of London. These three characters are distantly, tenuously united, and they come together as they board a train that seems to be headed to a symbolic sea (death or eternity). Interpolated throughout are passages from an eighteenth-century pornographic novel—their bawdiness and scatology function like the servants’ banter in Shakespeare, to let some of the air out of the novel before we are overcome by its poetic afflatus. All three main characters judge the present in one voice, a voice that occasionally overwhelms the fiction and threatens to turn this rather intricate literary construction into a political screed.
Art and Lies is a strange political beast, though perhaps not as strange as it looks at first glance. Despite Winterson’s early vote for Margaret Thatcher, Art and Lies decisively repudiates Thatcherism, not least for its indifference or hostility toward the poor and the working class:
Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.But the novel is far more invested in an aesthetic critique of the postmodern west (itself a recapitulation of Eliot’s aesthetic critique of the modern west: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”) as a time and place of wasted time and squandered artifice. All three of the voices in this novel denounce the artlessness of a society given over to money-making and cheap entertainment:
In the country of the Blind the one-eyed man is King? But what of the articulate among the guttural? Once upon a time I would have been listened to with respect, now, I am regarded with suspicion, and for the wrong reason. I know that I am false; the irony is that the barkers and jabberers believe themselves genuine. As if to speak badly is to speak truly. As if to have no command of language must ensure a complete command of emotional sincerity. As if, as journalists and novelists would have me believe, to write without artifice is to write honestly. But language is artifice. The human being is artificial. None of us is Rousseau Man, that noble savage, honest and untrained. Better then to acknowledge that what we are is what we have been taught, that done, at least it will be possible to choose our own teacher. I know I am made up of other people's say so, veins of tradition, a particular kind of education, borrowed methods that have disguised themselves as personal habits. I know that what I am is quite the opposite of an individual. But if the parrot is to speak, let him be taught by a singing master. Parrot may not learn to sing but he will know what singing is. That is why I have tried to hide myself among the best; music, pictures, books, philosophy, theology, like Dante, my great teacher is dead. My alive friends privately consider me to be rather highbrow and stuffy, but we are all stuffed, stuffed with other people's ideas parading as our own. Stuffed with the idiocies of the daily paper and twenty-four-hour television.Winterson goes so far as to indict modern medicine: a central symbol of the novel is a state-of-the-art cancer hospital, which is being erected in a poor district of London. Cancer serves for Winterson as a symbol of bourgeois emotional repression and material superfluity, and its expensive treatment as another means for the middle classes to make and spend, make and spend, its money. (Yes, you could light London with the power generated by Susan Sontag as she spins in her grave.)
But this Romantic assault on capitalist modernity, which is neither Left (too concerned about art and spirituality, too tragic in worldview) nor Right (too sympathetic to the poor and the colonized, too hostile to custom and religion), is a venerable tradition in British letters, encompassing Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, Pater, Woolf, Lawrence, and Eliot (if not, indeed, Shakespeare) before Winterson. And Winterson is easily able to reconcile her feminism and queer liberationism with this radically reactionary aesthetic because, in the person of Sappho, she persuasively identifies the artistic tradition itself with queerness and the feminine. Winterson’s polemic, in Handel’s voice, against the type of vernacular feminism that might now be labeled as Lean In feminism is quite timely:
It’s our fault, men like me I mean, we’ve spent so long trumpeting the importance of all that we do that women believe in it and want to do it themselves. Look at me, I’m a very wealthy man, at the top of my profession, and I’m running away like a schoolboy because I can’t sit at my desk even for another day. I know that everything I am and everything I stand for is worthless. How to tell her that?While I have my qualms about aspects of this worldview—and sometimes Winterson’s personae go much too far (“Better to be a beggar on the Ganges than broken on the gilded wheel of the West,” says Sappho, without, I suspect, having consulted such a beggar)—I am more sympathetic to it than not, for better or worse. The question for literary criticism, though, is, “How didactic can a novel get before readers have a right to protest?” This novel was not very well-received when it was first published in 1994. Its reception seems to have been marred by a spuriously personal venom in the British press, but even in America, reviews were mixed to hostile. William H. Prichard:
