The F-word discussion

Our June fiction group read - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Who's reading this, who's already read this, who's planning on reading this?

I just got my copy from the library! This has been on my to-read list for ages and ages and ages!

Alexa wrote: "Our June fiction group read - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Who's reading this, who's already read this, who's planning on reading this?"

I read it a few months ago. And that was a few months after reading the amazing Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson's autobiography, which I loved.

I found Oranges a tad confusing as a) there were so many crossovers with the autobiography, and b) it kept lapsing inexplicably into myths and fairytales.

I did really enjoy Oranges, but I much preferred Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?.

Oh, that makes me glad I'm reading this one first!

Like The Beauty Myth, I've requested this from the library. I am planning on participating in both reads this month, which might be a first for me. (I am such a book glutton.)

wow might be time for a reread. I have been thinking about this book lately :)....or maybe I will transgress the group and read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? from my TBR so I am still partly playing along ;)

I'm planning on getting this from the library soon. I'm so happy with the monthly reads this month, they're both books I've wanted to read for so long. I've already read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and fell in love with Winterson's writing style. I had heard that Oranges is very similar to that book, so I hope it's not too repetitive.

I've read Oranges and then later, Why be Happy. I'd say they work well that way around, as the latter builds on the former book, clarifying some of the fact from fiction. Both are worthy reads though, independent of each other.

I just started this a few mins ago. Already I can see what Natasha meant by part B in her post above - the lapses into fairy tales/myths is sort of jarring and confusing. I hope it gets a little less disjointed as I go along. (To be fair, I'm very early along - the first section, Genesis was less than 20 pages.)

Yes, I just read part 1, Genesis. This is deliciously funny! I thought the tales were simply allegories/retellings of her mother's tales. I feel like I could gobble this whole thing up in one sitting, but I feel the need to force myself to slow down and prolong the pleasure! The first page is just such a gloriously tongue-in-cheek description of a family. Really, the whole thing has this fairy-tale air to it.

And then all the various laugh-out-loud bits:
"'Don't be fanciful Jeanette,' said the voice. I looked up. It was Miss Jewsbury; she always talked like that, I think it was because she taught the oboe. It does something to your mouth."

And then the gleeful pleasure in the poison tins?

This is seriously fun!

It really is a quick read, Alexa. I started it last night and just finished now. :) I haven't written my review or even rated it yet (I'm a few books behind when it comes to that, oy), but I did enjoy it. The disjointedness I was worried about last night definitely evened out and felt less jarring throughout. I was equally amused and saddened for Jeanette as her story moved along, but especially was interested in her discussion of her relationship to God towards the end (don't worry, won't spoil anything).

As a non-religious person I always worry about books that deal with religion (whether pro or con) as being forceful either way, but I did not get that impression with this book.

(Behind on reviews, yikes, I think I've got a dozen unreviewed books sitting in my pile!)

With the humor and the fairy-tale-ness this just strikes me as a masterpiece of fiction. Knowing that it's autobiographical makes me curious to learn more, but it still feels (very early on still) like a wonderful fable. I can see that reading her actual autobiography first though, might take away one's ability to suspend disbelief and just go with the flow of the story.

Oh, that poor desperate little girl, trying to fit in by painting Wagnerian Easter Eggs - this is so, so, so funny and touching!

I've been thinking about Natasha's preference for Why Be Happy, and this analogy came to mind. Now keep in mind that I'm only about three-quarters through Oranges and haven't read Why Be Happy, so this may be completely inaccurate. (And I may totally disagree with myself once I've read both of them!)

I'm enjoying Oranges as one might enjoy a masterful impressionist painting (and I do think it is masterful art, particularly her use of fairy tales and other fantastical extended metaphors). Quite obviously this can be enjoyed all on its own. Yet if one first fell in love with a particular building, and then heard that there was an artwork of that building, one might be disappointed to find the impressionist painting in which one can only barely see the actual building, as opposed to a photographic depiction of the building you already admired so much. (And then of course there are those who just naturally prefer photographs over impressionism, but that's a different story.)

Does that make any sense?

It makes sense, Alexa ... but had I seen the impressionist painting before the building, I might have fallen for the painting and been disappointed by the building ;-)

I read it last year and reviewed it thus:

"FOUR I-might-not-be-intellectual-enough-to really-get-it-but-I-think-I-liked-it-anyway STARS"

I remember being impressed, but also being sure that there was a lot more going on than I understood.

I landed on 4 stars ultimately as well. At first I didn't like it, then I was sad I didn't love it as much as some friends said they loved it, but then in the end I found it better than I expected. I think it was just the perfect length - not too long, not too short. Anything more than what she had written would have, I think, taken it in a different direction. It's a powerful, short novel that has more of an impact at less than 200 pages.


