Customer Reviews

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' is a moving, dramatic story about a lesbian girl growing up in a small English Pentecostal community, which at times is likened to a cult. The somewhat autobiographical writing depicts attitudes towards gays in the 80's, more so within religious communities. It's a brilliant novel. Although not as fantastical as her others, it's definitely worth a read for fans of Winterson's work.

imagine someone decided to just do something completely different. write an autobiography, as an individual. break the mould. tear down the barriers of prose and poetry. play around with time cycles. throw in some fairytales to remind the reader that fantasy and reality are completely interchageable concepts. pose some good questions about sexuality, whilst we're there. social influences on individual identity. creativity. sanity..perhaps? interested? go and read.

Winterson's first novel is a compelling story that presages her talent for finding themes that aren't last year's, or even today's, but cut the edge of tomorrow.

No less importantly, it's the first look at a word smith of the finest calibre. Every word has import and can build, nuance by nuance, into breathtaking metaphors that only emerge after you've finished the book and find yourself thinking about it. I like to read Winterson out loud, because hearing words and reading them are two different experiences.

This book is a must read because the true high art of lesbian-themed writing is found here.

I just finished this book, and although it was a rather solid start for Winterson, I would recommend that you skip her early stuff and go straight to her masterpeice Written on the Body. I found Oranges to be rather dry and not completely formulated. However if you do find yourself with it in your hand, I do highly recommend page 170.

How do we access rapture? What comprises a revelation? Take every book you've ever read advertised as a 'coming of age story' or as a 'tale of sexual awakening' and recycle 'em. ....This, Winterson's first book, is a triumph in the memoir genre specifically because it refuses to be a memoir. Rather than rehash and rephrase the standard first-person epiphany, Winterson dwells in the details of exchange, and the vagaries of revelation, constantly twisting your narrative imagination with her delicate ironies and analogies. Of particular interest is her descriptions of Pentecostal culture, and the consequences of didactic belief.

Jeanette Winterson is a fresh new voice in what the book business would call "alternative literature" and "Orange Is Not The Only Fruit" (OINTOF), her Whitbread Prize winning first novel, is a striking if not altogether satisfying work which heralds the arrival of an impressive literary talent. This is a coming-of-age tale of young Jeanette who outgrows the religious fanaticism of her adoptive family to discover her own wayward sexuality in small town England. In my opinion, OINTOF could have been a more confident and intimate piece of work if Winterson hadn't used a tone of voice or style that tended towards caricature than realism. The people who made her growing up years such a horror - especially her mother and the priest - are so demented you can't quite take them seriously. Maybe they are genuine nutcases. Certainly, Jeanette saw them that way. Maybe it's down to Winterson's style which is inherently quaint and quirky, but by painting the landscape this shade of purple, she creates a strangely distancing effect that negates the heartbreak and poignance that lies beneath. The use of fables to break up the narrative is also a technique that doesn't work for me. They interrupt the flow, confuse and obscure rather than enlighten or add to the overall effect. I don't mean to pan the book because I rather enjoyed it. I just felt it could be better.

"People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious." (p. 93) This "autobiographical" novel challenges us with the nature of reality. Do we take seriously the naively precocious narration of young Jeanette, brought up in a social "reality" most readers would find suspect? Whose eyes tell us the truth? Even when the narrative breaks into the mythological, truth dances tantalizingly out of the shadows, but still evades, no matter how we try to seduce it.

If nothing else (and it is =MUCH= else), we encounter our own challenge of existing within social constraints that seemingly resist our attempts to alter them. In the young Jeanette we reflect on the naivete of one who does not recognize any other way to be, who only eats oranges, who cannot really imagine living outside the lines.

Jeanette grows up, finds love and discovers that her love receives no approbation from her family or community. Her love mobilizes all the "Holy" to try to fit her back into their mold for her life. As she matures, the story becomes less certain, more questioning of itself. Increasingly, we encounter interludes of mythological material, which move the story along, exposing even a deeper truth.

And perhaps that upsets the fruitbasket entirely. Jeanette's mother is virtually unbelievable. I would consider her two-dimensional, except I've met her. Well, not that same woman, but her spiritual twin. And in real life, she was two-dimensional, at best. Truth, so cleaned & dried & pressed becomes surreal, and what little bit of "reality" remains maps into a mere two dimensions. Flattens. And Jeanette's young life is so flattened, that only the trauma of forbidden love can give her depth. But even that cannot be told in mere words, it must be shown in yet another layer of story, lest truth escape disguising itself as language.

A magnificent book, and a fun read. Fast. Best read twice, in rapid succession.

Winterson's quirky first novel is a blend of autobiography, fiction, and fable. The main character, Jeanette, grows up in a firmly religious household and seems destined to become a missionary. As she interacts more with the world outside the religious community, she finds other avenues of possibilities, and as she matures, she realizes her desires for other women, much to the horror of her family and community. Winterson's style is magical, and the structure of this novel arounds chapters in the Bible is brilliant. I didn't find myself as drawn into the book as I was with Winterson's "The Passion" or "The World and Other Places", but that certainly it's a detraction.

This novel has often been criticised as Winterson's best now that she has gone on to write several powerfully experimental novels. This is implying that she should have remained in these more familiar regions of experience or stuck to a slightly more conventional mode of narrative. What's tremendous about this novel is the way it works as a perfect springboard for the kind of fiction that is being so negatively criticised for its inventiveness. This is a story about a girl who is struggling with the conventions of a restrictive Pentecostal community in a small spot of England, but it is also about the interplay between reality and fiction in people's lives. Jeanette's fables are established to be as valid as the complex religious practices of her family. The characters of the novel constantly differ to a fictional artifice to hold together the reality they cannot understand. Tension builds when the fictional worlds that people struggle to hold into place contradicts other people's realities. This novel is a tribute to the fight for independence and survival. She powerfully asserts that there is a necessary space for these fictional parts of people's realities despite the conflict it will inevitably create. She suggests that the reality built in fiction is also the truth of our own fictions accepted as reality. The interplay of these two creates a living reality.

This novel was a little slow to start, but once i got into it, i couldn't put it down. Growing up in an obsessively religious household, Jeannette Winterson writes about life as a teen girl, coming of age and figuring out that she's a lesbian. I definitely recommend it.