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Written on the Body
A novel of loss and love, and a philosophical meditation on the body. The novel explores the body as a physical entity and as an image of our innermost selves in order to reveal more about the phenomenon of love. author: Winterson, Jeanette; publisher: Vintage
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£5.59
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Vintage Written on the Body
<I>Written on The Body</I> is a tender dissection of erotic love. The prose is like a poem, lush with wit and imagery, but behind the luxuriant relish of the words, there is a scalpel-sharp cut of emotions. Love and longing are the wounds through which Winterson's imagery flows. The novel begins with regret: Why is the measure of love loss? It hasn't rained in three months ... The grapes have withered on the vine. The narrator is also suffering from a heart-stricken drought. She is grieving for the loss of her true love, Louise. <p> Louise has flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair, and a body besieged by leukaemia, her cells waging war: here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight. But Louise is not dead, merely abandoned by the narrator with the best of intentions. As the lament continues, striking in its beauty and dazzling inventiveness, more of the love story is revealed. The narrator has been a female Lothario, falling in love, and out again, swaggering like Mercutio. But then she meets Louise, married to Elgin--very eminent, very dull, very rich--and is hopelessly, helplessly smitten: I didn't only want Louise's flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. Elgin persuades her to leave for the good of Louise's health, and all is undone. <p> Winterson does not shy away from grief, or joy. She has acutely described how love can transform a life, but also destroy it too. But, for Winterson, where there is love there is hope: I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world ... I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields. <I>Eithne Farry</I>
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£5.59
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Reaktion Books Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History
The cover art for <I>Written on the Body</I> (A Young Daughter of the Picts) shows a 16th-century picture of a pleasantly broad-hipped Celtic woman wearing a flower-print dress. Except that it isn't a flower-print dress: the woman is covered in botanical tattoos. It is just one example of the antiquity and ubiquity of tattooing in human culture, a topic that this volume tackles with impressive depth and range. This is a book that started out as a scholarly academic tome gathering together a variety of anthropological and cultural studies essays on tattooing from Classical times to the present day; but, as with many Reaktion books, it transcends its origins. True, a couple of the essays are couched in academic-speak--Juliet Fleming, for instance, pondering tattooed skin in the Renaissance (within this new Euclidian space the skin functions as a Derridean supplement, the material remainder then haunts the objective spatial depth within which the Cartesian subject is driven to locate itself), but the majority of pieces in the collection are accessible and absorbing, helped by scores of fascinating illustrations. There are several accounts of James Cook's voyages to Tahiti, where the word tattoo comes from; and the volume comprehensively demonstrates how ubiquitous this practice is to human culture. Jane Caplan's own chapter on Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a particularly good survey, from crude anchors and serpents on British sailors to the surprisingly elegant tattoos recorded on the bodies of French convicts--smart designs and cool logos like <I>l'ami du contraire</I> and <I>etoile du malheur</I>. A recurring theme in the essays is that although tattooing is often seen as a marginal activity, in fact it occupies a much more central place in human culture than is often acknowledged. While most books about tattoos are nothing more than catalogues of images, this collection is a thought-provoking and engaging investigation into the theory and practice of the art. Tattooing, it seems, is everywhere. --<I>Adam Roberts</I>
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£17.05
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