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One Aladdin Two Lamps
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About This Book
A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions: Whom should we trust? Is love the most important thing? Does honesty matter? What makes us happy? Posing as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to re-examine what we think we know, to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings. As a young working-class woman with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story."
Reviews
"Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination ..."
"It's a common misstep in these types of works — the instinct, via playful explorations of ancient or classic literature, to inject more into the text than is really there."
"Again and again Winterson surprises us."
"It's hard to reconcile this with the general thrust of her politics, though the idea that fallen humanity might learn a thing or two from a disembodied redeemer perhaps bears the trace of Winterson's evangelical upbringing, written about elsewhere and revisited here."
"Winterson's highly personal readings of the stories are engaging."
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