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Gut Symmetries
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
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
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 1997
172 people are currently reading
4699 people want to read
About the author
Jeanette Winterson
124 books7,675 followersNovelist 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 assistant editor at Pandora Press.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
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August 23, 2025
‘Walk with me’ Jeanette Winterson writes like a refrain throughout Gut Symmetries, ‘Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative.’ To walk through the works of Winterson is to walk into a world of wonderment, eschewing direct routes to ramble a winding road that appears as if it were a hidden path revealed in the underbrush of a fairy tale forest, lush in the secrets of her sentences. It’s exactly where you want to be. For me it was exactly where I needed to be. Winterson’s prose soars and leaves you feeling ‘rescued from the smallness that we are,’ reminded that we are the star stuff Carl Sagan talked about. There is a density to Gut Symmetries that makes the journey a bit slower than her previous works, though it is a density composed of pure poetic elegance engaged in philosophical and romantic inquiry. Ambitious in its aim, Gut Symmetries spends little time in its present—though much of it at sea as we encounter ‘life asail on its own tears’—in order to examine paradigms of flux and fluidity through history, identity, interpersonal relations with quantum physics and metaphysics interlacing for a unifying theory of all existence. At the center of it all is the affair between a man and his mistress who then becomes the lover of his wife instead and Gut Symmetries shows Winterson afresh in post-modernist experimentation as questions of stability, identity, gender and power structures are blown about in fallout of their loves. Drawing from the sciences, mysticisms, the tarot, the Kabbalah and more, Winterson demonstrates the titular symmetry between the Grand Unified Theory—or GUT—and our ‘gut instincts’ of emotion in this slow-burning yet sweepingly ponderous novel filled with her signature whimsicality and wit revealing that history is alive within us all and love is the brightest star in our interpersonal cosmos.
‘The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.’
This novel accompanied me through the summer and was a dear companion when I really needed one. Winterson novels are always a balm for the heart, achingly beautiful in her hopeful depictions of love, fascinating in their scope and philosophical investigations. Written a decade into an already impressive career, Gut Symmetries finds Winterson as always continually reaching for greater poetic vistas, with this novel weaving a complex web of personal histories and desires in a novel that is as much about the meaning of existence as it is the fraught love triangle or the stories of each character’s fathers. 'Life is an intricate tapestry of possibilities, woven by the hands of fate,' she tells us and proceeds to produce an elegant tapestry of characters, philosophy and prose. ‘Here follows,’ she tells us, ‘a story of time, universe, love affair and New York. The Ship of Fools, A Jew, a diamond, A dream a working-class boy, a baby, a river, the subatomic joke of unstable matter.’ In the essays in Art Objects, Winterson explains:
Such artistic trajectory is certainly understood in the weaving structure of Gut Symmetries. It sounds like a lot and, truthfully, it is a lot, making this short book a bit of a dense and slow read, though one that feels so fully unique yet familiarly Wintersonian.
‘Every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?’
Her works are often threaded with fairy tales and contain an element of mythological whimsicality, found her in family histories such as the diamond-eating mother causing Stella to be born with a diamond in the base of her spin and shadowed by the diamond owner all her life. Though in place of fairy tales here we have the stories of quantum mechanics, wormholes, the Zodiac, Paracelsus, Schrödinger’s cat and a whole slew of metaphysical ideas all in orbit together. It all unites into the GUT, the science and the ‘thinking gut’:
I really love the way Winterson blends theories here, showing science, religion and all metaphysics ‘seems only to be a difference in terminology.’ It makes for a rather optimistic engagement pondering if ‘what physicists identify as our wave function may be what has traditionally been called the soul,’ and that if matter lives on perhaps so do we, and so does love. It is such a intriguing amalgamation of thought, each like a wormhole pulling us into a new realm of perspective such as the chapters denoted by Tarot cards or the way each character has a card to identify them: Alice as the Fool, Stella as the Star, and Jove the Knave of Coins (sometimes called Page of Pentacles).
There is an excellent dichotomy presented here between Jove and Stella, Jove making his life from academic pursuits of science and common sense as symbolized by his tarot while The Star emphasizes spirituality, strength and the optimism of a dreamer. 'As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.' The triangle between the three in many ways shows Alice's search for purpose to be a balance of the science and spirituality paralleled to the union of the two Winterson expresses thematically as a whole where 'thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.' Ultimately it is all a hopeful collaboration of ways to harness meaning in the universe. Anything to make life seem worthwhile.
What makes Winterson's works so enduringly beautiful are the ways in which she always centers love at the heart of meaning and purpose with her insights into love amongst her most extraordinary sentences across all her books. Gut Symmetries is no different with characters ‘stacking up our life histories as a bulwark against the world,’ still holding their beloved ‘knowing that your body is faced with knives,’ and always believing ‘love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.’ Such sentiments fill the heart and make the journey always worthwhile because, as Winterson has said on her writing, ‘I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world.’ Besides, ‘without love what does humanness mean?’ What, indeed.
‘Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together.
His wife, his mistress, met.’
The three principal characters occupy very little space in the book, and while cr that they are a bit flat compared to her other books and their voices somewhat indistinguishable are fair, I hardly found it lacking. I find they are better understood as forces of physics and matter colliding, the arrowhead of their family history on a trajectory through one another. There is a rich irony in Jove symbolized by the Knave of Coins—typically symbolizing loyalty as well as a student of learning—as he engages in frequent affairs such as the one that brings Alice and Stella together when wife and mistress meet and desire overrides hurt. Jove, with a name meaning “father of the sky” and referring to his erections as ‘the physics of God’ positions himself as a would-be god moving women around his life like chess pieces. Winterson cleverly subverts the patriarchal power dynamics as the women reject and eject the male dominance from the triangular structure of the romance. Because what would a Winterson novel be without a sapphic tale of love to play your heartstrings like a harp? Amidst all the talk of theories in the novel, Sigmund Freud rather unfortunate theory of homosexuality as a symptom of narcissicm is one refuted by Winterson in her depictions of Alice and Stella’s romance:
Love is not selfish or self deluding in a Winterson work, it is freeing and centering, something much needed in a story about life in flux.
