Customer Reviews

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Bloomsbury Classics)

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the most beautifully written story of a middle-class girl struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, creativity, passion vs. her family/society's inflexible "formed opinions". The story of the persecution of a girl because of her sexual preference (in this case, lesbianism) is not new. It's how Ms. Winterson presents her story. Fresh. Alive. Witty. Funny. Heartbreaking at times. Imaginative. Almost like you were holding a piece of someone's soul in your hands rather than merely a book. I noticed that one reviewer mentioned that the book's sexual nature is vulgar. I do not find this so. Even if it is, so what? Life is vulgar. Only those fond of sweeping the dirt under the carpet so that it stays out of sight (or those who drive lesbian girls from their house/church and pretend they don't exist) will disagree with the innate vulgarity of all life. This book is the antidote for that kind of sanitized thinking. This book exposes that sanitized Christian middle-class thinking is weird, almost alien when observed sanely by a third party standing on the outside. This book celebrates life. Read it.

Published in England in 1985, this first novel (autobiography?) is a story of a girl adopted as a baby into an evangelical Christian family in the Midlands, and raised with good humor and matter-of-fact, everyday, unquestioned love ("I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special"), strict religious teachings, a lot of structure, strong opinions coming from all corners. As a child, she's proud of her eccentric, high-achieving mom; she's her best student, too. The household and small community is a bubbling stew of English coziness, friends and neighbors, superstition, religious fervor and misinformation, vulgarity, harsh pronouncements and oddly good-natured fanatical beliefs.

The girl soaks it up -- to a point. Things begin to come apart, inevitably, and later still, as a teen, there's the narrator's growing knowledge that she is passionately, yearningly, and quite happily in love with a girl her age named Katy -- and no amount of exorcism will change that. The affair proceeds. Winterson is smart enough to put it all together with grace and humor. Her bright and resourceful protagonist travels a great and difficult path, avoiding all the predictable plot formulas. No whining or self-pity, either.

There is incisive wit, a smart and brave presentation of the (sometimes appalling) facts; very good use of myth, history and politics, fairy tales, Bible and church miscellany; amazing observation. This is a detailed and often funny picture of a truly strange household, a great girl, and there's a lot of love -- in this wonderful novel.

This story of a young girl discovering her homosexuality within the oppressive confines of a strict Pentecostal society left me with mixed feelings. I felt that Winterson exposed the hypocrisies inherent in the Church's "love the sinner, loathe the deed" mentality (as well as many other attitudes) with an extremely sharp sense of satire - a real strength of the novel. She also brings many of these revelations across with a gentle humour which intensifies their irony as it brightens the novel. However, I felt that the depiction of the central character's "coming out" was somewhat detached and passionless. I also found Winterson's juxtaposition of fantastic "King Arthur"-style episodes with the main narrative to be somewhat crude; they could have been woven in with more fluidity and made their parallels with the story more apparent.

As a criticism of the Church's often hypocritical views on love and sexuality, this novel was bitingly effective. But as a really human story of a young woman discovering with her sexuality, it was curiously unemotive.

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.

"We stood on the hill and my mother said, `This world is full of sin.' We stood on the hill and my mother said, `You can change the world.'"

Jeanette is an orphan child adopted my a fanatic Evangelical woman who believes that the child is sent to her by God. Jeanette's mother raises her with three strict ideas in mind for her- one, that she will be a missionary child... two, that she will be a servant of God... and three, that she will be a blessing. Her strict moral upbringing causes her severe grief when her mother has to enroll her into school at the age of seven. The children, the teachers, and even the administrators find her preaching attitude a bit unnerving. As a child her only friend is an older woman named Elsie Norris who is a bit of an eccentric, and her life is completely dominated by her mother's quest to convert all of the heathens in the world.

But when she is 14 she meets a young woman from the fish market who will compromise everything that Jeanette knows about herself, but does not bring her to lose her faith in God. Rather the opposite, through a series of events during this friendship she finds herself being drawn closer into the fervor of her faith. It is not until the affair comes to a climax that Jeanette really begins to question the path her mother has set her on.

