109th out of 455 books
—
402 voters
Gut Symmetries
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 wo...more
Hardcover, 219 pages
Published
March 25th 1997
by Random House Value Publishing
(first published 1997)
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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 pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing;...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 pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing;...more
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 of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is...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 of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is...more
Feb 16, 2009
Bar Shirtcliff
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Winterson fans, spiritual athiests
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 are some gems...more
That said, if you (yes, YOU) can maintain your concentration through heaps of sometimes too-repetitive, too-silly stuff, there are some gems...more
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 all meet death by water.
&
And aft...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 all meet death by water.
&
And aft...more
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
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
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. The skier in an av...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. The skier in an av...more
To me this is a delightful montage of a menage. A physicist couple end up having separate love relationships with a poetry-inclined woman, which shakes them all up. Despite the potential for the banal, the love triangle makes for fascinating reflections by the characters on the colliding or resonating relationships between quantum physics versions of reality and their own personal perspectives. Given that the whole swath of post modernist literature and much art of the 20th Century bears footpri...more
Aug 19, 2012
Iiris Onerva
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
read-2012,
summer-in-the-ice-cream-kiosk
I feel like the book only started about halfway through - as if for the first half it mainly consisted of saying "I'll tell you a story, just a minute, I'll tell you a story and it's really good and deep and stuff, trust me, I'll get to it in a minute" and then the storyteller sort of fiddled around for a hundred pages and then finally it got on with the actual story but even though it was a good story it didn't always quite meet the build-up and I have no idea why there was a build-up anyway. I...more
"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 she manage...more
Anything I write will make me/my experience with this book sound trite, so I'll just say one thing and then let Jeanette Winterson explain my feelings, as she seems to be uniquely capable of doing.
1) I have not lived a text as deeply/viscerally as I did this one in so, so long. I knew from five pages in that I was reading a five star book.
2)"They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the...more
1) I have not lived a text as deeply/viscerally as I did this one in so, so long. I knew from five pages in that I was reading a five star book.
2)"They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the...more
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 of contact, of co...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 of contact, of co...more
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 after a tarot...more
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is named after a tarot...more
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 title of a taro...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 title of a taro...more
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,...more
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 piss. The body is efficient but not...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 piss. The body is efficient but not...more
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 appear naked before you, bu...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 appear naked before you, bu...more
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 connect...more
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...more
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...more
Favorite book by favorite author of a woman I'm dating. It's very deep and complex and probably requires at least one more reading. Story is about a woman who strikes up an affair with a man, meets his wife and begins an affair with her. Fairly straightforward - until you add in string theory, other physics concepts and electromagnetism.
It's beautifully written. I can see why she's drawn to this writer.
She gave me several other of Jeanette Winterson's books - I'm not sure if they're all writte...more
It's beautifully written. I can see why she's drawn to this writer.
She gave me several other of Jeanette Winterson's books - I'm not sure if they're all writte...more
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 after a tarot...more
As in any other Winterson novel, the story is told in a non-linear fashion with heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Each chapter is named after a tarot...more
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!
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 relationships and huma...more
There were insightful comments about humanity and a great deal of comparison of human relationships and huma...more
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 more clearly delineated as peo...more
But this book rocks. I can't explain why it's so much better except for the fact that the characters are more clearly delineated as peo...more
Mar 24, 2009
Dianna
rated it
1 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
started-never-finished
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.
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Novelist 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 assi...more
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“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.”
—
199 people liked it
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”
“He: What’s the matter with you?
Me: Nothing.
Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.”
—
179 people liked it
More quotes…
Me: Nothing.
Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.”

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