‘Cogito ergo sum or is it Amo ergo sum? I think therefore I am? I love therefor I am? What has defined me at the clearest point of my out-spread life has been my love for you. Not a raft or a lifebelt. A fix in the flux.’
There is an instability of identity throughout Gut Symmetries. ‘Everywhere I go, reflection,’ muses Alice, ‘Everywhere a caught image of who I am. In all of that who am I?’ The love affair further puts life in flux and blending boundaries—‘I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am he was me I was him are we her?’—and we see Alice caught in the anxieties of ’eternal becoming, flux not fix, and identity of perpetual change, process not substance,’ as well as the fears of vulnerability to affix herself or give in to love worrying ‘what should lead me out is very likely to wall me in.’ Anxious attachment is hard to shake, finding oneself always 'carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it,' distrusting happiness assuming it's dark twin is around every corner, always waiting for the other foot to fall.
There is a constant push and pull between logic and feeling and, with love, the anxieties can melt away and one can feel themselves a part of the greatness of the cosmos.
‘The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are.’
The novel sashays between past and present, illuminating an epic of family history that primarily centers on the lives of the fathers as they search for their own stability. However, as is often in Winterson, we see time unstitched from linear motion and it rescues the past by way of the present:
Alice finds that her father was ‘in the fullness of his present,'’ having found that one must ‘pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it.’ For Alice and Stella, that gold might just be the love of each other.
Winterson is always at her finest when crafting language into expressions of love, and we see how Alice finds being able to productively and healthily give love to Stella allows her to craft a better self and love. Not that it isn't still frightening, but that it is worth it and we see how 'what you risk reveals what you value.' This line first appeared thematically central to her earlier—and my personal all-time favorite—novel The Passion and continued as motif in her other works such as Written on the Body, The Gap in Time or even an article she wrote for The Guardian about how to live with fear in a post-9/11 world. Love, Winterson teaches us, is always worth the risk and can help us love each other and ourselves better and more authentically. ‘I want to love well,' she says, 'To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being.’ We should all be so lucky.
'How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.'
Through all the moving pieces of life, both seen and unseen, we might wonder if there is a singular force directing us all as our lives collide, ricochet, scatter or find an orbit in one another. Gut Symmetries threads the theories, finds a symmetry, and asks us if, perhaps, the most moving of metaphysical insight might simply be love itself. So, 'walk with me,' Winterson asks us, 'hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.' She looks inside all our hearts in order to show it is filled with stars and that if the universe is a symphony, we are all notes harmonizing in the grand composition. I spent the summer with this one, reading it with my best friend and it was such a joy. A moving novel moving through the metaphysical and quantum, Gut Symmetries has claimed my heart.
4.5/5
‘I say your name as a spell and leave my last word here as yours. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.’
‘The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.’
This novel accompanied me through the summer and was a dear companion when I really needed one. Winterson novels are always a balm for the heart, achingly beautiful in her hopeful depictions of love, fascinating in their scope and philosophical investigations. Written a decade into an already impressive career, Gut Symmetries finds Winterson as always continually reaching for greater poetic vistas, with this novel weaving a complex web of personal histories and desires in a novel that is as much about the meaning of existence as it is the fraught love triangle or the stories of each character’s fathers. 'Life is an intricate tapestry of possibilities, woven by the hands of fate,' she tells us and proceeds to produce an elegant tapestry of characters, philosophy and prose. ‘Here follows,’ she tells us, ‘a story of time, universe, love affair and New York. The Ship of Fools, A Jew, a diamond, A dream a working-class boy, a baby, a river, the subatomic joke of unstable matter.’ In the essays in Art Objects, Winterson explains:
‘What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st century needs. A form that is not ‘a poem’ as we usually understand the term, and not ‘a novel’ as the term is defined by its own genesis. I do not write novels.’
Such artistic trajectory is certainly understood in the weaving structure of Gut Symmetries. It sounds like a lot and, truthfully, it is a lot, making this short book a bit of a dense and slow read, though one that feels so fully unique yet familiarly Wintersonian.
‘Every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?’
Her works are often threaded with fairy tales and contain an element of mythological whimsicality, found her in family histories such as the diamond-eating mother causing Stella to be born with a diamond in the base of her spin and shadowed by the diamond owner all her life. Though in place of fairy tales here we have the stories of quantum mechanics, wormholes, the Zodiac, Paracelsus, Schrödinger’s cat and a whole slew of metaphysical ideas all in orbit together. It all unites into the GUT, the science and the ‘thinking gut’:
‘GUT stands for Grand Unified Theory – the theory of everything science wants to discover – and it’s Gut as in Gut instinct, the feelings that lead us on much more than we like to admit.’
I really love the way Winterson blends theories here, showing science, religion and all metaphysics ‘seems only to be a difference in terminology.’ It makes for a rather optimistic engagement pondering if ‘what physicists identify as our wave function may be what has traditionally been called the soul,’ and that if matter lives on perhaps so do we, and so does love. It is such a intriguing amalgamation of thought, each like a wormhole pulling us into a new realm of perspective such as the chapters denoted by Tarot cards or the way each character has a card to identify them: Alice as the Fool, Stella as the Star, and Jove the Knave of Coins (sometimes called Page of Pentacles).
There is an excellent dichotomy presented here between Jove and Stella, Jove making his life from academic pursuits of science and common sense as symbolized by his tarot while The Star emphasizes spirituality, strength and the optimism of a dreamer. 'As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.' The triangle between the three in many ways shows Alice's search for purpose to be a balance of the science and spirituality paralleled to the union of the two Winterson expresses thematically as a whole where 'thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.' Ultimately it is all a hopeful collaboration of ways to harness meaning in the universe. Anything to make life seem worthwhile.