"He turned to me.
`I love her.'
`Then you do not love God.'
`Yes, I love both of them.'
`You cannot.'"

The book skillfully touches on the controversy of homosexuality in the Christian community, and deals with many of the biased points of views of that religion that still exists to this day. This is a tremendous book. The story has such depths of drama, pathos, and heartbreaking desire that it is impossible not to get swept up in the story. The clever use of narration that Winterson uses is periodically punctuated with fairy tales, Arthurian references, and Alice in Wonderland references as well- something that surely surprised and delighted me, a literary fan from way back. It's no surprise that this debut novel won the Whitbread Prize for first fiction when it was published in 1985. This book has definitely secured me as a Winterson fan for life.

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.

Yo, Shakespeare was England's master of both tragedy and comedy, but Winterson brings both to the present in a post-modern autobiographical story that is no lightweight. Winterson has all the authenticity one can expect from someone sharing the bittersweet irony of general growing up AND realizing both one's unorthodox blossoming sexuality and the deep eccentricities and shortcomings of religiously close-minded parents. Her writing style is quite unique, which I found to be lively interspersed with her fantasies she uses to cope with her situations and her own deeply philosophical introspections. I loved her book, and I think anyone, who believes they could like an original, non-conventional writing style combined with the story of a curious girl who must become a rebel to her parents, neighbors, and church, because she's a lesbian will find a lot to learn and enjoy from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

I was charmed by this book. Ms. Winterson has written a story that is often tender, funny, wry and winsome. I am looking forward to reading more of her work and am absolutely thrilled to see that Amazon carries a videotape of the film version of this book that has received the same excellent reviews as the novel. Thank you, Ms. Winterson, for this lovely story.

In her debut novel, first published in 1985, Jeanette Winterson managed to achieve two important goals: one, to impress the reader with her autobiographical story, and two, to create her own style and voice, which she developed in her later works.

At the level of the narrative, the reader is completely taken in by the life of an orphan girl raised in England of the 1960's by the strictly religious mother to be a preacher and a missionary. The world outside the church community, which, despite the presence of pastors, has a strong matriarchal feeling, and the men seems somehow obscure and dispensable, is for little Jeanette absolutely incomprehensible.

As a child, she does not have a reason not to believe her mother... but growing up as an intelligent child with inquisitive mind, she begins to ask questions. First quietly, only in her mind, then more openly, when she encounters other reality (at school and in her town), and finally, confronted with her own sexuality which is unacceptable by (although, as it appears, not unknown to) her church, she decides to step out of her life as she knows it, go beyond her very limited experience and start afresh (very brave; I could not help thinking though that her being lesbian seemed to be an obstacle but in a way was helpful because it was the real push to struggle for her own identity; for a girl who would marry it would be probably less difficult to settle down quietly and stop asking questions, like it was for Melanie, Jeanette's first love in the novel). The oranges from the title become the symbol of the forced limitations...
The book is full of general thoughts, and although there is no great philosophy, the discoveries of adolescence are put into great words. Winterson's voice sometimes sound incredibly bitter and she paints the characters with certain cruelty. Although the book if full of funny anecdotes, it is a sad kind of humor, I hope this was a catharsis to write it. The author admits that we create our own history and memories are what we remember and shape ourselves, therefore far from objective report of the past...

Formally, the novel is divided into chapters bearing the titles of the initial books of the Old Testament. There are also many religious metaphors and similes throughout. Winterson uses simple, short sentences which gives the book the clarity. Interchanging with the main plot are short tales, which remind me of things I imagined and put on paper when I was a child... They are a great insight into the mind, fears and fantasies of a sensitive girl and look very real, although are obviously conceived at the same time as the whole novel (although it would be nice to think that Winterson incorporated her real childhood creations) as they run in parallel with the plot and are inseparable from it.

I think that for anyone who wants to become familiar with Winterson's prose, this is the best place to start.

Jeanette Winterson's "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" is this amazing, bizarre story written with dialogue that reaks of reality, juxtoposed with ethereal myths that seem far too interesting for meer symbolism. I read it five times. I recommended it to every one of my friends. It is an honest-to-goodness fabulous book.