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A review by snowmaiden
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
4.0
I first read (or attempted to read) this book in 1997 for a seminar on contemporary British writers. It was my last semester of undergraduate study; I was 21 years old. The initial text for the class was Granta issue 43, a collection of short stories by notable young British novelists. We divvied up the list of writers from the table of contents and tried to find copies of their novels to report on. It was a brutal winter in a small college town in North Dakota. We were not very successful. (Although I was able to locate one of my assigned books on a website that one of my classmates recommended. It was an experiment in online bookselling called Amazon.com. Perhaps you have heard of it since?)
The near-impossibility of finding the texts is only one of the reasons that the class was a disaster. The professor was easily distractible and could be led off on tangents that consumed the whole class period-- that is, on the rare occasions when we actually had class. She lived miles away on a farm in Minnesota. It was, as I've already said, a brutal winter. Even on days when there wasn't an actual blizzard, she often cancelled class to attend to her flock of sheep.
I was one of the few students who actually got the opportunity to make a presentation (on Louis de Bernières). By that point I'd already given up on this book, which I couldn't make heads or tails of despite my best efforts. It's always nagged at me as unfinished business, especially as I've read other Winterson novels in the past few years and enjoyed them. So when I saw a glowing review appear here recently, I just knew it was a sign I should try again.
This time I managed to get through it in just three days! I'm definitely a more sophisticated reader now, with much more understanding of English history to draw upon. However, I still don't know how I would have fared without those other Winterson novels under my belt. This is a difficult work any way you slice it, and it definitely helped that I already "speak Jeannette Winterson." If you haven't already read and loved some of her more accessible novels, I wouldn't start here. But if you have, it's well worth the read.
The near-impossibility of finding the texts is only one of the reasons that the class was a disaster. The professor was easily distractible and could be led off on tangents that consumed the whole class period-- that is, on the rare occasions when we actually had class. She lived miles away on a farm in Minnesota. It was, as I've already said, a brutal winter. Even on days when there wasn't an actual blizzard, she often cancelled class to attend to her flock of sheep.
I was one of the few students who actually got the opportunity to make a presentation (on Louis de Bernières). By that point I'd already given up on this book, which I couldn't make heads or tails of despite my best efforts. It's always nagged at me as unfinished business, especially as I've read other Winterson novels in the past few years and enjoyed them. So when I saw a glowing review appear here recently, I just knew it was a sign I should try again.
This time I managed to get through it in just three days! I'm definitely a more sophisticated reader now, with much more understanding of English history to draw upon. However, I still don't know how I would have fared without those other Winterson novels under my belt. This is a difficult work any way you slice it, and it definitely helped that I already "speak Jeannette Winterson." If you haven't already read and loved some of her more accessible novels, I wouldn't start here. But if you have, it's well worth the read.