"Crossing the Atlantic" by Jeanette Winterson -2000 A Short Story by the Author of Oranges Are the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Jeanette Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers' in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.  From Goodreads.  

I have read and posted on three novels by Jeanette Winterson, Passion, Power Book, and her by far most famous work Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.  I also read and liked a lot her short story, "All I know about Gertrude Stein".  

"Crossing the Atlantic" was a pure delight to read.   I felt sad this morning to learn of the passing of Lou Reed and this story helped lift from me the malaise of this.  It is told by a man in his fifties or so, unmarried, setting out for a voyage from St Lucia to London.  The trip takes eight days and he has booked a room to share.  Of course he expects to be assigned a male roommate and is shocked when a beautiful twenty year old black woman named Gabriel shows up.  It seems the shipping company had assumed Gabriel was a man.  What happens next is beautifully relayed.  I loved this story.  It is about loneliness, racial attitudes, gender assumptions and much more but above all it was a lot of fun to read.

I will and should read more of Winterson's work.

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson  (2011)

I have recently begun to read through The Best British Short Stories 2012.  There are twenty stories in the collection, edited by Nicholas Royle.  I plan to read all the stories in the collection and post on some of them.   (Not posting on a story is not always a sign I did not like it that much, though it might be, it just is a question of time as it takes me just as long to write a post on a short story as it might to read one!)   I will keep a tab of my "fab five" (in no order), just for the fun of it.  I also have two anthologies of best  American short stories and  Best British Short Stories 2011 and I think  I will stage a transatlantic battle.   (So far the UK stories are a good bit better but I am just getting started.)







Top stories (in random order) Reading Life Best of British Short Stories for 2012-
1.  "iAnna" by Will Self
2. "The Heart of Dennis Noble" by Alison Macleod"
3.  "I Arrive First" by  Emma Jane Unsworth
4.  "All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson
5.  "An Appointment with Mr. Hemingway" by Jonathan Trigell (a very good story on which I did not post.)

I have also read and will not be posting on stories by HP Tinker and Robert Shearman.  

I was very happy to see a short story by Jeanette Winterson included in Best British Short Stories 2012.  A quick glance at the author biographies included in the collection reveals she is the most distinguished of the contributors to the anthology.    She is most famous for her first novel,  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which I posted on sometime ago.   I also read and greatly enjoyed her very creative novel, Powerpoint.  

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" is a very creatively designed story that draws you in from the start.   It is a story about two women, both on journeys motivated by love.  It starts out with Alice B. Toklas in 1907 who has just arrived in Paris to meet a woman who will become her lifetime love and partner, the famous author,  Gertrude Stein.  The story after the opening paragraph takes us to 2011 and we are on the Eurostar traveling with a woman from London, Louise, also on her way to Paris.  "Louise was traveling alone because she was trying to understand something about love."   Much like the relationship of Alice B. Toklas to Stein, Louise's lover was a much more important person than she was, Louise is defined as the love interest of  a greater in the eyes of the world person.

We learn  good bit about the facts of the life of Toklas and Stein in this wonderful story, it flips back and forth between Louise and them.   Louise's segment is devoted a lot to her reflections on the nature of love.   The thoughts are wonderful and will make you think about your relationships, present, past or hoped for one day.  

Please share your experience with Winterson with us.  

My thanks to Max u for giving me a gift card that allowed me to read and post on this story.


Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" by Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985, 171 pages, English) by Jeanette Winterson is not the first of her books I have read.   I really loved her Powerbook, both for the beauty of the writing and for the thematic matters explored.   I knew as soon as I finished that book that I wanted to read other works by Winterson.   I loved her style and the intermingling of realistic narration with magical realism and folk tales.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is told in the first person by a late teenage female, Jeanette.

She is an adopted child being raised by very fundamentalist Christians.   Her parents, especially her very religious mother,  see the primary goal of life as to avoid sin.   The primary sin appears to be sexual acts.   Winterson does a marvelous job of conjuring up for us the hyper-binding atmosphere in which the central character is raised.   The mother is  literate, being a lover of the work of Charlotte Bronte and she has internalized much of the poetry of  William Blake.   She believes in a literal devil who might well be living across the street.   Anyone who is not like her and anyone whose ideas are not like her faith is not simply misguided or mistaken but is to be seen as actively evil.   The world is divided up into a small group of people destined to be saved and the rest to be dammed.   It is a very closed and cramped world in which our protagonist has grown up.    In this world the most evil thing there is seems to be sex.   We get the impression the mother may have a bit of a past she is not telling her daughter all about.   She does admit to a premarital encounter with a handsome semi-stranger.   Somehow we feel the mother does not preach so much against the evils of sex because she hates it but because she likes it so much.   The father in the work seems to have decided just to stay in the background for the sake of peace.  

I think almost anyone who selects this novel to read among the many many 1000s of others they could have read will know in advance that it is a story about a young woman giving into and coming to cherish her sexual desire for other women.   You know in advance pretty much what is coming and the very long build up to this some how increases our suspense in spite of that foreknowledge.   The opening half of the book creates such an oppressive atmosphere that I am very much looking forward to something happening, anything really!.   There is no sense of the pleasure of life in the upbringing of Jeanette (the central character bears the same first name as the author  and apparently Winterson was raised in an atmosphere very like that described created in the book).   

Near the opening of the book Jeanette asks her mother  about two women who jointly own a paper shop.  These  women  are old enough to have a husband but for some reason do not.    When Jeanette asks her mother about these women she is told do not associate with them and above all do not get to know them.  