"Art & Lies," while it abandons novelistic constraints Ms. Winterson evidently feels are repressive, is saturated with echoes of Shakespeare and Blake and Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot (especially from "Four Quartets"). By contrast, Ms. Winterson's own efforts don't fare so well. "My belly was an unplowed field. Weeds had grown over my pubic hair. I was a nun among nettles," Picasso declares; Sappho exceeds her in visionary extravagance: "I am the petals double-borne, white points of love. I am the closed white hand that opens under the sun of you." "Shall I call your nipples hautboys? Shall I hide myself in the ombre of your throat?" Sappho asks rapturously, not staying for our reply. […] Ms. Winterson's prolonged and steady infusions of poetry into her novel turn the medium gaseous.And even Rikki Ducornet (“even” because she has many of the same virtues and vices as Winterson):
…a book that has opened with motion and light and a clear ringing becomes within a few pages gravity bound with the author's good intentions--one must always be wary of good intentions. Just as do children, books suffer from pedantry, and "Art and Lies," wanting to cover all the issues of our age, from ecological devastation, rampant corruption, dysfunctional families, homophobia, abortion, incest and more begins to preach. So that although the book's structure is mutable and porous, it manages to be both opaque and tedious, and this from a writer of great capacity whose custom it is to juggle with fire.And this is all fair enough, even Pritchard’s political complaint about the book’s ideological excesses (Winterson’s portrayal of Picasso’s father and brother make Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” look like a masterpiece of subtlety). Sappho’s section, in particular, is full of the breathless prose-poetry that made me dislike Written on the Body.
But when Winterson writes about Handel and Picasso, her prose becomes inventive and precise. It takes a true and a bold narrative gift to imagine the novel’s final section, in which we revisit with Handel his childhood romance with an older Cardinal who castrated him. This long and disturbing passage will have conservatives, feminists, and many if not most others hurling the book across the room (it did not bring a smile to my face either!), because Winterson, in her nostalgia for the aesthetic past, tells the terrible story without moral judgment; its outlandishness becomes plausible, its outrageousness delicate, as Winterson submerges herself and us in true otherness—not the fashionable otherness of commercial multiculturalism, in which self and other shop together, but the true otherness that even the most open-minded will want to denounce as mere barbarism. And maybe it is. But when Handel’s family finds out what has been going on and decisively ends his relationship with the Cardinal, the novel shockingly invites us to wonder, “Which cut did the harm? His or theirs?” What is worse—the mutilations of art and sex or the mutilations of a society hostile both to art and sex? That strikes me as a real question, a question you could spend your whole life trying to answer, and not a rhetorical one—which is what I mean when I say I want novels that deal with genuinely intractable and tragic quandaries rather than giving easy answers in the name of right-thinking.
It occurs to me that another novel was published around the same time in the U.K. that was similarly experimental and similarly ill-received: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Ishiguro’s novel is as bold as Winterson’s, and as complicatedly involved with the modernist tradition (though Ishiguro’s agon is with Dostoevsky and Kafka, whereas Winterson’s is with Woolf and Eliot). But The Unconsoled, as befits its title, totally undermines any Romantic ambition on the part of the artist to redeem society. Ishiguro’s artist cannot even redeem himself—but for all that, the novel says, art is worthwhile, a deep and private pleasure. These are two novels to read together, in dialogue with each other. They also illustrate the importance of going back to work that has been too hastily dismissed. When the fog of the present lifts in the future, the supposed masterpieces of the moment may be revealed as flimsy cardboard, while some of those books derogated by their first readers will stand out as figures of depth and substance.
(By the way, say what you will about Winterson’s high style, but this is a novel you can learn new words from: retiary orphrey, epurate, aurum, and more.)
In conclusion, it is time to look past the vagaries of Winterson’s reputation and even the datedness of this novel’s packaging—the cover of the edition I read looks (charmingly) like a 1990s cover for an alternative CD—and read this enchanting, disquieting, and exasperating novel. Not all of its risks are rewarded, but, as they say, better the interesting failure than the boring success.
October 9, 2007
"Two things significantly distinguish human beings from other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art."
Art & Lies is a book I don't quite understand. But there were choice quotes like the one above that kept me reading. The book is told through three characters eyes. Handel is a surgeon, ex priest. Picasso is a young painter who grew up in a very malignant environment, her brother molested, raped her repeatedly from when she was 9 on up. Her parents didn't believe her. Then there's Sappho. I hardly understood her parts in the book. The three of them are passengers on this train. The book tells a little bit of their histories. Their ways of thinking and recalling the past.
