=2013 Books Read=

The World and Other Places: Stories
Jeanette Winterson

Tea with the Countess...

Delicately, as was her habit, the Countess Esmerelda was eviscerating her afternoon mouse. I was nibbling a freshly-baked madeleine. The sun was warm in the west-facing bay window of the cozy Park Slope brownstone where we sat sharing our usual pot of tea. The Countess lapped her cuppa from a bone china saucer decorated in a delicate Elizabeth Grey pattern. I sipped mine from a cup, of course. Life with a cat is a civilized life. We were discussing the short stories of Jeanette Winterson.

We had spent the better part of the last week reading The World and Other Places together. I did most of the reading. The Countess, preferring to save her eyes for her midnight prowls, permitted herself to be read to. And, occasionally, petted. She would curl up in my lap on the couch of an evening, or lie beside me in the four-poster bed, purring at the paragraphs that pleased her, hissing at those that did not.

Other than the reading itself, there is nothing quite so enjoyable as discussing a good book with a literary cat. I highly recommend it as a habit. Like most cats, Countess Esmerelda holds very definite opinions where literature is concerned--well, where almost anything is concerned--but especially on the literary arts. Her taste is impeccable. She is generally fair, if merciless, in her critiques. She'll claw to shreds, literally, a text she finds second-rate. Say what you will, she is, at the very least, as well-informed as your average graduate Ph.D. candidate in Chaucer studies.

***

She'd been an independent bookstore cat in the most recent of her many lives. Like most cats, the Countess seldom looks back to the past, but when she does, she recalls these days in particular most fondly. Mousing between the high-piled, ever-teetering stacks. Lazing on the dusty, sunlit sill. When a Barnes and Noble megastore choked the last breath out of the business, a convenient brush of the tail caused the fire that enabled her people to retire with a massive insurance settlement. When the elderly lesbians  died of natural causes six and seven years later, respectively, the Countess was briefly exiled to the indignity of an animal shelter where she kept her dignity until the details of the much-contested will, which, naturally and rightly, left everything to the Countess, could be worked out. She took  triumphant possession of both brownstone and bank accounts from jealous and undeserving relatives and hired me as live-in help to perform what services were necessary to a lady of her stature.

***

But all that was in the past. Today we were talking about Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places.

The first story, "The 24-Hour Dog,"  didn't do much for the Countess. In fact, from the title on she rather hated it. I thought the story affecting: a sweet, ebullient evocation of the personality of a new puppy through the eyes of its besotted new owner. I suspect the Countess disliked it for this very reason. It pleased her, however, that in the end the narrator returned the trouble-making dog back to the farm  from which she got it. It was causing all kinds of ruckus in the formerly quiet, well-ordered home. Worst of all, the rambunctious upstart pup was disturbing the four older cats established in the household.

"A perfectly sensible resolution," the Countess nodded, licking her mouse-flavored paw.

Personally, I had another take. I thought the ending a total cop-out. Nothing more than the narrator's way to assuage her guilt. In support of which position, I made mention of the narrator's reasoning:  that she and the puppy were just too much alike to live together.

There we found ourselves in total agreement. Both of us hissing in derision.

***

By way of her utter indifference, the Countess affected even for her a greater than normal interest in her gutted rodent when I brought up the next story in the collection,  "Atlantic Crossing." In this tale, a heartbroken man finds himself sharing a berth with a pretty young aviatrix of "color," as the saying goes. His heart destined to be broken again.

"Well?"

The Countess yawned and closely examined something dark and red clawed up from the mouse's innards. Then she began coughing up a hairball.

"Oh Esmerelda! I'll go fetch the paper towels."

 'Nuff said.

***

We arched our backs and stretched our limbs wallowing in the sensuality of  "The Poetics of Sex," a surrealistically erotic prose poem and philosophical ode to lesbianism.  It ends on a bittersweet note that left me feeling misty-eyed, reflecting back on my own loves lost, connections missed, misunderstandings perpetuated unto eternity. Was that a tear the Countess herself blinked back, sharing similar memories? No? Just a dust-mote in the air? It's not true what people think, that cats aren't sentimental. They are. But only for three or four seconds at a time.

Let's move on, shall we?

"Mee-ow," the Countess agrees. And she licks her whiskers and squeezes her eyes tight savoring the delicious memory of Artemis's revenge upon her smelly brutal rapist in Winterson's arch retelling of the myth "Orion."

A couple of stories followed that not even I felt worth the mentioning. They weren't bad, but they weren't particularly noteworthy either. I plucked up another madeleine instead.