That's an interesting analogy, Alexa. :) It does make sense. I keep going back and forth on whether or not I want to read the autobiography. I sort of feel it's unnecessary now, but then others keep pointing out that it tells us which parts of this story were true. I just wonder if it's necessary to know. Again, it's a powerful story the way it is. I don't need anything added to or detracted from that.


Has anyone seen the BBC miniseries? I didn't even know it exists until I just saw word of it on the Wikipedia page.

Sadie/Zarah wrote: "I remember being impressed, but also being sure that there was a lot more going on than I understood."

I can understand that statement. :)


Anyone want to throw out ideas as to the symbolism of the oranges? They were a part of the story way more than I had expected them to be.

I think they represented the normative, the status quo that her mother kept so desperately trying to force her to comply with (to be). I seem to recall one being offered every-time the MC tried to rebel.

Disclosure: it's been over a year, so memory is hazy, but I think my version had a discussion section at the end (or maybe a forward). So, I probably didn't come to that understand all on my own.

Isn't it beautifully ironic that it's actually her mother who says, "after all, oranges aren't the only fruit."

An interesting review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007...

I was actually trying to find a nutshell analysis of what each bible title represented. Only Genesis and Exodus are obvious to me.

El wrote: "Anyone want to throw out ideas as to the symbolism of the oranges? They were a part of the story way more than I had expected them to be."

I think, in addition to the symbolism, they were also meant to be a running joke. As if anytime Jeanette asked a question, or needed comforting, she was given an orange. And sometimes that was perfect, but sometimes she needed more. And they also at times have their erotic side as well, "I did finally pull away the outer shell and, cupping both hands round, tore open the fruit." But, in the end, she isn't content with this everyday form of knowledge, or comfort, or eroticism.

The back of the book that I read said it was a coming-out story, which yes, it is. But even more than that, I found it to be a story about a daughter's relationship with her mother. So the oranges, to me, symbolized the mother's mad rigidity and the daughter's need to escape her mother's sphere of influence in order to establish her right to explore her own life needs. And her mother only acknowledged that oranges weren't the only fruit under absolute necessity; she didn't like it but she had to admit it in order to function in that particular situation. Which I think parallels the fact that she kept a limited relationship with her daughter. She didn't *like* her daughter's choices but in order to have any kind of a relationship with her daughter moving forward, she had to at least implicitly acknowledge that her own choice (remember the woman's photo in the album under "Old Flames") is not the only choice.

Yes, I meant to bring up that woman's photo! Her mother appeared to be quite knowledgeable on the subject, for the times.

Yes, I would say this is much more of a coming-of-age story.

This is all good stuff with the symbolism. I'm always drawn to symbolic aspects of literature; I love trying to reason it all out. Sorry for the delay in response to everyone - had family in town and work and life, blah blah.

So the color orange, I know, is symbolic - combination of red and yellow - red symbolizing energy and yellow symbolizing happiness. And orange itself symbolizes endurance usually. From that end, then, I wondered if there was a color symbolism going on that I was trying to process.

Additionally, I just found this on scribd.com: "Orange symbolizes the point of balance between the spirit and the libido; it may be the emblem of divine love or extreme lust."

That also puts things in a different light in relation to the story - similar to Alexa's idea above in that passage about tearing open the fruit.

I'll have to keep searching for symbolism about fruit itself. Does anyone know if there are any biblical connections to oranges? I think there's other fruits mentioned in the bible - just not familiar with oranges necessarily.




Alexa wrote: "I was actually trying to find a nutshell analysis of what each bible title represented. Only Genesis and Exodus are obvious to me."

Yeah, me too. I don't know enough about the bible, but I think I was able to make some limited connections. Or maybe I was stretching the knowledge I do have to fit the bible title. :) That Guardian article you included was interesting. Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Random thought: Oranges are not mentioned in the Bible, but when I was growing up evangelical, people would sometimes say, "Oh, well you know that Genesis doesn't say that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an apple, so it could be an orange or something." It was always an orange. Never "a kiwi or something" or "an avocado or something" or whatever. Probably just a familiarity thing, because people when/where I grew up ate oranges, bananas, and the many local fruits; oranges and bananas were the only fruits that were familiar but also exotic. Although nobody ever said "a banana or something." But then maybe we'd be getting into the sexual symbolism in our culture of an apple vs. a banana, and that's a whole different conversation. :-)

Lindsey, that's a good point!

Yes, there are quite a few possible phallic references (like the banana bar Jeanette is given by the two women in the shop).

