Orange you glad...

I remember an author recommending Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson a few months back on NPR while I was driving home from work.  Oddly, I only remembered this after picking up the book and looking at the cover as I was about to start reading it, even after personally picking it out at the used bookstore myself.  Funny how my memory can change from one sensory form to another, as the physical word "oranges" made me recall what I had heard (however delayed it may have been).

I think the author who was talking about it on the radio said it changed her life.  She had found it at a garage sale as a young person and was drawn to its openness about religion and sexuality through the voice of another juvenile.  Unfortunately, my poor memory fails to really recollect any insightful commentary or who the speaker even was, but I can attest to the fact that she was very fond of this work, as am I.  Even as (somewhat of) an adult -- but maybe moreso as one -- I appreciate the simple, uncomplicated views that children have in the face of corrupted adults.  In this case, corruption comes from religion.

In regards to its subject matter, this book surely seems ahead of its time.  It could have been written today with Winterson's openness about homosexuality.  She tends to get a little bit too artful (and off topic at times), I think, with her metaphors and fantasies, but she is successful in her use of humor and sincerity.

I'm surprised at the number of spelling/grammatical errors in this book.  I always hate when this happens, because I want to break out a red pen and play the role of editor.  I don't even really understand how a published novel can get away with so many blunders.  I would blame it on the fact that this book was originally published in '85 when they no doubt did not have spell check, but then there is The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok that was just published a few years ago, that has even more mistakes than this one.  Shame on you, editors.

My slim volume is weathered now with crumpled pages after being shoved into my bag along my travels earlier this week (damn you Spirit Airlines, with your horribly sneaky tactics).  Somehow, that feels right.  Jeanette's made-up heroine Winnet was traveling with me.  She was looking for a city with "only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it".  I am trying to dare as much as I can.

A life completely her own

Well, the impending doom that I had forecasted in the last post came quicker than expected, placing me now at the end of my first week of unemployment.  It was no surprise though, and therefore failed to jar me in any way.  Coincidentally, along with my finishing up The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, I will be spending some hours in the Big Apple working toward a new career.  Hopefully good things will come from that, but as Auster describes in "The Locked Room" (the second of the three stories), "In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm."  I'd rather less squirming and more veering, after almost three years of risen hopes and inevitable letdowns.  Anyway, to get on with the book...

What a strange book, with layers that go deeper than I can explain in any fathomable way -- especially since I haven't yet been able to wrap my mind around it myself.  The New York Trilogy is composed of three "installments".  I went into it thinking that each would be its own short story but found that the three parts are mysteriously interwoven in very subtle ways that very effectively haunt the reader (at least, me) into discomfort.

The third part, "The Locked Room", is the climax of the unsettling feeling that builds throughout the book.  It is self-conscious of itself as a whole (while the previous two parts simply reveal strange and questionable connections to each other) -- book existentialism! -- but it does this through such delicate hints that one is continuously left questioning these connections.  One of the things I am talking about here of course (*spoiler*), is Auster's "retelling of anecdotes" and stories throughout the entire novel.  I've never read a fictional book that does this, and I found it very interesting.  To place your own original writing alongside quotations and ideas from other authors seems a little bit courageous as well as inspiring...at least to me.  It gives a glimpse into the author's (or I suppose, character's) interests, and that to me further adds depth and stimulates the already numerous things going on in your head while you read this book.

The collection as a whole is a mental labyrinth.  Although the characters in all three stories ultimately find freedom from their struggles and paranoia, the reader is not allowed the same privilege, but rather left to puzzle over what the connections really were, and how best to interpret them. I suppose this mental struggle is a small reflection of the billions of personal fights we must overcome these days (especially as young people)...just like Sophie; "Sophie was just twenty-six years old.  She was too young to live through someone else, too intelligent not to want a life that was completely her own".  Voice of a generation (lol).  Overall though, I can confidently say that The New York Trilogy is a much more accomplished and powerful work than I found Moon Palace to be.  We'll have to see how the rest of his books on the list compare.