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Book Review of "Lighthousekeeping"
by Jeanette
Winterson Jeanette Winterson is the undisputed master of sensual, surrealist literature. In Lighthousekeeping, she tightens her hold on the ungraspable, rendering time and space inconsequential compared to the longevity and truth within human relationships.
In the dewy haze between past and present, Winterson plants Silver, a young girl orphaned essentially by her village’s prejudice, then thrust into the care and schooling of lighthouse keeper Mr. Pew. “As old as a unicorn,” the people of the village of Salts tend to leave Pew to himself; Silver suspects that they are afraid of him because he is different. Having spent his whole life in the darkness of the lighthouse, it is hard for anyone to say whether or not he’d always been blind. Silver quickly grows accustomed to this darkness, explaining that “darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway.”
How fitting then, that the stories Pew tells her are of the son of the man who built the very lighthouse they keep: the stories of Babel Dark. As Pew recants the tales of Dark’s lost love and subsequent travels, the stories also mark the passage of time – both in Silver’s world and in Dark’s – until finally the worlds collide like a torrential rainstorm urgently rushing back to meet the sea.
As the novel comes to an end, an adult Silver reflects on her own lost loves, acknowledging that “life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done." She vows to never let the words of love be lost on her lips again, and we are brought back full circle as Silver tells the stories to her lover, and the story of how they met: “these were my stories – flashes across time.”
Once again, Winterson has penetrated, embedded herself in the reader’s heart, a stowaway as you travel the ocean within; the ocean with no lighthouse to guide you. See more free fiction book reviews
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