masonn 's review for:

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

4.0

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The first book I have ever read of its kind. Earlier this summer I read Winterson's Art Objects and I loved what she wrote about the author's job being to push her language into the future, so when I picked up this book I was eager to see how she went about doing that (or if she did). Sexing the Cherry obeys no rules of fiction that I am familiar with, and throughout the book I kept thinking to myself 'I didn't know it was possible to write like this.' In some ways the book reads like a Haruki Murakami story in that reality and fantasy work side by side, but it also goes beyond Murakami's work and takes on a complete dreamlike quality that I want more of. Time is relative, narrator is relative, even setting is unstable. You can never be quite sure who is speaking and where you are in time and place, and that creates an effect of distilled reality that I am still trying to understand. I'm going to be rereading this book several times because I don't think I can digest all it contains, or even a fraction of what it contains, in one pass. There's a lot to take apart here, but I am already in love.