‘Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.’
What makes Winterson's works so enduringly beautiful are the ways in which she always centers love at the heart of meaning and purpose with her insights into love amongst her most extraordinary sentences across all her books. Gut Symmetries is no different with characters ‘stacking up our life histories as a bulwark against the world,’ still holding their beloved ‘knowing that your body is faced with knives,’ and always believing ‘love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.’ Such sentiments fill the heart and make the journey always worthwhile because, as Winterson has said on her writing, ‘I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world.’ Besides, ‘without love what does humanness mean?’ What, indeed.
‘Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together.
His wife, his mistress, met.’
The three principal characters occupy very little space in the book, and while cr that they are a bit flat compared to her other books and their voices somewhat indistinguishable are fair, I hardly found it lacking. I find they are better understood as forces of physics and matter colliding, the arrowhead of their family history on a trajectory through one another. There is a rich irony in Jove symbolized by the Knave of Coins—typically symbolizing loyalty as well as a student of learning—as he engages in frequent affairs such as the one that brings Alice and Stella together when wife and mistress meet and desire overrides hurt. Jove, with a name meaning “father of the sky” and referring to his erections as ‘the physics of God’ positions himself as a would-be god moving women around his life like chess pieces. Winterson cleverly subverts the patriarchal power dynamics as the women reject and eject the male dominance from the triangular structure of the romance. Because what would a Winterson novel be without a sapphic tale of love to play your heartstrings like a harp? Amidst all the talk of theories in the novel, Sigmund Freud rather unfortunate theory of homosexuality as a symptom of narcissicm is one refuted by Winterson in her depictions of Alice and Stella’s romance:
‘Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth, were more than Narcissus hypnotised by his own likeness. Everybody knows how the story changes when he disturbs the water. I did disturb the water and the perfect picture broke…Why then did I trouble the surface? It was not myself I fell in love with it was her.’
Love is not selfish or self deluding in a Winterson work, it is freeing and centering, something much needed in a story about life in flux.
‘Cogito ergo sum or is it Amo ergo sum? I think therefore I am? I love therefor I am? What has defined me at the clearest point of my out-spread life has been my love for you. Not a raft or a lifebelt. A fix in the flux.’
There is an instability of identity throughout Gut Symmetries. ‘Everywhere I go, reflection,’ muses Alice, ‘Everywhere a caught image of who I am. In all of that who am I?’ The love affair further puts life in flux and blending boundaries—‘I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am he was me I was him are we her?’—and we see Alice caught in the anxieties of ’eternal becoming, flux not fix, and identity of perpetual change, process not substance,’ as well as the fears of vulnerability to affix herself or give in to love worrying ‘what should lead me out is very likely to wall me in.’ Anxious attachment is hard to shake, finding oneself always 'carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it,' distrusting happiness assuming it's dark twin is around every corner, always waiting for the other foot to fall.
‘My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feelings rebel against me. I separated myself from too much hurt. Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically I recognise that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain.’
There is a constant push and pull between logic and feeling and, with love, the anxieties can melt away and one can feel themselves a part of the greatness of the cosmos.
‘The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are.’
The novel sashays between past and present, illuminating an epic of family history that primarily centers on the lives of the fathers as they search for their own stability. However, as is often in Winterson, we see time unstitched from linear motion and it rescues the past by way of the present:
‘I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who will I be?’
Alice finds that her father was ‘in the fullness of his present,'’ having found that one must ‘pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it.’ For Alice and Stella, that gold might just be the love of each other.
'Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that I explore. THe much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. Gold in the mine of you. Mine own gold.'
Winterson is always at her finest when crafting language into expressions of love, and we see how Alice finds being able to productively and healthily give love to Stella allows her to craft a better self and love. Not that it isn't still frightening, but that it is worth it and we see how 'what you risk reveals what you value.' This line first appeared thematically central to her earlier—and my personal all-time favorite—novel The Passion and continued as motif in her other works such as Written on the Body, The Gap in Time or even an article she wrote for The Guardian about how to live with fear in a post-9/11 world. Love, Winterson teaches us, is always worth the risk and can help us love each other and ourselves better and more authentically. ‘I want to love well,' she says, 'To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being.’ We should all be so lucky.
'How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.'
Through all the moving pieces of life, both seen and unseen, we might wonder if there is a singular force directing us all as our lives collide, ricochet, scatter or find an orbit in one another. Gut Symmetries threads the theories, finds a symmetry, and asks us if, perhaps, the most moving of metaphysical insight might simply be love itself. So, 'walk with me,' Winterson asks us, 'hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.' She looks inside all our hearts in order to show it is filled with stars and that if the universe is a symphony, we are all notes harmonizing in the grand composition. I spent the summer with this one, reading it with my best friend and it was such a joy. A moving novel moving through the metaphysical and quantum, Gut Symmetries has claimed my heart.
4.5/5
‘I say your name as a spell and leave my last word here as yours. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.’
September 10, 2020
You know that thrill you get when you discover a favourite author has a new book coming out? Equally exciting is realizing there is an older book that you have yet to read.
I thought I had read all of Jeanette Winterson's books. Then I was perusing her Goodreads page last week and saw that there was one book (aside from her children's books that I have no interest in reading) without any stars.
What? Surely I read it, I thought to myself. Perhaps I forgot to rate it on Goodreads. So I got out the notebook in which I've been writing down all the books I've read since 1997 and went through the entire thing. Every single one of Jeanette Winterson's books was listed, except Gut Symmetries! The thrill!
I recalled that several years ago I purchased all of her books I still needed to read, Gut Symmetries among them. I thought I would save one of her books for later rather than enjoying them all at once. I'm the sort of person who always wants to extend and delay my enjoyment. I save that last chocolate truffle rather than gulping them all straight down..... only to find it many months later, chocolate greying and no longer tasting very good.