Art & Lies is a book I don't quite understand. But there were choice quotes like the one above that kept me reading. The book is told through three characters eyes. Handel is a surgeon, ex priest. Picasso is a young painter who grew up in a very malignant environment, her brother molested, raped her repeatedly from when she was 9 on up. Her parents didn't believe her. Then there's Sappho. I hardly understood her parts in the book. The three of them are passengers on this train. The book tells a little bit of their histories. Their ways of thinking and recalling the past.
March 24, 2025
This may be Jeanette Winterson’s best work to date. It is also the book so unanimously slammed by critics in 1994 that it nearly ended her career. Perhaps because, as Libby Brooks put it in a Guardian profile of the author some six years later, the primacy of her image – her absurd, messianic self-belief, her eccentric lifestyle, her sexuality, her unfeminine choices, her humourless determination to take her work seriously – was swiftly outflanking her own modernist agenda for the primacy of the text. Equally likely because of how radical this agenda here reveals itself to be: Art and Lies is an experimental novel, a startlingly, completely invented novel, written and published before such formal reinvention became concurrently fashionable outside of Joyce and Calvino and the literary manosphere.
On the face of it, this novel seems to bring together three figures from across art and time – the composer Handel, the painter Picasso, and the poet Sappho – on a train journey in a near-future London. But the Handel in this dream-world is a failed surgeon-priest and Picasso a young woman artist seeking a path away from sexual abuse and familial repression, neither bearing much relation to their namesakes. Sappho, on the other hand, speaks directly from the mouth of the Ancient Greek figure – either as a nod to that aforementioned primacy of text, or to how we have enough by way of biographical fact for the others but only speculation for herself. All three are fleeing themselves, and between Winterson’s captivating, impressionistic writing that switches between the first and third person and to and from an overlapping fourth character from an 18th century pornographic novel, their storylines weave together into a meditation on art, Eros, language, and identity.
Indeed, this is very evidently not just a book about art as pure form and creation, but also the conditions within which it can – or cannot – be birthed, and so between the author’s philosophical meaning-making and her formal reinvention of what a novel can do and be lies a pulsing, politically thorough critique of Western modernity and the socio-emotional deadening of society. By situating her characters between the past and the near-future with the train as a signifier of progress and civilisation, Winterson deftly produces a systemic critique ranging from religion, patriarchy and scientific sexism to consumerism, misinformation and miseducation, deep-rooted classism and the many evils historically normalised in the name of advancement and dialled further up by neoliberal establishments Thatcherite and beyond:
This is a ‘challenging’ read for a reason, as Winterson has long been telling us. Consider its politics, consider the central question – How Shall I Live? – and the emphasis on art here becomes an emphasis on creative potential: a way of reimagining, a start to remaking the world, something that simply can’t be made digestible, or force-fed, but which comes from engagement and understanding. And that, really, is the plot!
But of course, the primacy of an author’s image often outflanks her agenda. I get the sense that Winterson was more than aware of this at the time of writing this book – she was aware of it over three years earlier, when writing her new Introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and asserting its anti-linear, experimental interests over the (critical) notion that it was a straightforward semi-autobiographical novel. In this book as in her first, it is tempting to read each narrator as a stylised self-portrait of the author, who was brought up to serve the Church, fled a culturally void and emotionally repressive family, and is, like her Sappho, all sex. And so the book declares: “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.” There’s art to the breathtaking intertextuality woven here in the references to empty spaces and points of light and a child who doesn’t understand that bananas are the only fruit, and there’s art to the way this book explores the lies and deceptions of our neoliberal age. An astounding feat.
On the face of it, this novel seems to bring together three figures from across art and time – the composer Handel, the painter Picasso, and the poet Sappho – on a train journey in a near-future London. But the Handel in this dream-world is a failed surgeon-priest and Picasso a young woman artist seeking a path away from sexual abuse and familial repression, neither bearing much relation to their namesakes. Sappho, on the other hand, speaks directly from the mouth of the Ancient Greek figure – either as a nod to that aforementioned primacy of text, or to how we have enough by way of biographical fact for the others but only speculation for herself. All three are fleeing themselves, and between Winterson’s captivating, impressionistic writing that switches between the first and third person and to and from an overlapping fourth character from an 18th century pornographic novel, their storylines weave together into a meditation on art, Eros, language, and identity.
