I picked this up in a spare moment and I liked it. I’m rather puzzled by it, but Winterson has a narrative style I enjoy.

The novel is narrated by three characters, “Handel,” “Picasso,” and “Sappho.” Of the three, Handel is the most lucid because he is the closest to the reality of the reader. Picasso is the pseudonym for a young female painter recovering from/escaping/surviving familial abuse. Sappho I could not figure out at all – was she a real person? An abstraction? A reincarnation or ghost of the actual poet, come back to comment on modern happenings?

Winterson plays a lot with narrator reliability. It was fascinating to watch the layers of characterization unfold. It wasn’t circular narrative (eg mixing up chronological events, like Alice Walker is fond of) as much as getting to know someone when you first meet them, then getting to know them again as they reflect to you about their life, and yet again, and again. I just started reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and that style is quite different. I am curious what a religious person, or an artist, or a survivor of sexual abuse would make of this novel. It has a lot going on, but sometimes I felt like I was in the dark due to the indirectness of it all.