Perhaps that's what happened with this one, the book version of the dreaded chocolate fat bloom.
It includes all those elements I love.... her unique blend of physics and mythology and dazzling wordplay. And yet, it failed to excite me the way her other books do.
It's the story of Alice who has an affair with Jove... and also with his wife, Stella. "My first serious emotion was for a married man. My first experience of authentic desire was with a married woman."
Time is irrelevant and though the triangular love affair unfolds in a linear fashion, it is interwoven with the stories of our main characters' parents, as though all is happening at the same time. Does time even exist or is it an illusion? "If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
I think it is this back and forth-ness of all the extra characters that made this a less than enjoyable read for me. Had it been solely the threesome, I might have liked it more.
The writing is exquisite. Sheer, beautiful, scintillating. The analogies and metaphors are brilliant. It is classic Jeanette Winterson.
However, it was a chore to read and my interest often waned. This is my least favourite of her books. I wish I had put aside for later a different one.
And now I will resume eagerly -almost obsessively- awaiting a new book from her. Time certainly feels real and I hope it won't be too long....
I thought I had read all of Jeanette Winterson's books. Then I was perusing her Goodreads page last week and saw that there was one book (aside from her children's books that I have no interest in reading) without any stars.
What? Surely I read it, I thought to myself. Perhaps I forgot to rate it on Goodreads. So I got out the notebook in which I've been writing down all the books I've read since 1997 and went through the entire thing. Every single one of Jeanette Winterson's books was listed, except Gut Symmetries! The thrill!
I recalled that several years ago I purchased all of her books I still needed to read, Gut Symmetries among them. I thought I would save one of her books for later rather than enjoying them all at once. I'm the sort of person who always wants to extend and delay my enjoyment. I save that last chocolate truffle rather than gulping them all straight down..... only to find it many months later, chocolate greying and no longer tasting very good.
Perhaps that's what happened with this one, the book version of the dreaded chocolate fat bloom.
It includes all those elements I love.... her unique blend of physics and mythology and dazzling wordplay. And yet, it failed to excite me the way her other books do.
It's the story of Alice who has an affair with Jove... and also with his wife, Stella. "My first serious emotion was for a married man. My first experience of authentic desire was with a married woman."
Time is irrelevant and though the triangular love affair unfolds in a linear fashion, it is interwoven with the stories of our main characters' parents, as though all is happening at the same time. Does time even exist or is it an illusion? "If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
I think it is this back and forth-ness of all the extra characters that made this a less than enjoyable read for me. Had it been solely the threesome, I might have liked it more.
The writing is exquisite. Sheer, beautiful, scintillating. The analogies and metaphors are brilliant. It is classic Jeanette Winterson.
However, it was a chore to read and my interest often waned. This is my least favourite of her books. I wish I had put aside for later a different one.
And now I will resume eagerly -almost obsessively- awaiting a new book from her. Time certainly feels real and I hope it won't be too long....
March 6, 2008
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; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
Don’t lie.
Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want be someone’s neat little home."
&
"...To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein’s E=MC2."
"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; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
Don’t lie.
Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want be someone’s neat little home."
&
"...To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein’s E=MC2."
August 14, 2017
For me this book didn't know weather it wanted to be a physics text or the tale of a triangular affair.
Readers will touch on some information about quantum physics and string theory.
Sort of like "Physics for Dummies" but just when that starts to get interesting the comparisons begin between physics and the affairs.
On a plus note, Ms.Winterson can write beautifully.
There is more than enough back story.
And towards the end, story line twist start coming at you rapid fire.
"In the 1970's Jove was working on his GUTs: Grand Unified Theories that sought to unite the strong, weak, and electromagnetic quanta..."
"Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together."
"His wife, his mistress, met."
"The separateness of our lives is a sham."
"What patterns do the numbers make? Three pairs of two: Jove and Stella, Jove and Alice, Alice and Stella."
July 30, 2012
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 footprints of the overthrow of the Newtonian vision, this novel trods a well worn path. But it is fresh in having physicists themselves in the throes of the pains of love and jealousies, and I was pleasantly surprised by the lyrical mash-ups of the universal and the personal on nearly every page. The ending is perhaps a little too clever in its rendition of the quantum paradox of Schroedinger's cat, in which Alice's lovers are both alive and dead until the observer makes a determination. Still, I enjoyed the whole book, somewhat in the same way I would appreciate a jazz performance.
July 31, 2023
I'm finding it almost painful to admit that a book from one of my favourite authors was mediocre. Winterson is amazing, and she writes in a style that no other can match, but this particular book didn't live up to the standard I was expecting.
The book had everything that Jeanette expertly weaves into her tales, and that unique style that I adored with the first book I was introduced to, but unfortunately, it failed to takeoff, and I was left feeling rather flat.
The characters were fairly unlikeable, and certainly not relatable for me, and I found the pacing a little irritating, especially the manner in which it jumped back and forth with other various characters. It put a dampener on things.
This book had all the delicious writing from Winterson that I love, but with a weak plot, so I'm glad it can tick it off the list now.
The book had everything that Jeanette expertly weaves into her tales, and that unique style that I adored with the first book I was introduced to, but unfortunately, it failed to takeoff, and I was left feeling rather flat.
The characters were fairly unlikeable, and certainly not relatable for me, and I found the pacing a little irritating, especially the manner in which it jumped back and forth with other various characters. It put a dampener on things.
This book had all the delicious writing from Winterson that I love, but with a weak plot, so I'm glad it can tick it off the list now.
July 13, 2007
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 themselves they are trying to love back to a better place."
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 themselves they are trying to love back to a better place."
February 16, 2009
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 in here. Near the end of the book, for example:
"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. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feeling rebel against me." (208)
I've just noticed that that paragraph exemplifies both sides of this book - it's interesting and reflective, but discontinuous and awkward, too. Her transitions are often missing, and I can see where this heightens an effect, but it seems that she has gotten a bit carried away.
