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The Powerbook - Hardcover

Winterson, Jeanette

 
9780375411113: The Powerbook
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375411119 ISBN 13: 9780375411113
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Relates the story of Ali, a young woman who will compose anything in cyberspace for a price.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A novelist whose honours include England's Whitbread Award and the American Academy's E.M. Forster Award, Jeanette Winterson burst into the literary community as a very young woman in the eighties with <i>Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit</i> and soon won the praise of such masters as Gore Vidal ("the most interesting young writer I have read in twenty years") and Muriel Spark ("just what we need now in the literature of the English language"). She lives in London and the Cotswolds.

Aus dem Klappentext

folds her seventh novel within the world of computers, and transforms the signal development of our time into a wholly human medium. The story is simple: an e-mail writer called Ali will compose anything you like, on order, provided you're prepared to enter the story as yourself and risk leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price, and Ali discovers that she, too, will have to pay it.<br><br>The PowerBook reinvents itself as it travels from London to Paris, Capri, and Cyberspace, using fairy tales, contemporary myths, and popular culture to weave a story of failed but requited love.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

language
costumier

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

It's night. I'm sitting at my screen. There's an e-mail for me. I unwrap it. It says--Freedom, just for one night.

Years ago you would have come to my shop at the end of the afternoon, telling your mother you had an errand for the poor.

        At the tinkle of the bell you would have found yourself alone for a moment in the empty shop, looking at the suits of armour, the wimples, the field boots, and the wigs on spikes, like severed heads.

        The sign on the shop says verde, nothing more, but everyone knows that something strange goes on inside. People arrive as themselves and leave as someone else. They say that Jack the Ripper used to come here.

        You stand alone in the empty shop. I come out from the back. What is it you want?

        Freedom for a night, you say. Just for one night the freedom to be somebody else.

        Did anyone see you arrive?
        
No.

        Then I can pull the blinds and light the lamp. The clock ticks, but only in time. From outside, looking in, there will be only a movement of shadows--the looming of a bear's head, a knife.

        You say you want to be transformed.

This is where the story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA.
Here we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night.

Undress.

        Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise.

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it--creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I.

        The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself.

        What is it that I have to tell myself again and again?

        That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

        I can change the story. I am the story.

Begin.

OPEN
HARD
DRIVE

I want to start with a tulip.

In the sixteenth century the first tulip was imported to Holland from Turkey. I know--I carried it myself.

        By 1634 the Dutch were so crazy for this fish-mouthed flower that one collector exchanged a thousand pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single bulb.

        What's so special about a tulip?

        Put it this way . . . When is a tulip not a tulip?

        When it's a Parrot or a Bizarre. When it's variegated or dwarf. When it comes called Beauty's Reward or Heart's Reviver. When it comes called Key of Pleasure or Lover's Dream . . .

        Tulips, every one--and hundreds more--each distinctively different, all the same. The attribute of variation that humans and tulips share.
        It was Key of Pleasure and Lover's Dream that I carried from Sulyman the Magnificent to Leiden in 1591. To be exact, I strapped them under my trousers . . .

.  .  .

'Put it this way.'

        'No. I'll crush them when I rest.'

        'Put it this way . . .'

        'No. I'll crush them when I pray.'

        'Put one here and one here . . .'

        'No! It will look as though I have an evil swelling.'

Well, where would you store a priceless pair of bulbs?

That gave me the idea.

In the same place as a priceless pair of balls.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not
afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

        When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.

        I did.

        So slender am I, and so slight, that I can slip under the door of a palace, or between the dirt and the floor of a hovel, and never be seen.

        A golden thread, a moment's talk, a spill of coffee, a pepper seed, is all the distance I am between one side and the other.

        I became a spy.

        Sulyman himself appointed me and his instruction now is that I should get into a boat and bear a gift to his friends, the Dutch. A gift that every scurvy captain and leprous merchant will try to steal.

        How to conceal it?

        Put it this way . . .

My mother got some stout thread and belted it through the natural die-back of the bulb tops. Then she sewed the lot on to a narrow leather strap and fastened it round my hips.

        'Should they hang dead centre like that?'

        (My mother went to inspect my father.)

        'Dress them on the left.'

        'That's good, but there's something missing.'

        'What?'

        'The bit in the middle.'

I went up into the hills, for tulips grow as thick as thieves here. I found
myself a well-formed fat stem supporting a good-sized red head with rounded tips. I nicked it at the base with my knife and the juice covered my fingers.

        At home my mother embalmed the tulip, and in a few days it was ready to wear.

        This was my centrepiece. About eight inches long, plump, with a nice weight to it. We secured it to my person and inspected the results. There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting.

        My mother knelt down and put her nose close.

        'You smell like a garden,' she said.

.  .  .


The sun rose. The ship hoisted sail. I lifted my arms and waved and waved. Then, adjusting my tulip, I went below.

I seemed to dream of buffalo...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375411119
ISBN 13 
9780375411113
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
289
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Verantwortliche Person
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