Indeed, this is very evidently not just a book about art as pure form and creation, but also the conditions within which it can – or cannot – be birthed, and so between the author’s philosophical meaning-making and her formal reinvention of what a novel can do and be lies a pulsing, politically thorough critique of Western modernity and the socio-emotional deadening of society. By situating her characters between the past and the near-future with the train as a signifier of progress and civilisation, Winterson deftly produces a systemic critique ranging from religion, patriarchy and scientific sexism to consumerism, misinformation and miseducation, deep-rooted classism and the many evils historically normalised in the name of advancement and dialled further up by neoliberal establishments Thatcherite and beyond:
We have come a long way. So we have. Is distance travelled more important than the state, on arrival, of the travellers? I have come so far so fast that I haven’t had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be. And I am not going to be given the choice. As soon as I learn enough to ask questions, all aboard, off we go again. Society on a World Cruise. And isn’t it astonishing how everywhere we go is beginning to look like everywhere we have been? The shock of the new? Forget it.
This is a ‘challenging’ read for a reason, as Winterson has long been telling us. Consider its politics, consider the central question – How Shall I Live? – and the emphasis on art here becomes an emphasis on creative potential: a way of reimagining, a start to remaking the world, something that simply can’t be made digestible, or force-fed, but which comes from engagement and understanding. And that, really, is the plot!
But of course, the primacy of an author’s image often outflanks her agenda. I get the sense that Winterson was more than aware of this at the time of writing this book – she was aware of it over three years earlier, when writing her new Introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and asserting its anti-linear, experimental interests over the (critical) notion that it was a straightforward semi-autobiographical novel. In this book as in her first, it is tempting to read each narrator as a stylised self-portrait of the author, who was brought up to serve the Church, fled a culturally void and emotionally repressive family, and is, like her Sappho, all sex. And so the book declares: “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.” There’s art to the breathtaking intertextuality woven here in the references to empty spaces and points of light and a child who doesn’t understand that bananas are the only fruit, and there’s art to the way this book explores the lies and deceptions of our neoliberal age. An astounding feat.
April 15, 2024
“What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire?
What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed?
What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?”
Back on the Winterson-themed train! This one real packs a punch and then a whole arsenal of societal criticism, raw cries of feminism and just the most amazing prose I could have hoped for. It is a fragmented mess but such a glorious one that I really don't care about that at all. Her profound understanding of the value of literature and how art affects us comes through in a the symbolism of a book that is revealed not through the (artificial) light we use to illuminate it but through the light that comes from it. I shouldn't say anything else, just please read this. I am convinced that you cannot read this and feel nothing!
No one writes like Winterson.
What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed?
What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?”
Back on the Winterson-themed train! This one real packs a punch and then a whole arsenal of societal criticism, raw cries of feminism and just the most amazing prose I could have hoped for. It is a fragmented mess but such a glorious one that I really don't care about that at all. Her profound understanding of the value of literature and how art affects us comes through in a the symbolism of a book that is revealed not through the (artificial) light we use to illuminate it but through the light that comes from it. I shouldn't say anything else, just please read this. I am convinced that you cannot read this and feel nothing!
No one writes like Winterson.
November 2, 2022
this had some beautiful writing in it (as expected), but it was just... very hollow? it was a long paean to words and language and meaning, but seemed to get caught in the idea of being that; trapped in eddies of repetitive images and clever phrases and passages that didn't feel genuine.
unfinished-or-abandoned
July 11, 2023I was disappointed that Handel and Picasso aren't actually Handel and Picasso - I'd anticipated an interesting conversation between these three artists from European history.
the thread of Handel the doctor... contained alot of sexualised and pretty manipulative interactions with women ☹️
there was a big wanky passage of Latin for no good reason earlier too...
not sure what the story about the library was about...
the writing is good I think... but the content feels like it's trying abit hard to be clever, and comes off as abit elitist.
and some of the language used?? either again trying abit hard, or it's simply abit ignorant/bigoted.
cos, yeah, it's kinda the voice of the character Handel, but given the piece being really a ramble by the author, it's also her voice I'm hearing.
(I deliberately hadn't read anything by Jeanette Winterson - until finding this in the library, and the title and (slightly misleading) synopsis catching my eye - after a really ableist article she wrote for an LGBTQI periodical, probably about twenty years ago now).