I think perhaps that the oranges represent the limited choices Jeanette has - not just because she's brought up in a narrow minded world, but also due to her homosexuality in a heterosexual world. Even when she tries to create something new with the oranges (the igloo of peels), this is disregarded by her family. Not to mention her mother constantly giving Jeanette oranges and only oranges, despite her daughter's true beliefs.

Ah yes, the igloo of orange peels! Her desperate attempts to express herself with very limited resources!

Oh, and how could I forget, the demon is also orange!

What about the feminism in this? The strong role that the women have taken in the church and the fact that her mother is willing to deny that, to deny her own mission, in order to stifle her daughter. Wasn't that the betrayal that hurt Jeanette the worst?

Alexa wrote: "What about the feminism in this? The strong role that the women have taken in the church and the fact that her mother is willing to deny that..."

That's true. Her mother rejected Jeanette's soul *and* sexuality. And based on the last few pages of the book, I feel like Jeanette never completely got the balance back, like the wound to her spirituality was impossible for her to recover from. Not that she doesn't have a spiritual life, but that she longs for the uncomplicated purity that she used to have in it. She longs for Eden.

I know that the discussion for this is probably pretty much finished, as it is July, but after reading it I was wondering what everyone thought of the fairytale elements throughout the text? Especially the later sections including "Winnette". What could the "city" where philosophers and thinkers reside, represent, and is it at all significant that Jeanette's mother who seems to be shown as the sorcerer figure, has become a "father" and a man?

I loved the fairy tale elements! I have to admit the first one was sort of jarring, right out of the blue as it appeared, but then they just got better and better once I knew to expect them. I took the city as Oxford/Cambridge, representing Jeanette's own escape off to university. That's a really interesting bit, about Jeanette's mother becoming the "father!" I hadn't really thought about that - it kind of ties in with Jeanette's mother denying the power of the women in the church, in a weird kind of way.

so, I read this just now before Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal at Alexa's suggestion.
The strongest carry-through theme of this book was really about the relationship between Jeanette and her mother. It seemed good enough when she was younger and then the older she got, the more she displeased her mom really. It seems like she adopted to fill a particular hole and Jeanette wasn't filling it properly once she began developing into her own person.
I also felt like poor Jeanette just couldn't fit in anywhere; at school or at home, and the church was done with her once she "fell."

I can agree with all the raised symbolic references to oranges; I've also heard that saying that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge could be an orange. It is always an orange that her mother offers her, whether the occasion called for one or not. It must symbolize her mother's comfort. I also thought it was ironic that her mother said oranges are not the only fruit, but only after she offered all the pineapples to the colored people she was trying to convert. She was willing to adjust her comfort and thinking to meet the needs of others, but couldn't adjust her thinking to comfort her daughter.

Ultimately, Jeanette finds the city with the enlightened people and thinkers, but the book doesn't end on this happy note of freedom gained, it ends on her gloomy return home for the holiday, with the connection to Winnette and how the sorcerer tied the string to her button to be able to tug her.
It is a heavy reminder of the ties we have with family, whether we want them or not.

I didn't see any discussion of her father, though. And it must be significant that he was there, but never there for Jeanette in any way worth writing about, right? Why was he only mentioned in passing in seemingly random places, like carrying bags to a car, or eating fish and chips at the counter of the pub when her mother broke all the dishes?

Interesting thoughts, Anita! I've wondered about the lack of a father figure in the book - it portrays religion (perhaps ironically) as a very matriarchal society.

Yes, glad to read your thoughts Anita! I'm intrigued by your statement about the heavy ties of family - I saw permanent love in spite of betrayal, where you saw being dragged back into the past. Can both be simultaneously true?

I think it's absolutely both feelings simultaneously. If there weren't love in spite of betrayal, then Jeanette would be able to stay away. I personally feel the more optimistic view of family which is that we love them no matter the damage we inevitably cause each other from time to time.
I think Winterson, however, has a more somber view of that specific family tie given her choice of words and the atmosphere she creates in the book. She doesn't describe the move to the city as an exciting journey or adventure or opening of a door; she describes it briefly in her fairy tale as the effect of her banishment, and then jumps back to the real story at a time when she returns home. So she doesn't allow herself or the reader the celebration of freedom and independence gained that an author would if it were a joyous occasion. I guess that's my interpretation of how I think she wants us to interpret it, if that makes any sense.
Plus, she makes many references to how authors are feeling things for us, they're sharing so that we don't have to be alone and how books are an escape for her. I think she's trying to be that escape for others as well.

Thanks! That's a really thought-provoking analysis!