There are numerous interludes in the book in the form almost of fairy tales or fables.   These fables were simply delightful interludes to me and help illuminate the themes of the book.   Part of the general theme of Winterson's work is how we create myths for ourselves to help us give meaning to the events in our life.

As we knew she would, Jeanette does have her first sexual encounters with another woman.   No graphic details are given.   It is as though the puritanical gloom of her raising has quite turned her from men and has left her with little real relish for sex in any form.  She loves her female partners but we sense no deep passion in these opening encounters in her life.   I do not wish to give out too many details as a lot of people will eventually read this book.

It is beautifully written.   I in fact enjoyed the fables that were interludes more than the main narrative but I think that is just my quirk.   I do think  Powerbook  a greater joy to read in terms of the wonderful prose of Winterson at her best.   Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit gives us a brilliant look at the atmosphere which some how turns Jeanette into an embodiment of the very thing her up-bringing is most against.   

This book is one of my selections for the GLBT challenge.   It's relevance there is obvious as it is, I think, a core text in that area.    I also think it is a very good read for the Woman Unbound Challenge.   It shows a woman moving away from the very binding atmosphere in which the protagonist was raised and turning to  sexual partners that would be completely unacceptable in terms of the religion in which she was raised.   I should note that I am not of the mind set that any novel where the author is a homosexual female (or male) should be counted as a GLBT read or as a novel appropriate for the Woman UnBound Challenge but Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a paradigmatic work for both these challenges.  

Off the books I have reviewed there are three works of fiction that I think would be good choices for the GLBT Reading Challenge: 

Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki -Japan-1928-this work actually has  more of an open erotic element than Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit-If you read this book, I think you will find it hard to image it was written over 80 years ago.

February Flowers by Fan Wu-a coming of age story about two female university students in modern China

Hardboiled by Banana Yoshimoto-a novella concerning a woman's only gay relationship -Her novel Kitchen also touch on themes related to the challenge but it is not directly focus on related issues.

I also posted a review of a biography that is very relevant to the GLBT challenge-The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Youssoupov and the Murder That Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire  by Greg King -Prince Felix in his personal preferences was gay but did marry and have  children as part of a dynastic duty.    This book purports to show the factors that caused his development and does have some interesting data on upper class gay brothels in Czarist Russian and early 19th century Japan.

This book is being read for these challenges

Women Unbound

GLBT Challenge

Simply British Challenge

Global Reading Challenge

Second Chance Challenge  (read a second book by an author you have already read)

The Read Before I Die 2010 challenge

Mel u

"Powerbook" by Jeanette Winterson

PowerBook  is my first Jeanette Winterson novel.   It  will not be my last.  PowerBook is a 21th century story of the reading and writing life.   It is also about love, sexual possession, the Isle of Capri, the internet, the nature of history and a good bit more.   It is not a straightforward story and can be very much enjoyed just for the beautiful writing and the many thought provoking things said in the book.   The story line is not real hard to follow just give it a bit of time to develop.  

In my comments on the book I will just take a look at some of what it says about the reading life.  The central character, Ali or Alix (the sexes blur a bit here) is a professional online writer of stories, sort of custom made to enliven the lives of her customers who can be the leads in the stories if they like.   The only catch is once the story begins they cannot control how it will end.

The sign on the door says VERDE, nothing more, but everyone knows something strange goes on inside.  People arrive as themselves and leave as someone else.   People say that Jack the Ripper used to come here.

Reading seemingly brings freedom

This is where the story starts.   Here, in those long lines of laptop DNA..This is an invented world.  You can be free just for one night.

Stop for a portion  of a second to think about all the  books about prisoners set free by reading-from the Count of Monte Cristo on.

The  book spends some time in ancient Antioch

 Antioch was an aqueduct city...a civilization built on an aqueduct is a perilous ..one barbarian with a pickaxe can drown thought...There is always a city.   There is always a civilization.   There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe.  Sometimes you are the city..to become the city , that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand

Reality is not fixed in the world of PowerBook.  

 Nothing is solid.  Nothing is fixed.   These are images that time changes and that change time.

  

When I read this passage about automatic writing I wondered what Mr and Mrs Yeats would think of it:

There is always the danger of automatic writing.   The danger of writing yourself towards and ending that can never be told..There is a fatefulness and loss of control that are somehow comforting.   This was your script but now it writes itself. 

Science is a story.   Reality is a story.

We are people who trace with our fingers a marvelous book, but when we turn to read it again, the letters have vanished.   Always the book must be rewritten.

There are many fascinating historical allusion in the book, many of them almost as throw away lines.   You have to pay careful attention or you will miss the best part of the show.

There is other thematic veins one could mine in this book.    Much of the language of the book is beautiful.   The book tapped into my own story lines, which is no doubt one of the reasons I liked it so much.  Maybe the notion that we create  the world with our stories is escapist fantasy.   On the other side, maybe the  old Hindu masters were right.   Both of these ideas can and to me are true at the same time.    

The primary theme of my blog is the literary treatment of the reading life.   If I meander away from that I always have it in mind.   I see Powerbook as a core very early 21th century reading life book and endorse without reservations.   Read it slowly.

Su [shu] has an a very interesting post on the book that goes into some of the other themes.

As I read the remarks about aqueducts I thought of Oriental Despotism  by Kurt Wittfogel.   It is a very interesting historical work that attempts to explain why civilizations often begin in deserts rather than more seemingly welcoming places.