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Gut Symmetries
by Jeanette Winterson
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$13.95 |
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$10.88 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
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Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN13: 9780679777427
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity.One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer. "Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story."--Times Literary Supplement "Dazzling for [its] intelligence and inventiveness...[Winterson] is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination."--Elle "One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."--San Francisco Chronicle
Physics seems to have become the new language of love in the 1990s, and Jeanette Winterson is not the first writer to make a major character a physicist. Jonathan Lethem mined similar territory earlier this year in his delightful book, As She Climbed Across the Table, and now Winterson enters the lists with not one, but two physicists populating the pages of her equally wonderful book, Gut Symmetries. If you think about it, physics does make a good metaphor for love, encompassing as it does the principles of attraction, the exchange of energy, and unification. At the center of this meditation on "the intelligence of the universe" and "the stupidity of humankind" are Jove, a married physicist; Alice, a single physicist who becomes his mistress; and Stella, Jove's wife and later, Alice's lover. They meet on the QE2 and from there the three participants in the story take turns telling their versions of it. Gut Symmetries is a collage of memories, snippets of scientific theory, meditations on abstract concepts like truth, and the events surrounding Jove, Alice, and Stella's affair. This is a book that demands your attention, jumping as it does from one seemingly tangential topic to another; but whereas physics still seeks a grand unification theory (GUT) to explain how everything in the universe fits together, Winterson actually finds one of her own in this satisfyingly complete fictional world.
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| Good service. Long wait. |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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The book arrived a little later than the last projected date (given a two week berth, that was pretty long to wait), but when it arrived it was in good shape and exactly in the condition I expected.
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| Post-modern, complex, beautiful, worth the effort. |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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An affair. Two women. A man. Love disrobed and exposed to its multiplicitous passions, pains, and controlled recklessness. "What kind of woman goes to bed with another woman's husband? Answer: a worm? That might explain my invertebrate state." Reading Jeannette Winterson is like picking up a broken mirror, looking in it, cutting your hands, then marvelling at how beautifully red our blood can be. Gut Symmetries is a complex work. At times you may become disoriented. You may be uncertain who's speaking. It's worth staying with it until the pieces come back together. Even when disoriented you will find a character's self-reflection cutting beautiful and deep. "I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt." Handle it as a broken mirror -- piece by piece. Savor it one sentence at a time.
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| somewhat ok |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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I am trying to finish it. There are few philosophical remarks that I enjoyed.
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| Gut Symmetries |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This book changed my view on what great literature can be. Previously I thought plot drove the reader to keep going - reading this I was driven forward by the beauty of the words that Winterson uses, sometimes not understanding, or paying attention to the action, often reading several times to revel in the flavours of her prose. I looked with regret at the dwindling number of pages as I approached the end, wanting to stay longer in the drunken, passionate language of this wonderful book.
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| The quantum uncertainties of love and life |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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The title of Winterson's novel is a triple pun, referring to the twin themes of animal instinct and modern physics (Grand Unified Theory), and--in a bizarre plot twist--human innards. Most of the narrative is presented from the perspectives of two women: Stella, a poet married to a Princeton physicist, and Alice, a younger physicist who has an affair first with Stella's husband and then with Stella herself. Presented nonlinearly, it's one of Winterson's more challenging novels, a scrapbook weaving scientific metaphors and cabalistic mysticism with the tangled associations of three generations of three different families. "I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps. . . . Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me? No. So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next." Still, a thematically satisfying, often surprising plot emerges from the accumulated snippets of poetry, witticism, and musing. Even though the book's focus is certainly not its plot, all the bits and pieces eventually tie together in satisfying and unexpected ways. If the novel has a shortcoming, it would be the sacrifice of characterization for thematic unity and postmodern cleverness. It's difficult at times to distinguish the two women (surprising in a novel by Winterson) and their family histories, and one is often forced to seek textual clues in order to determine whether the present narrator is the Jewish poet or the British scientist. Occasionally, however, emotions (and especially humor) surface above the ponderous rumination--for example, the "gut"-wrenching chapter in which Stella finds out about her husband's affair and conducts a physics experiment as conceived by an enraged poet: "If I drop a CD player and a lap top out of the same window at the same time which one will hit the ground first?" "Gut Symmetries" rewards the persistent reader with memorable passages on love and physics, guilt and energy, poetry and mysticism. It's a novel many will want to reread for the Wildean wordplay and the Joycean artistry.
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