Written on the Body: My Impression…

I don’t believe in writing book reviews. I cannot clinically and objectively review books that impact me. They can only be recollected, relived, re-experienced in one’s mind like any other experience. Those that do not impress are not worth reviewing, in any case.

I finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body last night. I was up till 2:00 a.m. finishing the book and then was awake for the rest of the night thinking about it. I read and re-read passages, phrases, paragraphs, sentences… The book with its intricate, rich, entwined metaphors at multiple levels had left me breathless. Not because this is the best book I have read. I have read better ones, more profound, of greater literary value, trendsetters in the literary world, creating genres of their own… This left me stunned because of its closeness to truth as I knew it, as I had felt it.

I had come across an excerpt from this book in the Granta book of Body. I had been on the lookout for the book ever since and came across it in a Crosswords sale. But I had not dreamed of the impact it would have on me--this feeling of "you are voicing my thoughts, articulating them in a way I was powerelss to do, and thus bringing me face to face with them, forcing me to recognize them as my own..." was new to me.

This book held me spellbound by its immediacy. It was a chilling experience. Rarely had a book made me feel that it was narrating the life of someone I knew, and knew so well that it was unnerving to see it in print.

I have put some passages here that moved me, scared me, thrusting it home that human emotions and experiences are not so unique after all. Even when we feel we are breaking all bounds and norms set by society, manifesting ourselves in ways only we have envisaged, carving new pathways, delineating emotions in previously undreamed of ways, we still fail to be original. Never can be. Even the most private of feelings, the most intense of passions have been felt by someone else somewhere at some other time, far removed from my world yet succumbing to the same emotions. These have been recorded, put into print for people like me to read.

Each one’s life is a quotation, a replica of someone else’s. Just like the words “I love you” will always be a quotation. But that does not stop us from packing every emotion we feel into those three words. This is possibly the only sentence in the English language that is so open to interpretations as to be limitless in its meanings, boundless because of the emotions it can contain--sometimes lapsing into meaninglessness because of the sheer possibilities it presents, because of the cliché it has become…

In this novel, Winterson undercuts clichés at every occasion, turning them on their heads to explore love but also exposes the frightening and unnerving ambiguity that lies at the heart of the “phenomenon of love itself.”

In this book, she looks (quoting her here): “…at love's ability to shatter and heal simultaneously. Loving someone else destroys our ideas of who we are and what we want. Priorities change, friends change, houses change, we change. Part of the strangeness of being human is our need of boundaries, parameters, definitions, explanations, and our need for them to be overturned. For most people, only the positives of love and faith (and a child is both), or the negatives of disaster and disease, achieve this. Death comes too late. The final shattering affects others, but not ourselves…”

Some passages/sentences from the book:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

…I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me. I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures…the saggy armchair of clichés.

Why do human beings need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.

These are the confines of our life together, this room, this bed. This is the voluptuous exile freely chosen. We daren't eat out, who knows whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the canniness of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day, chilled in the fridge, baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot and cold, fire and ice, the extremes under which we live.

…I know exactly what's happening and I know too that I am jumping out of this plane of my own free will. No, I don't have a parachute, but worse, neither does Jacqueline…

…I don’t want a pillow I want your moving breathing flesh. I want to hold your hand in the dark, I want to roll on to you and push into you. When I turn in the night, the bed is continent broad. There is endless white space where you won’t be. I travel it inch by inch but you’re not there. It’s not a game, you’re not going to leap out and surprise me…

"You'll get over it..." it's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because "it" is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit in. Why would I want them to?... Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price, I would have agreed to pay it. With the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it...

I named the cat Hopeful…

Wisdom says forget, the body howls...

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