The title story "The World and Other Places" was full of the magical that is a hallmark of Winterson's best stories. Time and space bend in these stories, history is fluid, and so is identity. What cat wouldn't love storytelling like that?

Countess Esmerelda nods, cat-smiling her agreement.

For instance, in "Disappearance I" and "Disappearance II", rooms in houses vanish, taking their inhabitants with them. Other rooms appear in their place, rooms with no access, in which voices can be heard. Winterson is adept at creating fairytale worlds--worlds where sleep is outlawed and dreamers must be licensed by the government, where gypsy caravans bring sex magic to staid suburban towns turning everything topsy-turvy, where diamonds are burned as cheap fuel and coal is worn in crowns.

Countess Esmerelda looks up, red-whiskered. I've got her attention now.


***

Jeanette Winterson is a feminist and a lesbian but she can still write with remarkable sympathy for the plight of the modern-day male. For instance, in "The Green Man" she gives voice to a lamenting husband who's all but a slave in his marriage.

"Listen to this Countess," I say and read the following passage aloud. "Somewhere in the fourteen years of our married life I seem to have had a sex change and converted to Islam. How else to explain the twenty paces I lag behind? When I come home caught in the cobwebs of my day, my wife has been planning our next holiday or working out the finance for a new car. I am still building the extension she designed two years ago. My wife strides us on into prosperity and fulfillment and I shuffle behind clutching the bills and a tool box."

Not many male writers would dare write such a passage today for fear of being accused of misogyny. Come to think of it, maybe there aren't any at all who'd dare to say what Winterson has written. The Countess and I laugh because from what we've seen of many marriages, Winterson has nailed it right on the head.

Then the Countess sniffs and shrugs. I know what she is thinking, which is saying something when it comes to cats. What she's thinking is: "If a man is not man enough to keep himself from being unmanned, it's his own damn fault."

For all her fiercely held feminist values, when it comes to relations between the sexes, the Countess likes it back alley down-and-dirty, prefers her mates strictly Tom.

What can I say? I tend to agree.

***

Where Winterson is weakest and least convincing is where the influence of Calvino and Borges is not only the strongest but shows the most. Angela Carter is reflected here, too, which is paying any writer a huge compliment. At the mention of the divine Ms. Carter the Countess's ears prick up and her eyes grow wide, pupils sharpened to pins. Oh she is a big Angela Carter fan, the Countess is.

"Aren't you darling?"

There--did you see it? Her ears twitched again. Her long tail thumps the window-seat Or is it the sound of mice in the walls? The two have the same effect.

The stories in this collection are generally short, none much more than ten pages or so, and constructed, like mosaics, in gemlike sections that glitter with enchantment. Brevity and glitter. Those are good things insofar as the Countess and I are concerned. For the Countess Esmerelda and I tend to have short attention spans when it comes to every thing but two things.

For the Countess: it's eviscerated mice.

For me: it's lemon-flavored madeleines.

Yes, Winterson writes with cat-vision, which is to say, in the infrared and ultraviolet lights of the imagination. She sees things that aren't there...until you see them.

We don't even have to confer. Our favorite story in this collection was "A Green Square." The two of us purred continually straight through it. How does the outsider, the outcast, those that don't fit the mold and yoke that society has fashioned for them find a sense of home? Live an authentic life? Discover who they truly are? What could be more important and at the same time more impossible than to reject societal conditioning and discover your own secret true identity? To be the hero and/or heroine of your own spectacular myth? It's a theme that recurs throughout Winterson's fiction but it's heightened in this story to a crisis pitch and resolved with the resounding power of a manifesto.

The green square is the answer.

What is the green square? Well, I'd love to tell you but it would ruin the surprise. Here's a clue: get a calendar and a green magic marker.

Here's another clue: You're sitting in the midst of it right now.

***

Funny how a book of fiction so feline in structure and sensibility should have so few actual cats in it. In fact, aside from the first story, where the cats are all but mere background observers of the drama, incidental to the plot, referred to more or less in passing, I don't even remember a cat mentioned in any of the other stories.

"Do you, Countess?"

The Countess Esmerelda slowly blinks her great yellow eyes and sighs. Her entire cattitude expresses her judgment on the matter and her disappointment in my lack of understanding. She expected better of me. 

"The cats are implied throughout."

Indeed, the Countess has a curious notion that Jeanette Winterson herself is a cat. The author photo on the dust jacket notwithstanding. But then the Countess Esmerelda considers all those deemed worthy of ten seconds of her aristocratic company to be cats, whether of the four-footed furred variety or deeper down below the surface. She demands her company to be cats...where it counts.

And who am I, mere mortal, to argue with a cat?

Meeow.