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 ph...
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Mar 05, 2008
beauregard
rated it: 
ummm i love this book and am about to re-read it.
"Do you fall in love often?
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. I love widely, indiscreetly. I forget it is myself I am trying to love back to a better place.
Some people dream in color, I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of More...
"Do you fall in love often?
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. I love widely, indiscreetly. I forget it is myself I am trying to love back to a better place.
Some people dream in color, I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of More...
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Jul 13, 2007
lori
rated it: 
beautifully written story about a complicated love triangle.
favorite excerpt:
"Stella turned towards me and crumpled my heart in her hand.
'Do you fall in love often?'
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. There are children who grow up as I did, with the love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all. There are others who make fools More...
favorite excerpt:
"Stella turned towards me and crumpled my heart in her hand.
'Do you fall in love often?'
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. There are children who grow up as I did, with the love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all. There are others who make fools More...
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Feb 16, 2009
Bar
rated it: 
The prose seemed a bit on the experimental side, and not altogether successful. Addressing the reader directly is always risky, and I guess Winterson pulls it off here about as well as it can be done - but I guess I've never understood what that is supposed to add to a work of fiction. For me, it seems to be appropriate only in self-help books, manuals, etc.
That said, if you (yes, YOU) can maintain your concentration through heaps of sometimes too-repetitive, too-silly stuff, there a More...
That said, if you (yes, YOU) can maintain your concentration through heaps of sometimes too-repetitive, too-silly stuff, there a More...
May 01, 2011
Isa
rated it:
What can I say about Jeanette Winterson? That reading her is like watching a stone fall in a calm, clear pool. You can stay for hours just watching the resulting ripples.
The piece of Jeanette Winterson writing that I love the most is her short story The 24-Hour Dog. I read it while I was still in college and I've never forgotten it. I photocopy my photocopy and pass it on to friends.
Who wouldn't fall in love with writing like this?
If time is a river, we shall a More...
The piece of Jeanette Winterson writing that I love the most is her short story The 24-Hour Dog. I read it while I was still in college and I've never forgotten it. I photocopy my photocopy and pass it on to friends.
Who wouldn't fall in love with writing like this?
If time is a river, we shall a More...
Aug 30, 2010
Peter
rated it:
Jeanette Winterson's prose is truly a sublime thing. Words of lyrical beauty that wrap themselves about you and move within you, resonant with living colour and poetic meaning. That intense beauty though does somewhat serve to render in starker contrast the one or two minor things of the book that didn't quite sit so well with me. Particularly when it comes to the (sort of) happy ending and the exceptional coincidences that may work in terms of the book are just a bit too neat, and come in too s
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Aug 30, 2010
Peter
rated it:
Jeanette Winterson's prose is truly a sublime thing. Words of lyrical beauty that wrap themselves about you and move within you, resonant with living colour and poetic meaning. That intense beauty though does somewhat serve to render in starker contrast the one or two minor things of the book that didn't quite sit so well with me. Particularly when it comes to the (sort of) happy ending and the exceptional coincidences that may work in terms of the book are just a bit too neat, and come in too s
More...
Jan 04, 2010
David
rated it:
Question. What occurs when an unstoppable cannonball encounters an immovable post? Answer: The questioner has beggared the question; any universe that does or can contain the former cannot also contain the latter; it is one or the other. It is in fact likely none or the other, but that's beside the point.
Could God create a stone so large that He Himself could not lift it? As is known to those who die in the collapse of large heavy buildings, god cannot or will not lift stones. More...
Could God create a stone so large that He Himself could not lift it? As is known to those who die in the collapse of large heavy buildings, god cannot or will not lift stones. More...
Apr 03, 2010
Sam
rated it:
"Gut Symmetries" is about love. And physics. And geometry. And the infinite and the finite, and matter and what matters, and particles and monstrosities and life and time and death and the grinning skull in the mirror. It explores a relationship that swallows its own past, the ouroboros of human interaction. It is prods and pokes at the most sensitive underbelly, clinical yet caressing. Winterson seems to wield her pen with remarkable grace in this novel, and despite a few wrong turns
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Jul 04, 2009
pri
rated it:
i do love winterson's language. her poetry prose of writing. this was not my favorite book of hers (possibly least favorite?), but it is worth reading if only to hear her use of language and her repetition.
Quote: "Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope More...