Doll (the bawd) makes an appearance towards the end of Handel's first piece. I enjoyed her part in the story, tho wasn't prepared to endure the others...
Picasso... 😶
I got as far as Sappho's thread... but I'd lost interest and stopped about 27 percent into the book.
accessed as an RNIB audiobook, the readers were good 🙂
the thread of Handel the doctor... contained alot of sexualised and pretty manipulative interactions with women ☹️
there was a big wanky passage of Latin for no good reason earlier too...
not sure what the story about the library was about...
the writing is good I think... but the content feels like it's trying abit hard to be clever, and comes off as abit elitist.
and some of the language used?? either again trying abit hard, or it's simply abit ignorant/bigoted.
cos, yeah, it's kinda the voice of the character Handel, but given the piece being really a ramble by the author, it's also her voice I'm hearing.
(I deliberately hadn't read anything by Jeanette Winterson - until finding this in the library, and the title and (slightly misleading) synopsis catching my eye - after a really ableist article she wrote for an LGBTQI periodical, probably about twenty years ago now).
Doll (the bawd) makes an appearance towards the end of Handel's first piece. I enjoyed her part in the story, tho wasn't prepared to endure the others...
Picasso... 😶
I got as far as Sappho's thread... but I'd lost interest and stopped about 27 percent into the book.
accessed as an RNIB audiobook, the readers were good 🙂
July 13, 2007
Jeanette Winterson's strong command of the language combined with a concise, confident direction make Art and Lies a pleasure to read. Filled with allegory and farcical situations reminiscent of Jean Genet and William S. Borroughs she tells of a sexually ambiguous surgeon named Handel; a mentally and physically molested woman artist named Picasso; and the poet Sappho who shares a train ride with the other two.
What ensues is a history of each carefully developed character and how they intertwine with the others, unbeknownst to themselves. In turn misconseptions of literature, art, sex, and poetry are placed on the slab to be dissected with each of their lives. Art, she says is not meant to reflect life; a life which cannot help but reflect our own escape from adolescence. Rather, art is a product of imagination which creates its own rules and laws. The conclusion is so satisfying I was disappointed only that Winterson's fantastic imagery and play of light, color, and depth had to come to and end.
What ensues is a history of each carefully developed character and how they intertwine with the others, unbeknownst to themselves. In turn misconseptions of literature, art, sex, and poetry are placed on the slab to be dissected with each of their lives. Art, she says is not meant to reflect life; a life which cannot help but reflect our own escape from adolescence. Rather, art is a product of imagination which creates its own rules and laws. The conclusion is so satisfying I was disappointed only that Winterson's fantastic imagery and play of light, color, and depth had to come to and end.
June 30, 2022
this was an Experience, capital E, there's no other way to describe it. i told a friend this when i was halfway through and i stand by it now that i've finished it: it feels like being told a story by someone who is incredibly smart and incredibly drunk? i did not understand it pretty much at all, but even with that i still loved it because of how absolutely amazing the writing is. the only thing that put me off was how much i fucking hated handel, like i know he's not Meant to be likeable in any way but still i could NOT stand him and had to skim through his sections to get through them - LOVED picasso and sappho's sections though, they were amazing.
so yeah, did not understand this at all, winterson is a genius, it was kind of like getting punched in the face over and over again and i loved it, dear god i need to read something with a followable plot now to give my brain a break
so yeah, did not understand this at all, winterson is a genius, it was kind of like getting punched in the face over and over again and i loved it, dear god i need to read something with a followable plot now to give my brain a break
April 15, 2024
I am so excited to be doing a deep dive into Winterson's works over the next few weeks! This feels like an excellent place to start exploring her writing further. It's expansive, fragmented, covers a massive amount of themes, and is beautifully written. The prose is more like poetry and it was so satisfying to see certain connections form and discover recurring elements. I am also very impressed with the sheer breadth and depth of Winterson's knowledge and the amount of references (to literature, history, politics...) she makes - and the number of languages that are just casually included. Having said that, this does feel a bit too fragmented at times and the novel is a bit rough at times. I'm personally not at all bothered by the lack of straightforward plot, but I can imagine that not everyone enjoys the confusion that's inevitable when reading this one. All in all, 4 stars!
