well I gave it 4 stars before I finished as I loved the way it challenges standard narrative...BUT the last 2 chapters kind of blew that....like she just chucked in a few pages from her journal... so downgrading it to 3 stars.14/03/13 1 of 19 books for $10***********QUOTES ********* SPOILERS****************He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.but they might not be telling you the truth.What do you mean?you can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.So what should I say?When?When I love someone?You should say it.A problem shared was a problem doubled, he thought. people tried to help, but all they did was interfere. better to keep trouble contained, like a mad dog. Then he remembered the dog. They were his thoughts. he wouldn't tell anyone, ever. Do you know the story of Jekyll and Hyde?Of course.Well then – to avoid either extreme, it is necessary to find all the lives in between.Are we so utterly lacking in self-knowledge do you think?I wouldn’t put it like that, Dark: a man may know himself, but he prides himself on his character, his integrity – the word says it all – integrity – we use to mean virtue, but it means wholeness too, and which of us is that?This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, loves is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.We’re here, there,, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.There’s a booth in Grand Central Station where you can go and record your life. You talk. It tapes. It’s the modern-day confessional – no priest, just your voice in the silence. What you were, digitally saved for the future. Forty minutes is yours.Now the sky was a dead sea, and the stars and the planets were memory-points, like Darwin’s fossils. There were archives of catastrophe and mistake.The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water – either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in the rock – your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright. Before he wrote on the origin of Species, Darwin spent five years as a naturalist, aboard HMS Beagle. In nature he found not past, present and future as we recognise them, but an evolutionary process of change – energy never rapped for too long – life always changing.Darwin said something to me once for which I was grateful. I had been trying to forget, trying to stop my mind reaching for a place where it can never home. He knew my agitation, though he did not know the cause, and he took me up to (Am Parbh) – the Turning point. Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.I wish I could be clearer, I wish I could say “ My life has no light. My life was eating me alive”The rest of my life. I have never rested always run, run so fast that the sun can’t make a shadow. Well, here I am – mid-way, lost in a dark wood – the selva oscura without a torch, a guide, or even a bird. In 1859 Darwin published on the Origin of the Species. Wagner completed the opera Tristan and Isolde. Both are about the beginnings of the world.In Tristan the world shrinks to a boat, a bed, a lantern, a love-potion, a wound. The world is contained within a word – Isold. The Romantic solipsism that nothing exists but the two of us, could not be further from the multiplicity and variety of Darwin’s theory of the natural world. Here, the world and everything in it forms and is re-formed tirelessly and unceasingly. Nature’s vitality is amoral and unsenti-mental: the weak die, the strong survive. In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth’s crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. There last meal is sometimes preserved n peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.Some wounds never heal.The second time the sword went in, I aimed it at the place of the first. I am weak there – the place where I had been found out before. My weakness was skinned over by your love. I knew when you healed me that the wound would open again. I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice. The love-potion? I never drank it? Did you?I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution.I don’t think of love as the a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought making as it I life giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.My little orbit of life circles love. I daren’t get any closer. I’m not a mystic seeking final communion. I don’t go out with SPF5. I protect myself.
I know - I'm "currently reading" 3 books already. But only one of them is fiction - so that's really the only one I count. And it's 892 pages long! I'm enjoying Shadow Country, but its work to read. This book is play. I'm not very far in Lighthousekeeping. In fact I picked it up just for a little distraction from the weight of Shadow Country, just planning on reading the book jacket and putting it right back down. Then I moved on to the first page ..."My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate." (Aren’t we all?) I started feeling a little breathless and mesmerized and swirly eyed and moved on to the next short section. I'm a sucker for a book broken into short sections and this one just flows from one little tiny section to another. I'm not sure how I'll pace myself between this book, Shadow Country, the Total Immersion swimming book and the Chi running book (which I haven't touched in so long I'm not sure where it is). But I know which one of this reading stack will make me get that calm little smile of pleasure when I'm reading it. Review:I have zigged and zagged about this book: It’s a story within a story within a story. It’s about the power of stories. It’s a fable. It’s poetry. It’s about light and dark. It’s about Jekyll and Hyde. It’s about Pirates and Silver. But finally I have to say it is what it is. It’s whatever you get from it. You can just sit back and enjoy the language and the salty, fuzzy images Winterson creates for you: Railings Row is a terrace of houses set back from the road. They reared up, black-bricked and salt-stained, their paint peeling, their brass green. Or you can appreciate the subtle humor in the dialog between Pew and Silver: Miss Pinch says you came from the orphanage in Glasgow.There’s always been a Pew at Cape Wrath.But not the same Pew.Well, well.You can count the references to the dark and light, good and bad, this and that, here and there, then and now – and get a rather large number.You can furrow your brow and wonder when the heck the story took place since there are both references to lighthouse keepers and Starbucks coffee.Or you can just enjoy Lighthousekeeping like you would a painting or a nature walk or a lovely Pinot Noir from the Oregon coast. And that’s what I finally settled into.
What do You think about Lighthousekeeping (2006)?
Second book of the readathon! I love Jeanette Winterson's writing, but I just don't love her books. Does that make any sense? I love the way she uses words, the ebb and flow of her prose, but it never becomes a satisfying whole for me. I think I find it easier to accept, the more I read of her stuff, but I'm still not quite there yet.I never know what to say about her work because of it. I loved the beginning of this, and the story within the story about Babel Dark, but I don't think it was satisfying in the end. Still, if you like Jeanette Winterson's work, this is very similar to her usual style.Oh, and I did like the Tristan and Isolde segment.
—Nikki
LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING was my return to Winterson's writing after a long absence. This novel is uneven, but the better parts clearly demonstrate Winterson's considerable strengths as a writer: hauntingly poetic prose, mesmerizing in its rhythms, and a deployment of language that is rich, deft, nuanced, but never ostentatious. Winterson's themes (across her whole body of work) don't run broadly, but they run deep: the perils attendant upon how we construct our identities; what really matters in life and how we define and protect those things; love, loneliness, and abandonment; the thin line between truth and lies; and, most of all, the absolute necessity of storytelling for the human experience to have meaning. This novel's ideas, symbols, parables, and clever use of historical fact (from Charles Darwin to Robert Louis Stevenson to the history of lighthouses) keep the reader musing for days afterwards, but the attempts to bring the rich fictional fabric into the present day, and the occasional feeling that autobiography is forcing its way in a little too assertively, prevent the the novel from rising to the heights of Winterson's masterpiece, THE PASSION.
—Mark
Jeanette Winterson came to Chicago during the tour of this book. It was a very exciting reading that I will never forget. I brought my books to be signed by her and she was very gracious and quite personable when it was my turn to speak to her. We all must remember, myself included, that even great writers are just people underneath it all.Anyways, when I got home the first thing I did when I got home was plop down on my couch and devoured this book. I was like a kid in a candy shop, I just couldn't stop reading. This is a very good book about love, loss and the ties that bind. Friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and sometimes that family becomes more meaningful than the ones that we are stuck with. I would certainly recommend this book to new readers of Winterson as well as seasoned readers.
—Kate