Quote: "Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope More...
Jan 14, 2012
Valley Cottage
rated it:
While this is not my favorite of Jeanette Winterson's books, I still read it in a single (long) sitting. It is the story of the love triangle/three-way relationship among two physicists and a poet. Alice, while already having an affair with Jove, a married man, meets his wife Stella expecting a fight. Instead, Alice and Stella fall in love as well.
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is named af More...
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is named af More...
Jan 21, 2012
Jenny
rated it:
While I love her writing as always, this is not my favorite Jeanette Winterson. That honor still belongs to Written on the Body or The Powerbook. It is funny because both of those books have less plot than Gut Symmetries, but I think it is some of the plot in this book that made me enjoy it less.
The story focuses on three people - Alice, a theoretical physicist, who has an affair with Jove, and then also his wife Stella. Each chapter is told from a different perspective, with the t More...
The story focuses on three people - Alice, a theoretical physicist, who has an affair with Jove, and then also his wife Stella. Each chapter is told from a different perspective, with the t More...
May 12, 2008
I like movies, there is in some people’s lives, a general vivid life in dramas, as such when these that injects people and energy and project them along a page well written. I put this book down, only for a few days, after that having only the last three chapters to delve into. The first was hard to discuss. The author is extraordinary and can recreate the right atmosphere for her characters. It all seems straight forward enough. The story is long and boorish. It is all a little outdated though,
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Jan 22, 2012
Jessica
rated it:
I love this author, although this meanders a bit...
____________
This is the difficulty. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we do to about the stupidity of people? (11)
____________
The body is its own biosphere, air entering cautiously through an elaborate filter, food attacked by hostile acids. Nothing from outside is given a long-stay visa. Oxygen is expelled as carbon, even champagne and foie gras are pummeled into turds and More...
____________
This is the difficulty. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we do to about the stupidity of people? (11)
____________
The body is its own biosphere, air entering cautiously through an elaborate filter, food attacked by hostile acids. Nothing from outside is given a long-stay visa. Oxygen is expelled as carbon, even champagne and foie gras are pummeled into turds and More...
Nov 05, 2007
alicia
rated it:
There were pages on end when I only grasped a small portion of what Jeanette Winterson was describing. And then there would be a few words that absolutely floored me.
One of my favorite excerpts:
“My feelings dismay me. I so rarely control them. They are their own kingdom, too primitive to be a republic, and when they want to, they send their armies to batter me. My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state…
I say I app More...
One of my favorite excerpts:
“My feelings dismay me. I so rarely control them. They are their own kingdom, too primitive to be a republic, and when they want to, they send their armies to batter me. My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state…
I say I app More...
Oct 15, 2007
Evan
rated it:
I'm in a phase where I am reading all J.W.'s work and trying to do so in order of publication. That being said she revisits sentences and themes. Her work builds on itself even though the characters and stories are different and I like that. This story is about Jove and his wife Stella and his mistress Alice. After Stella finds out about the affair, she and Alice meet and begin an affair of their own. The book tells the stories of each of their parents also and their are some interesting co
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Jan 21, 2010
Andrew
rated it:
A favorite of mine that I just re-read for some reason or another. Somewhere in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (I don't have a copy handy), Annie Dillard says that the discovery of the seeming contradictory behavior of the universe at the quantum level has turned modern physicists into a pack of raving mystics. In a way, Winterson is basically spinning that same idea out over the length of a novel. For Winterson, modern physics, the madness of poetry and the ancient art of alchemy all point to one thin
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Nov 11, 2011
pearl
rated it:
I forgot I even read this! Which says less about the quality of the book than the reliability of my memory. In any case it was not Winterson's best but still enjoyable. It has the remarkable quality of being a short book though feeling like a much longer and swirling sort of read than it is. My only regret was that I sometimes got lost in the physics-talk, did not particularly engage with Jove's or Stella's back-story, and wished only for more Alice & Stella, because of course, I'm like that.
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Jan 14, 2012
Katie
rated it:
While this is not my favorite of Jeanette Winterson's books, I still read it in a single (long) sitting. It is the story of the love triangle/three-way relationship among two physicists and a poet. Alice, while already having an affair with Jove, a married man, meets his wife Stella expecting a fight. Instead, Alice and Stella fall in love as well.
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is name More...
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is name More...