August 30, 2010
With such astonishingly lyrical writing, deep introspective musings and resounding cries for individualism this is a truly mesmerising book. I began thinking to try the first few pages and some endlessly astounding moments later I had finished and was strangely aware of how dark it suddenly had become outside! Jeanette Winterson's fantastic prose weaves exhilarating, arousing, inspiring and uplifting web that entirely entangles and lingers long after the end.
April 10, 2024
“i am the place i come back to and i can’t keep hiding difficult things in trunks” [said through gritted teeth]
July 4, 2025
(4.5★) wow wow wow. this read more like poetry than a novel to me (my fav chapters were those of sappho's, in case you couldn't tell from my updates). a captivating reflection on why humans create art and whether art reflects or simply IS life. i am in love with winterson's prose and can't wait to delve into more of her work.
that being said, this was definitely not an easy read. i had to really spend time and effort to follow the overarching plot, so much so that i considered lowering my rating of this book. im still not sure i "understood" the novel entirely, but im so enchanted by how winterson writes that im willing to overlook that and give her other works a chance.
overall, very much a book for thought daughters who spend their days reminiscing, in a way, about their painful past and how that affects their current life and art (im looking at you, diane nguyen). if you like beautiful writing that is a bit obscure and challenging to read, this one is definitely for you.
that being said, this was definitely not an easy read. i had to really spend time and effort to follow the overarching plot, so much so that i considered lowering my rating of this book. im still not sure i "understood" the novel entirely, but im so enchanted by how winterson writes that im willing to overlook that and give her other works a chance.
overall, very much a book for thought daughters who spend their days reminiscing, in a way, about their painful past and how that affects their current life and art (im looking at you, diane nguyen). if you like beautiful writing that is a bit obscure and challenging to read, this one is definitely for you.
June 19, 2025
went insane several times over the course of reading this
June 3, 2022
An astonishingly eye-opening 1994-'penned' cornucopia of Jeanette Winterson's literary oeuvre!
There! Poetic language used to express ideas, feelings & emotions about sex in Western Literature (capital letters!).
The three characters/voices are Sappho, Handel & Picasso...but the names are somewhat ambiguous; but the essential core of this 200-odd page dream of a read(!) is sex, and women's strengths in dealing with the injustices & inequalities of sexual identities. Topical!...but from the last century...& the milennia past. Several short passages would warrant the term 'poetry'; others, 'science' or 'philosophy'...or, as in the title 'art' or 'lies'...; the whole is just a phenomenal read, which sent my mind in so many directions about my own experiences in the western mind-sets & sexual continua...(is that good latin?)...sexual mores, habits & expectations...again all very topical! Do women have penises? Are men naturally promiscuous? Are women advancing into a sexual utopia where men no longer have the whip hand? (If you like that sort of thing!). See...a book to provoke your own critique of our differences & similarities! For the record, I have all the requisite organs to qualify as a reader (eyes, brain, heart)...if not as a 'membrum virile'...used pejoratively!
Not for the faint-hearted or the over-sensitive or innocent!
There! Poetic language used to express ideas, feelings & emotions about sex in Western Literature (capital letters!).
The three characters/voices are Sappho, Handel & Picasso...but the names are somewhat ambiguous; but the essential core of this 200-odd page dream of a read(!) is sex, and women's strengths in dealing with the injustices & inequalities of sexual identities. Topical!...but from the last century...& the milennia past. Several short passages would warrant the term 'poetry'; others, 'science' or 'philosophy'...or, as in the title 'art' or 'lies'...; the whole is just a phenomenal read, which sent my mind in so many directions about my own experiences in the western mind-sets & sexual continua...(is that good latin?)...sexual mores, habits & expectations...again all very topical! Do women have penises? Are men naturally promiscuous? Are women advancing into a sexual utopia where men no longer have the whip hand? (If you like that sort of thing!). See...a book to provoke your own critique of our differences & similarities! For the record, I have all the requisite organs to qualify as a reader (eyes, brain, heart)...if not as a 'membrum virile'...used pejoratively!
Not for the faint-hearted or the over-sensitive or innocent!
May 23, 2020
"This is not a novel but an extended rift on art, sex, religion, social repression, the dangers of patriarchy, and everything that is wrong with the contemporary drift to the right.”
