The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The World and Other Places by Jeanette WintersonEric Lorberer
Jeanette Winterson. The World and Other Places. Knopf, 1999. 220 pp. $22.00.
Fans of Jeanette Winterson’s laconic prose will find much to enjoy in this, the author’s first collection of short fiction. Culling stories from the last twelve years, this book shows that Winterson can sculpt her sentences as precisely in the short form as she does in the novel. Her gift for imagery is startling, whether noticing an aged woman (“with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist”) or a dinner table suspended in the air by chains: “an armoury of knives and forks laid out in case the eaters knocked one into the abyss.” Despite the deft, self-deprecating irony that finds expression in her characters, Winterson’s lyricism is the central note struck throughout, as in this passage from “Adventure of a Lifetime”: “I started to think about Hansel and Gretel and how they found their way through the forest by leaving a trail of stones. We left nothing behind but the heat from our bodies and that soon chilled.”
One of the most delightful things about this book is its range; Winterson proves herself equally adept at personal narrative (“The 24-Hour Dog”), fable (“The Three Friends”), speculative fiction (“Disappearance I”) and arty metatext (“The Poetics of Sex”). Her story “Newton” (which contains the all-time great sentence: “There’s no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental”) lengthens this reach even farther. As in her novels, Winterson is able to enunciate a feminist politics without leadening her prose, and her facility for portraying strong women (such as the Artemis who quietly kills a brutish Orion in a reimagined mythology) is balanced here by complex male characters (see “Atlantic Crossing,” “The Green Man,” or the title story). “Using my compass I write to you,” Winterson says in her afterword, and indeed, she directs these stories to her readers with unerring aim. [Eric Lorberer]