The Passion is about war, and the private acts that stand against war. She will tell your fortune depending on your face. The woman she loves steals her heart and hides it in a jar. “The Passion is set in a world where the miraculous and the everyday collide,” she writes on her website. Instead, Winterson suggests that the novel uses history as “invented space”, a setting for magical characters and weird and wonderful events. This is the story of Henri, a young Frenchman sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars, and of Villanelle, a cross-dressing Venetian woman, born with webbed feet.Īlthough the action takes place during the Napoleonic era, and the book conveys a wonderful sense of the period, the author rejects the idea that The Passion is a historical novel. An epic tale which straddles early nineteenth-century Europe, The Passion is set amongst the frozen wastes of Russia and the exotic, crumbling decadence of Venice. It’s been a while since I read a magical book, so this week I picked up an old favourite, and re-read my dog-eared copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.
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