Another pick from my to-be-read shelf, probably purchased from Daedelus Books back in the dark ages, twenty-some years ago, when they sent you a paper catalog and you sent in an order.
Art & Lies is set in some dream time, in the 20th century, maybe in London. The characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho aren’t *the* Handel, Picasso and Sappho, although Sappho actually is even as she unwittingly interacts with Picasso, in some kind of time space meld. There are threads of a story but they are interspersed with the extended riffs so it doesn’t read like a novel. The writing is amazingly beautiful. I needed to read this book slowly so I could savor the words. Even if I sometimes didn’t quite understand the meaning of the words.
I think, in another previous time, I might not have had the mental capacity to handle this book, but, now, in the midst of this pandemic, when we are in our very own dream time, sometime in the 21st century, maybe wherever we are at this moment, it was easier to slip into the surreal setting and events. It’s a shorter book but worthy of a long, slow read.
Another pick from my to-be-read shelf, probably purchased from Daedelus Books back in the dark ages, twenty-some years ago, when they sent you a paper catalog and you sent in an order.
Art & Lies is set in some dream time, in the 20th century, maybe in London. The characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho aren’t *the* Handel, Picasso and Sappho, although Sappho actually is even as she unwittingly interacts with Picasso, in some kind of time space meld. There are threads of a story but they are interspersed with the extended riffs so it doesn’t read like a novel. The writing is amazingly beautiful. I needed to read this book slowly so I could savor the words. Even if I sometimes didn’t quite understand the meaning of the words.
I think, in another previous time, I might not have had the mental capacity to handle this book, but, now, in the midst of this pandemic, when we are in our very own dream time, sometime in the 21st century, maybe wherever we are at this moment, it was easier to slip into the surreal setting and events. It’s a shorter book but worthy of a long, slow read.
June 30, 2010
4.5 stars. I am growing more accustomed to Winterson's writing style, and it was this book that finally made me bow down and worship her as a master of the English language. Her prose is so smoothly woven that even when I didn't follow the "plot" of the story I was still mesmerized. That is her style, I realized-- for me to enjoy the journey rather than rush through to the destination. I won't even attempt a plot summary. "Art & Lies," for me, was more a series of vibrant, human vignettes on personhood and art. This book reminded me strongly of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities."
October 3, 2016
The usual unsurpassed Winterson literary & lingual pyrotechnics and lyricism. Ideas of love, art, desire, history, big ideas dealt with in breathless fragments. The Handel and Picasso chapters were wondrous, the Sappho a bit more oblique and harder to grasp and therefore less satisfying. And the bawd, was well bawdy. Maybe just a bit too packed and breathless for my way of reading. One should probably bask in a couple of a pages at a time and go away and meditate on them before returning for another sumptuous nibbled feast of the next two pages.
March 11, 2017
This one lured me in with its beautiful, philosophical language and then crushed me to pieces. Art and Lies deals with a lot of heavy and dark themes and is therefore very hard to read at times. Nevertheless, the writing is so smooth and has such a pleasant flow that you want to read on, no matter the subject.
March 31, 2024
A gift for language.
Winterson’s writing provokes great waves of emotions, leaving the reader in awe of what she is able to produce.
While the plot is all over the place and, being very honest here, still makes no sense to me, the rich vocabulary and phenomenal storytelling make it all worth it and create a hauntingly beautiful picture.
Winterson’s writing provokes great waves of emotions, leaving the reader in awe of what she is able to produce.
While the plot is all over the place and, being very honest here, still makes no sense to me, the rich vocabulary and phenomenal storytelling make it all worth it and create a hauntingly beautiful picture.
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December 5, 2010I don't know how to rate this...it was my first Winterson book. There were whole pages I wanted to cut out and paste on my wall. But there's also an entire musical score at the end, and lots of other strangeness. Not entirely sure what to make of it--but I will definitely read more JW.
June 10, 2012
Brilliant! Another Winterson masterpiece! This novel doesn't quite read like a novel, but the prose is stunning, breath-takingly beautiful. I was enthralled through the entire book, couldn't read fast enough. It was an absolute joy to read.... again!
January 3, 2018
first book by her. descriptions are astounding, i fell in love with her attentiveness to colour and light especially. a special intertwining of 3 tales, written with emotional sensitivity and daring. one of those books that upon finishing, i already feel like i need to read again.
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