I can't remember where I read this (I suspect William S. Burroughs), but a good writer doesn't need to make every page a masterpiece, unless they're of Faulkner's stature. Aside from this mistake (okay it obviously drove me nuts), this is a lovely book, an unusual story.
That said, if you (yes, YOU) can maintain your concentration through heaps of sometimes too-repetitive, too-silly stuff, there are some gems in here. Near the end of the book, for example:
"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. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feeling rebel against me." (208)
I've just noticed that that paragraph exemplifies both sides of this book - it's interesting and reflective, but discontinuous and awkward, too. Her transitions are often missing, and I can see where this heightens an effect, but it seems that she has gotten a bit carried away.
I can't remember where I read this (I suspect William S. Burroughs), but a good writer doesn't need to make every page a masterpiece, unless they're of Faulkner's stature. Aside from this mistake (okay it obviously drove me nuts), this is a lovely book, an unusual story.
November 4, 2024
i finished this ages ago and never really reviewed it because i wasn't sure how to articulate my thoughts on it but like, wow, holy fuck, jeanette winterson never fails me <3 on the sliding scale of how esoteric her books get, this one - for me at least - lands squarely somewhere between Art and Lies and Lighthousekeeping, which worked SUPER well for me. i love the character dynamics, i love how the dialogue is written, i love the unexpected moments of hilarity woven between musings on love and time and physics. i love how in every single book she writes, the man characters are just the most deeply unlikeable people on the planet hahaha (excluding henri my beloved). just gorgeously written, although i'll admit that it took me ages to read because this one is DENSE. expect to be working your way through a few pages at a time - which is honestly the way to do it because there are so many gems in here. adored this book and adored buddy reading it with my partner in winterson crime, s!! 5/5 please read it immediately
January 8, 2019
This is a beautifully written and dizzying novel about an affair or rather two affairs which reads like a meditation. There is a narrative, but it is not linear yet each chapter fits into the whole. Every reader will probably find something different in this wondrous novel, for me it was the gorgeous writing!
February 20, 2018
Read: February 2018
Rating: 2/5 stars
It's so difficult to rate this book because the writing was beautiful and lyrical and evocative, but at the same the plot was so thin as to be non-existent. I was never really gripped by the story and even though I enjoyed it I was never in a rush to get back to it and see what happened next.
Rating: 2/5 stars
It's so difficult to rate this book because the writing was beautiful and lyrical and evocative, but at the same the plot was so thin as to be non-existent. I was never really gripped by the story and even though I enjoyed it I was never in a rush to get back to it and see what happened next.
March 24, 2009
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.
May 7, 2017
Time.
Newton visualised time as an arrow flying towards its target. Einstein understood time as a river, moving forward, forceful, directed, but also bowed, curved, sometimes, subterranean, not ending but pouring itself into a greater sea. A river cannot flow against its current, but it can flow in circles; its eddies and whirlpools regularly break up its strong press forward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since.
Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotions, time’s inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by.
A kick in the current twists us round, and suddenly we are caught in the net we made, the accumulations of lifetime just under the surface. What were those stories about townships at the bottom of a river? Lost kingdoms tantalisingly visible when the river was calm? It is well-known that mermaids flash through the dark sea to swim like salmon against the river.
The unconscious, it seem, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are.
If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.
p.106-107
Newton visualised time as an arrow flying towards its target. Einstein understood time as a river, moving forward, forceful, directed, but also bowed, curved, sometimes, subterranean, not ending but pouring itself into a greater sea. A river cannot flow against its current, but it can flow in circles; its eddies and whirlpools regularly break up its strong press forward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since.
Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotions, time’s inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by.
A kick in the current twists us round, and suddenly we are caught in the net we made, the accumulations of lifetime just under the surface. What were those stories about townships at the bottom of a river? Lost kingdoms tantalisingly visible when the river was calm? It is well-known that mermaids flash through the dark sea to swim like salmon against the river.
The unconscious, it seem, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are.
If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.
p.106-107
December 19, 2016
Gut Symmetries is unsurprisingly very well written, as all of Winterson's work is. I very much liked the fragmented style of prose, which perfectly demonstrates the love triangle which has been focused upon from the perspectives of both females involved. Causal actions are a large part of the text, and the varied focus worked perfectly to demonstrate these. At times, it wasn't entirely clear as to who was speaking, but on the whole, it didn't really matter. All of those involved were troubled in some way, and Winterson highlights both their heartbreak and thought processes masterfully.
Gut Symmetries is not my favourite Winterson by any means, but it is well crafted, and a great read nonetheless. Some of the imagery used is absolutely beautiful, and many threads of story can be traced. The novel also has one of the finest final sentences which I have come across in a long time, and which I will leave you with: 'Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of you own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.'
Gut Symmetries is not my favourite Winterson by any means, but it is well crafted, and a great read nonetheless. Some of the imagery used is absolutely beautiful, and many threads of story can be traced. The novel also has one of the finest final sentences which I have come across in a long time, and which I will leave you with: 'Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of you own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.'
August 19, 2012
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'd rather not be promised things, I'd rather just get them and be pleasantly surprised.
Frankly, even though there is a lot I like about Winterson's writing style, if I hadn't read and loved The Stone Gods I would probably be giving up on her novels.
Frankly, even though there is a lot I like about Winterson's writing style, if I hadn't read and loved The Stone Gods I would probably be giving up on her novels.
January 19, 2015
Eye-opening read.
“The most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.” - Gore Vidal
To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas.
Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.
I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present.
I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.
What kills love? Only this: neglect.
When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies?
My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none.
Aliquem alium internum. 'a certain other one, within.
The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha!
Where’s the difficulty in being bad?
My grandmother loved me because she recognized the same stubbornness that she had gened in her son. The difficulty and the dream were not separate. To pan the living clay that you are is to stand in the freezing waters and break yourself on a riddle of your own making. No one can force you to it. No one can force you away. Rhinegold, pure gold and somewhere in the Rhinegold, the ring.
Wagner’s Ring cycle
The stories agree that in the difficulty and the dream the hero should never count the cost.
Some writers mix the stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course. My father feared no remoras.
Ship of Fools navigating the stars
A Knife and Fork
A Bottle and a Cork
That’s the way to spell
New York
Intensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.
Whitman: I moisten the roots of all that has grown
Shadows, signs, wonders, said Papa
Whitman: The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal.
Defect of vision.
What you see is not what you think you are.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve - Max Planck
It appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point can hardly be conceived anymore - Einstein
If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no. - Robert Oppenheimer
What we know constantly reveals itself as partial.
In the Torah, the Hebrew ‘to know,’ often used in a sexual context is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and thought time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.
The facts cut me off. What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness.
Energy precedes matter.
New York, city of motion, could not go forward, and so, because it hated to stand still, it went backwards. The past of its people, now from so many parts of the globe, but all knowing what it was to struggle, to pioneer, To make the difficulty into the dream.
To defy the silence of the snow people began to sing.
Food tastes better in Italian
She put her hands down over her belly and felt me there.
“Here I am, Lord,” he said, remembering the story of Samuel.
The dogs slithered to a stop, turned, obeyed the frequency, higher than 30 megahertz, and ran forwards.
I was able to find you because you were radiant. That night the light in you was strong.
The tougher the problem, the more beautiful the solution
General Unified Theory (GUT): any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.
Renaissance thinker Robert Fludd: Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-19) has a diagram of the tuning and harmonies of this instrument according to the heavenly spheres.
As above, so below
The Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect 10-dimensional space
The world’s most famous seducers?
Lothario
Casanova
Don Juan/Giovanni Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa (If she wears a petticoat, you know what he does).
A man with 2 reputations he wanted to protect: his primacy and his potency
Walk with me. Love him and I love star-dust and light.
Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of traveled light, single year’s journey of illumination...Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.
We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. It was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. Lighter than light in the atmosphere of our love.
It was a volatile experiment.
There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
When Jove began to notice me I was puppy-dog glad.
Come out for a walk? Woof
Like some dinner? Woof
And then there were three.
His wife, his mistress, met.
I am my father’s daughter.
A man is more than his penis. Not much more but something.
Alla Vostra Salute!
“Do you fall in love often?”
I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun to your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.
It was not that either of them were insincere, simply, being bored by an argument, they could change sides faster than a mercenary offered double pay.
Tertium non datur The third is not given, whatever it is that reconciles two opposites.
Post-coital ludos -- a game
What shall we seek?
The first said, Gold
The second said, Wives
The third said, That which cannot be found.
My father shroud himself in the pressure suit and pressure helmet of normal life
He had protected himself against himself.
The pressure suit saved him from the disruptive forces of depth.
According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, but multiple chances.When dead, my father may have simply shifted to an alternative point of his wave function. A wave function spreads indefinitely though at its farthest, it is infinitesimally flimsy.
Hawking’s idea is we should treat the entire universe as a wave function, both specifically located and infinite. If we accept that, then that function is the sum of all possible universes, dead, alive, multiple, simultaneous, interdependent, co-existing.
Paracelsus: The galaxa goes through the belly
What is it that you contain?
Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that I explore. The much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. GOld in the mine of you. Mine own gold. We did escape gravity. If I flew too close to the sun, forgive me. Water claims her own at last. You were the one who taught me the aerodynamics of risk. I should have trusted you. The failure was mine, Alice, not the pain of having spoken and said nothing. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.
Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner
Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist.
What is the proper perspective on my existence?
The sun you see is 8 minutes in the past, the time it takes for light to travel the distance between the sun’s eye and yours.
Look at the galaxy. What you see is thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years past, drama of the nebula only visible when it reaches us, effort of light, 183,000 miles per second, crossing centuries of history, still dark to us. The distances are vast. Space and time become space-time.
Only in the present do I begin to recognize my own past.
Truth is found in odd places.
The most plausible explanations usually are lies.
Temporary insanity; temporary all his life.
How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.
Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete.
Perhaps I have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet possess.
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
“The most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.” - Gore Vidal
To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas.
Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.
I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present.
I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.
What kills love? Only this: neglect.
When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies?
My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none.
Aliquem alium internum. 'a certain other one, within.
The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha!
Where’s the difficulty in being bad?
My grandmother loved me because she recognized the same stubbornness that she had gened in her son. The difficulty and the dream were not separate. To pan the living clay that you are is to stand in the freezing waters and break yourself on a riddle of your own making. No one can force you to it. No one can force you away. Rhinegold, pure gold and somewhere in the Rhinegold, the ring.
Wagner’s Ring cycle
The stories agree that in the difficulty and the dream the hero should never count the cost.
Some writers mix the stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course. My father feared no remoras.
Ship of Fools navigating the stars
A Knife and Fork
A Bottle and a Cork
That’s the way to spell
New York
Intensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.
Whitman: I moisten the roots of all that has grown
Shadows, signs, wonders, said Papa
Whitman: The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal.
Defect of vision.
What you see is not what you think you are.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve - Max Planck
It appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point can hardly be conceived anymore - Einstein
If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no. - Robert Oppenheimer
What we know constantly reveals itself as partial.
In the Torah, the Hebrew ‘to know,’ often used in a sexual context is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and thought time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.
The facts cut me off. What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness.
Energy precedes matter.
New York, city of motion, could not go forward, and so, because it hated to stand still, it went backwards. The past of its people, now from so many parts of the globe, but all knowing what it was to struggle, to pioneer, To make the difficulty into the dream.
To defy the silence of the snow people began to sing.
Food tastes better in Italian
She put her hands down over her belly and felt me there.
“Here I am, Lord,” he said, remembering the story of Samuel.
The dogs slithered to a stop, turned, obeyed the frequency, higher than 30 megahertz, and ran forwards.
I was able to find you because you were radiant. That night the light in you was strong.
The tougher the problem, the more beautiful the solution
General Unified Theory (GUT): any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.
Renaissance thinker Robert Fludd: Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-19) has a diagram of the tuning and harmonies of this instrument according to the heavenly spheres.
As above, so below
The Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect 10-dimensional space
The world’s most famous seducers?
Lothario
Casanova
Don Juan/Giovanni Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa (If she wears a petticoat, you know what he does).
A man with 2 reputations he wanted to protect: his primacy and his potency
Walk with me. Love him and I love star-dust and light.
Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of traveled light, single year’s journey of illumination...Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.
We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. It was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. Lighter than light in the atmosphere of our love.
It was a volatile experiment.
There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
When Jove began to notice me I was puppy-dog glad.
Come out for a walk? Woof
Like some dinner? Woof
And then there were three.
His wife, his mistress, met.
I am my father’s daughter.
A man is more than his penis. Not much more but something.
Alla Vostra Salute!
“Do you fall in love often?”
I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun to your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.
It was not that either of them were insincere, simply, being bored by an argument, they could change sides faster than a mercenary offered double pay.
Tertium non datur The third is not given, whatever it is that reconciles two opposites.
Post-coital ludos -- a game
What shall we seek?
The first said, Gold
The second said, Wives
The third said, That which cannot be found.
My father shroud himself in the pressure suit and pressure helmet of normal life
He had protected himself against himself.
The pressure suit saved him from the disruptive forces of depth.
According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, but multiple chances.When dead, my father may have simply shifted to an alternative point of his wave function. A wave function spreads indefinitely though at its farthest, it is infinitesimally flimsy.
Hawking’s idea is we should treat the entire universe as a wave function, both specifically located and infinite. If we accept that, then that function is the sum of all possible universes, dead, alive, multiple, simultaneous, interdependent, co-existing.
Paracelsus: The galaxa goes through the belly
What is it that you contain?
Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that I explore. The much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. GOld in the mine of you. Mine own gold. We did escape gravity. If I flew too close to the sun, forgive me. Water claims her own at last. You were the one who taught me the aerodynamics of risk. I should have trusted you. The failure was mine, Alice, not the pain of having spoken and said nothing. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.
Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner
Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist.
What is the proper perspective on my existence?
The sun you see is 8 minutes in the past, the time it takes for light to travel the distance between the sun’s eye and yours.
Look at the galaxy. What you see is thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years past, drama of the nebula only visible when it reaches us, effort of light, 183,000 miles per second, crossing centuries of history, still dark to us. The distances are vast. Space and time become space-time.
Only in the present do I begin to recognize my own past.
Truth is found in odd places.
The most plausible explanations usually are lies.
Temporary insanity; temporary all his life.
How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.
Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete.
Perhaps I have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet possess.
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
May 19, 2016
This is the second time I've read this book. It's heady and mad. Delicate, strong and totally flawed characters. Mystical and scientific. That's what I love about Jeanette Winterson, really; she weaves these magic stories into reality with a presumption that we'll just get on board with it. I'm well on board with it. Saying that, I think other novels of hers are better. Oranges are not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body, to name a couple.
December 15, 2023
ms winterson…. what is this….. sometimes less intertextual references, more actual plot needed….. gruesome and unrealistic …… well written of course but it needed more redemption than nice turns of phrases…. why the poorly explained physics ….
July 25, 2022
I would’ve liked this book more if I was smarter, which is why it gets three stars instead of two. It was good objectively but I read the whole book and honestly could not tell you what it was about.
September 13, 2016
Highly-strung physicist Alice starts an affair with rapacious older professor Jove during a teaching assignment on the QE2. When news of the affair reaches Jove's wife Stella, the women meet and find themselves in a relationship too. They have to make a decision, and it seems that only a yachting trip will split the triangle for good - but in what direction?
Yes, it's another fictional portrayal of polyamory where the trifecta is triggered by the male's philandering and is driven by guilt, deceit and the need to choose. Just once it'd be nice to see a poly relationship treated as functional and not a gimmick, if not for the fact it'd be a novelty in fiction more than anything. The chances of a triangular happy-ever-after here are nil, though: for these characters too much water has passed under the bridge and deposited its effluvia at the shores of their memories, rendering the beaches bitter and inhospitable. Did I mention water was a recurring motif?
It's Winterson, so the plot as described is almost a background character, with the primary focus of the book being the rumination, yearning, family history and musings of the main characters (they may not want to share each other but they do share the narration). Pages go by where the book drifts further and further out to sea before finally returning to the terra firma of plot. Alice and Stella riffing on Hawking and Oppenheimer in the Plathian mode (Plathonic?) is of course the most beautiful part of the book. The prose is ornate but overwhelming; it reminded me most of the equally purple style of the band Of Montreal, which meant I could not listen to them while reading this. Compare "The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery" with "In my cracked kingdom in my terror hive of brutal nostalgia on some self imposed house arrest of the mind that's useless". Which is which?
There's a lot to unpack here: I've barely touched on the comparisons between the parents (Stella's Jewish mystic father, Alice's working-class boy done good shipping magnate), or the suggestion that Tarot, Kabbalah and quantum physics are all models to understand the universe through. Yet for all the hifalutin theorising there's not much in the way of linear plot, while the ending is so drenched in cryptic symbolism that one wonders if it happened at all and if so, surely not in the way described. The linguistic gymnastics are ****, the plot **, so let's call it ***. Not a luxury cruise, but not a choppy journey by tugboat either.
Yes, it's another fictional portrayal of polyamory where the trifecta is triggered by the male's philandering and is driven by guilt, deceit and the need to choose. Just once it'd be nice to see a poly relationship treated as functional and not a gimmick, if not for the fact it'd be a novelty in fiction more than anything. The chances of a triangular happy-ever-after here are nil, though: for these characters too much water has passed under the bridge and deposited its effluvia at the shores of their memories, rendering the beaches bitter and inhospitable. Did I mention water was a recurring motif?
