Gut Symmetries

Rating:
Summary: First heard, then read - a pleasure each time.
Review: For those of you who haven't had the chance to hear Jeanette Winterson read her work aloud, take any opportunity that comes your way: her words fly, sing, dance around your head as she speaks them (and she has such presence). I heard extracts of Gut Symmetries at the Hay Book Festival and felt compelled to buy the book - the first of hers that I'd read. The plot lures one through sometimes difficult concepts and passages which, when read moments before sleep, can take three or four re-readings. The language is so rich that I can enjoy it three times over: in her voice, in my mind's voice and out loud (to my partner's irritation).

Rating:
Summary: Can't beat Winterson!
Review: Jeanette Winterson is one of the most talented and versatile writers of this era. I have read and loved her excellent novels. Gut Symmetries, though filled with Winterson's signature poetic and metaphorical prose, is somewhat different from her other efforts. Physics and romance intertwine in this book. What are the similarities between the aforementioned subjects? Could love be measured in the law of physics? As said earlier, this book has the author's signature poetic prose -- and the same is illustrated in outstanding proportions.

I marvel at Ms. Winterson's beautiful writing and overactive imagination. Her masterful work has a unique brand of magic realism all its own. Gut Symmetries illustrates this. I highly recommend this gem to people with a penchant for literary, intelligent reads.

Rating:
Summary: what is this book?
Review: OK, it's been a while since I've read this book, but I remember almost feeling tingles when I heard about it...I too, have thought that physics is the meaning of life, and I ADORE any considerate mediation on relationships, but alas this book was horrible. It may have been a huge letdown because I was looking forward to it so much as I LOVED "The Passion" and "Written on the Body". I found this book to be entirely tooooo tangental and poetic words leading into boxed up nothings.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing call to re-think the world that surrounds us
Review: Reading Gut Symmetries does not mean just reading a novel. There are many philosophical passages (a lot of them using physics and the new theories about how the way the world works as metaphores that take your breath away, for they describe the way people feel and act. Many times Winterson's reflections make you stop everything else you are thinking about and start looking back at your own life, your own way to see your world around. It's a book to read for the pleasure of the things it says, not for entertaining on a rainy day.

Rating:
Summary: The quantum uncertainties of love and life
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Gut Symmetries
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Winterson at her finest.
Review: This is the third Winterson novel I've read, and I was disappointed. I read her novels because I admire her technique: she weaves the interesting aspects of physics and chemistry into the personal asepects of her characters. But in "Gut Symmetries" her refusal to follow any sort of "conventional" narrative left me craving more of a storyline. If you are thinking of buying a Winterson book, consider the much better "Written on the Body" (1992).

Rating:
Summary: A humdinger of a pleasure
Review: ______________________________________________

Fluff or Not? No matter - you won't be disappointed.
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----- Comments -----
This was my first foray into Winterson. I picked up this book by accident and almost missed out. This is a work in which to revel, wallow, and mark up - not to overanalyze, psychoanalyze, or moralize. Its not the plot, or even the intermingling of epic scientific theories as parallels for love, its purely the words. It's the magic that occurs when a word you've seen hundreds of times is set beside another ordinary word to form a string that is simply profound and surprisingly beautiful. Any writer able to wow with words like Winterson is deserves an unequivocal thumbs up. Don't pass this up - you'd be missing out.

---- What I liked -----
beautiful prose, unconventional plot and method, interesting characters, human and scientific dilemmas

----- What was unusual ----
highly irregular rhythm and method, just be prepared to forsake the ordinary
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