Status Updates From The PowerBook

possibly ive begun reading something very special

losing my mind over this book in an extremely unhealthy way. so ready to make this my entire personality for the next six months. foaming at the mouth

Winterson writes beautiful. This story unfortunately isn’t my kind of book.

ISTANBUL MENTIONED

Beautifully written, a masterclass in Winterson prose, but lacking a driven narrative. Adored some elements of this, but found myself tired by the affair that encases the story.

“The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love’s fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.”

“I have never been able to stop loving her, or to stop my body leaping at the sight of her. There is no penance that can calm love and no regret that can make it bitter.”

“As I approached you, you held up your hand, and I would gladly have plucked my heart out of my body to make you hold it as you once held it—the core of me in your hands.”

“I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.”

I would read anything she writes any time any place any day

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself—my fossil-love and you discover it.”

'...when all love is, is what it always is--that you look at me and want me and I don't turn away."

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe and even if your heart is built like the Titanic, you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

I love Winterson’s prose but idkkkk

“Serve. Eat. Reflect.”

PeriodT 💅✨ a quotidian mantra fr😩

It’s refreshing to finally enjoy something you read wholeheartedly (moreover it being required reading). The prose is gorgeous, though it extends from time to time to purplish one. Atp it’s fine—prose-wise. Timeline-wise and narrative-wise—oh boy…the post-modernism is starting to seep into its full bloom. We’ll see how this unravels.

I just seem to love procrastination

I am going through a breakup and haven’t been able to write reviews despite having not stopped reading since the incident.
This book helped me. Love is a wound always. Love is time and death. Love survive death.
I underlined so much.
Love is messy. I still love him and he still loves me but it cannot work. It is deeply sad. This book helped me.
Love is life and life without love isn’t worth it.

such a masterpiece, sapphic poetry, WE STAN JEANETTE WINTERSON

Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I’m not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn’t love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

'I haul myself up, slither down. What keeps the tension is the tension itself - the pull between what I am and what I can become. The tug of war between the world I inherit and the world I invent.'

'Life was a journey I would have to make by myself.
Myself. If they gave me nothing, that was the one thing they could not take away.'

'I killed all twelve of those cowards who lusted after our bravery, and it is brave to love, for love is the mortal enemy of death. Love is death's twin, born in the same moment, each fighting for mastery, and if death takes all, love would do the same. Yet it is easier to die than to love.'

To avoid discovery I stay on the run.
To discover things for myself I stay on the run.

picked this up at the Little Prince in TLV

Lush writing, in many styles, with themes I expect from Winterson. But as a novel, or “PowerBook”, I’m not sure it works.

Review to come.

"Hayır, yalnızca yalan söyledim."
"Sevdigin birine yalan söyleyebilir misin?"
"Dogruyu söylemekten daha az yaralıyor. "
"Hala yakın mısınız?"
"Uzaklaşmakta olan iki insan ne kadar yakın olabilirse."

I'm in love with this book, this prose like poetry, this character, that character, her, you, the writer, inventor of the phrases of words that I'm sure I've said, and heard her say before. I'm in love with all of it. I'm in love with love...oh heck it feels like a disease in me!

I loved JW when I was 18 and read most of her books, but now I’m finding myself quickly sick of her poetic writing, which at times seems to be so just for the sake of it.

"I wanted her because she was as beautiful as a warm afternoon with the sun on the rocks."

"What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain."