<![CDATA[The Powerbook]]>

false <![CDATA[The Powerbook]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170370867m/50653.jpg 50653 11 "What happened to the omniscient author?""Gone interactive." While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, Jeanette Winterson's The.PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, The.PowerBook travels with ease. It casts the net of its love story over Paris, Capri and London. Interactive narrator Ali is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation. All you have to do is decide who you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. Like all the best video games you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware, you can enter and play the game, but you cannot determine its outcome. Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. Ali/x wants to make love as simple as a song. But even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story. The.PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humour, snappy dialogue and good jokes, several of which are at the author's own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of the The.PowerBook are stored a variety of stories which the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of a Roman Governor in Spitalfields Church or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel. "What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson wrote in "A Work of My Own". The.PowerBook answers these needs. Winterson's prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of co-ordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked noughties. With The.PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly got there first. --Rachel Holmes 965334 2000 The Powerbook total:1002|5:179|4:302|3:331|2:146|1:44| 1002 3432 1292 75 4 1 false false Sat Jun 09 21:00:24 -0700 2007 Sat Jun 09 21:06:13 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Sep 28 01:17:37 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 28 01:18:11 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 20 08:06:40 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 20 08:54:27 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jun 22 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 21 15:23:33 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 22 01:47:40 -0700 2009 "Always"
"Any particular reason?"
"A stranger is a safe place. You can tell a stranger anything."
"Suppose I put it in my book?"
"You write fiction."
"So?"...more...]]> 4 1 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 17 19:59:10 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 18 08:39:57 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 1 false false Mon Mar 31 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Mar 28 04:35:49 -0700 2008 Mon Mar 31 08:07:42 -0700 2008
I would NOT recom...more...]]> 2 0 false false Fri May 25 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 27 08:59:45 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 27 08:59:45 -0700 2009 I did not sense that the narrative's analogy with the Apple Powerbook has been fu...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Oct 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Oct 13 14:30:52 -0700 2009 Tue Nov 03 17:32:41 -0800 2009
The main plot, which actually f...more...]]> 5 0 false false Wed Mar 05 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Mar 27 11:31:33 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 07 20:19:54 -0700 2008
"Inside her marriage there were too many clocks and not enough time. Too much furniture and too little space. Outside her marriage, there would be nothing to hold her, nothing to shape her. The space she found would be outer space. Space w...more...]]> 1 1 false false Sat Feb 16 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Feb 18 13:27:09 -0800 2008 Mon Feb 18 13:45:56 -0800 2008
I resisted the whole powerbook idea. It felt like it was trying too hard to be clever and exotic. (And the language of computer prompts and commands stopped being exotic a while...more...]]> 3 1 false false Fri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2002 Thu Jan 17 17:33:22 -0800 2008 Mon May 19 16:56:44 -0700 2008 The Passion by this author, I was expecting something a bit more significant. But alas, it was not to be. A clever idea, though.

In online chat rooms, people take on alternate personas. This is about someone who helps others do that and who develop the story that goes wi...more...]]> 4 1 true false Mon Oct 12 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jun 21 12:43:01 -0700 2007 Thu Oct 15 10:42:43 -0700 2009
The Powerbook explores love, sexuality and gender....more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Apr 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 04 22:02:37 -0800 2009 Wed Apr 08 17:47:43 -0700 2009
Although the narrator, Ali/Alix, who is herself a writer (and all too easily confused with the author), says that her b...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Apr 10 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Mar 28 05:32:41 -0700 2009 Fri Apr 10 12:13:53 -0700 2009 1
I still didn't enjoy it. Dreamy nuance just can't replace a clear plotlin...more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Oct 27 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 30 09:28:11 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 30 09:28:11 -0700 2009 Sexing the Cherry the best, but this one is absolutely fantastic as well. Her writing is very deliberate and always has a depth to it that just blows me away. I highly recommend her if you haven't read her yet.more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 10 21:18:07 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 14 23:09:17 -0700 2008 The Powerbook.
...more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Jan 04 20:02:00 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 04 20:03:34 -0800 2009 3 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Sep 27 10:00:03 -0700 2007 Thu Nov 22 07:04:41 -0800 2007 The Powerbook, time and love can only be experienced as non-linear and ahistorical recollections.

"Th...more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Sep 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Mar 10 14:13:23 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 10 14:18:11 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sun Sep 13 03:17:32 -0700 2009 Thu Nov 12 23:17:23 -0800 2009 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=50653