The Passion

Jeanette Winterson

Winterson's third novel, and the first one I picked up to read. It came highly recommended, but I'm not sure exactly what to make of it.

The story is that of Henri, a naive French soldier who works in Napolean's kitchens slaughtering chickens and of Villanelle, a mysterious Venetian woman whose husband has sold her to Napolean's armies and gambled away her heart. When Henri becomes disallusioned and runs away, he takes Villanelle with him. As they journey to Venice, he falls in love with her, but she can't love him back because her heart has been stolen. In the attempt to retrieve her heart, Henri kills her estranged husband, and ends up in an asylum.

While this seems straight forward enough, the author alternates between Henri and Villanelle's viewpoints almost in the same paragraph, without a clear indication of which is speaking. I'm not a big fan of magical realism, and this short novel is rife with it. I felt that the book was well written, and well researched but some spark of enjoyment was missing for me. I have several of Winterson's other novels, and I hope I don't find the same difficulty of enjoyment in those.