"Weight," Jeanette Winterson

I first discovered this British author by watching her interview with Bill Moyers on his "Faith & Reason" series. She was open, intelligent, modest, and thoughtful. What struck me most was the rawness of her emotions and personality. Adopted at a young age by a fundamentalist Christian couple, later to see her adopted mother burn all of her treasured books, and later deal with discovery of her own homosexuality, this is a woman who has been in pain, and hasn't yet allowed it to heal over. Although I ache for her pain, I am actually grateful for her ability to use it to create.

"Weight" is a retelling of the myths of Atlas and Hercules ("Heracles" in her book), part of a recent series of great myth retellings commissioned from some of the world's best-known authors, including Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt.

In her short, searing novel, Winterson portrays Atlas as a Titan who believes he was punished by the gods and is locked into his fate, his eternal doom to hold the weight of the world on his back. Over millenia he is forced to question himself and the gods, prompted by Hera's claim that, no matter how difficult life seemed at any given time, he always had choices.

Winterson inserts chapters of her personal struggles with reality and choices, the questions that each of us face about our own role in the condition of our lives. The ancients knew about Fate, she says, because they knew how terribly impossible it is for humans to make true choices about our present circumstances. The present is crushed between the weight of the past and the future.

She ends the book with an answer to the question Atlas has been asking himself for centuries, since Hercules tricked him into taking back the weight of the world for all time: "Why not just put it down?" In this question is the monumental problem of Winterson's own life. In spending years trying to recreate her own reality, she has instead, like Atlas, created a world that she must carry on her back. A world that crushes her present.

"Weight" is honest and beautiful. It forces us to ask questions about our own belief in fate or choice, and how willing we are to admit to the choices we make, both conscious and subconscious. It forces Winterson, and her readers, to acknowledge the world that we each carry on our own backs, and how they inhibit our lives.