Nov 20, 2011
Darlene
rated it:
I happened on this book in my university bookstore. A former physics student, every page I opened grabbed at my heartstrings. I loved how she used metaphors from physics and astronomy to illustrate the different emotions and relationships in the book. Beautiful and unique images - I was instantly starstruck!!! It was my first Jeanette Winterson book and I fell in love. I'm a fan for life!
Apr 18, 2011
Leigh
rated it:
This novel was not what I was expecting and I felt disappointed by the time I got to the last page. I expected, based on references from other writers, a clever interweaving of physics concepts and a love triangle. Instead, I got back story, lots and lots of back story. I venture to say that Winterson compiled histories for all of these characters and forgot to put them together in a plot.
There were insightful comments about humanity and a great deal of comparison of human relationship More...
There were insightful comments about humanity and a great deal of comparison of human relationship More...
Feb 21, 2011
Leif Erik
rated it:
Amo ergo sum.
Quantum physics as a vehicle for conveying the uncertainty and complexity of love. My love of Winterson continues. If you find riveting narrative to be essential to good writing then look more. However, if you can dig a literary equivalent of Abstract Expression, you will be rewarded with passages like 'I am civilized. My feeling are not."
Quantum physics as a vehicle for conveying the uncertainty and complexity of love. My love of Winterson continues. If you find riveting narrative to be essential to good writing then look more. However, if you can dig a literary equivalent of Abstract Expression, you will be rewarded with passages like 'I am civilized. My feeling are not."
Mar 18, 2008
simon
rated it:
In general, I am kind of "over" Jeannette Winterson. I don't have any of her books anymore, except this one, and I used to have quite a few. _Oranges Aren't The Only Fruit_ was definitely a source of fantasy material when I first read it, but I haven't been back since. I read a bunch of others, but to tell you the truth, they are all a jumbled blur by this point.
But this book rocks. I can't explain why it's so much better except for the fact that the characters are mor More...
But this book rocks. I can't explain why it's so much better except for the fact that the characters are mor More...
Mar 09, 2010
John
rated it:
Combines stuff about love with string theory/physics/a bunch of stuff I don't understand. Excellent, closer to Sexing the Cherry than something like Written on the Body. Read it for my research project on women authors and food in the late 20th century and a HUSBAND EAT PART OF HIS WIFE. NICE.
Jul 20, 2010
kris
rated it:
Sometimes I got lost in the technical terminology used and felt like it was too smart for me to follow. But it did contain an engrossing storyline and it was interesting getting the histories and different points of view from the characters on the same events.
Mar 24, 2009
Dianna
rated it: 
i'm only a chapter or two in and i'm already losing interest. what others seem to find poetic about the language, i'm finding overly purple and obtuse. i kept wanting to roll my eyes. i guess jeanette winterson is not my thing.
Sep 04, 2011
Alison
rated it:
I need to try this author again, when I have plenty of time to read slowly and think about her story ... too complicated; I chose it because each chapter was headed by a Tarot card .... didn't really get the connexion.
Jan 24, 2011
Stargirl
rated it:
I loved the intersection of physics and love, two things often depicted as being on opposite sides of a spectrum of reason. Characterisation was excellent and as always, I love Winterson's lyrical, languid style.
May 11, 2010
sisterimapoet
rated it:
I will never not be wowed by Wintersons imagination. I really think I could read anything she wrote and get something special from it. A literary version of being able to sing the phone book perhaps?
I liked the sea-based sections of this, but it felt a fair bit weaker than the wonderful 'Lighthousekeeping'.
I liked the love triangle, and the dipping from past to present. But some of the physics stuff was a bit confusing. And the tarot card chapters didn't seem to fit More...
I liked the sea-based sections of this, but it felt a fair bit weaker than the wonderful 'Lighthousekeeping'.
I liked the love triangle, and the dipping from past to present. But some of the physics stuff was a bit confusing. And the tarot card chapters didn't seem to fit More...
Oct 25, 2010
Emily
rated it:
Generally I don't mind Jeanette Winterson, but in the case of this book I found her writing to be pretty self-indulgent, unsubtle and a bit 'try hard' at being intellectual and deep.
Apr 17, 2011
Lindsey
rated it:
Beautiful story about a love triangle, with a twist. The prose can get a little confusing if you're not paying attention, but still a very nicely written piece of literature.