It's Winterson, so the plot as described is almost a background character, with the primary focus of the book being the rumination, yearning, family history and musings of the main characters (they may not want to share each other but they do share the narration). Pages go by where the book drifts further and further out to sea before finally returning to the terra firma of plot. Alice and Stella riffing on Hawking and Oppenheimer in the Plathian mode (Plathonic?) is of course the most beautiful part of the book. The prose is ornate but overwhelming; it reminded me most of the equally purple style of the band Of Montreal, which meant I could not listen to them while reading this. Compare "The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery" with "In my cracked kingdom in my terror hive of brutal nostalgia on some self imposed house arrest of the mind that's useless". Which is which?
There's a lot to unpack here: I've barely touched on the comparisons between the parents (Stella's Jewish mystic father, Alice's working-class boy done good shipping magnate), or the suggestion that Tarot, Kabbalah and quantum physics are all models to understand the universe through. Yet for all the hifalutin theorising there's not much in the way of linear plot, while the ending is so drenched in cryptic symbolism that one wonders if it happened at all and if so, surely not in the way described. The linguistic gymnastics are ****, the plot **, so let's call it ***. Not a luxury cruise, but not a choppy journey by tugboat either.
August 30, 2010
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 suddenly near the end, to be believably satisfying, or perhaps it is that they are just too satisfying. Winterson creates a world of beauty, wonder, passion and feeling but would have been better keeping away from the more mundane real world as she doesn't render those quite so believably and, not that the strongly feminist orientation of the story bothered me at all I might have liked to know a bit more of Jove and what made him the unlikable character that he was, besides being male. Those things aside though this remains a wondrous, beautiful and exceptional book though it may have been perfect had it kept in the deeper realms of poetic beauty and not strayed at points closer to the conventional which the book does not pull off nearly so well. Still it remains a sparkling, delightful tale.
May 1, 2011
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 after symmetries of autumn, symmetries of austerity. Bare winter's thin beauty, rib and spine. The back of him sharp-boned, my hands leaf-broad covering him, patterning us. Us making love on the leaf-shed in the cold of the year.
&
We think of ourselves as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
& finally:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
Her writing speaks for itself.
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 after symmetries of autumn, symmetries of austerity. Bare winter's thin beauty, rib and spine. The back of him sharp-boned, my hands leaf-broad covering him, patterning us. Us making love on the leaf-shed in the cold of the year.
&
We think of ourselves as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
& finally:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
Her writing speaks for itself.
February 13, 2013
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 boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, is enough."
Absolutely stunning.
Beyond heartstopping.
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 boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, is enough."
Absolutely stunning.
Beyond heartstopping.
December 25, 2007
This is an intriguing novel in the sense that it often reads as a quantum physics text but always in the service of a larger romantic agenda. If understanding the connection between gravity and love isn't your thang, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. That said, Winterson throws some quality quotes in there that would look good on your fridge or facebook, and this was my main source of enjoyment.
If you like Winterson's style, I would highly recommend "Written on the Body" instead.
If you like Winterson's style, I would highly recommend "Written on the Body" instead.
November 11, 2011
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.
March 5, 2017
One of the most lyrical prose writers to be writing. Winterson's writing is fast, rhythmic, and at the same time poetic and akin to Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness stylings. It is a delicious pleasure to read. The plot of Gut Symmetries is fascinating and gripping in the most punctually unusual but perfect way. Definitely five stars.
January 21, 2016
This book was okay. The story was interesting enough at times but overall it was way too existential for me. Don't get me wrong, I love a good bit of existential reasoning and reflection but only when it is done subtly and intricately within the story. This was just like a big ol' slap to the face.
July 5, 2023
Occasionally witty but just unbearably pretentious. And frankly boring. I picked it up again today after taking a 4 month break and could hardly stomach it. 2 stars is generous
EDIT: this is, admittedly, quite a mean review
EDIT: this is, admittedly, quite a mean review
September 5, 2024
I had been reading bits of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway for a personal project, and I picked this up to take a break from non-fiction, especially non-fiction about quantum and particle physics, but two of the three main characters here are physicists who draw analogies from their disciplines to think about their lives. The "gut" in the title that seemed to me so unrelated to physics references grand unified theories (GUTs). I can't seem to escape the quantum...
The plot is loose and simple: it's a love triangle between Alice, Jove, and Stella. The book is more poetry than prose; the plot gives some narrative structure and subject to the poetry. Winterson has a signature move here; she switches between the momentum of poeticized vagueness and the specificity of description, the logistics of novelistic events. For example, there's a bit where Uta, Stella's mother, craves diamonds as she's pregnant, and this detail looks like a poetic ripple, grouped with other ruminations on life, death, birth, transience, and value. But then Uta swallows a diamond, and it merges, in utero, with Stella's spine. Stella is tracked by the family who owns the diamond and intends to excise it post-mortem. This maneuver, where the subject of a vague poetic line permeates the plot with surgical specificity, Winterson makes with elegance and, sometimes, a humorous twitch.
Stella tells Jove this diamond story, and the whole time, we doubt its trueness because her sanity is put into question, and Winterson keeps reminding us of the sub-atomic joke of unstable matter, of a measurement that interferes with the object measured, of the limbo between definite, localized existence (matter) and the probabilistic tendency of existence that stretches over distances (energy/wave). In other words, is the diamond at the base of Stella's spine or over a few residential blocks of New York? Is it a thing, here, now or a wavelet of energy, here and there, and now and 10 years from now? Is it a plot detail that will affect subsequent events or a poetic rumination that, in its vagueness and irresponsibility, will have no bearing on the rest of the plot? Maybe it doesn't matter…unless you're the diamond guy.
The plot is loose and simple: it's a love triangle between Alice, Jove, and Stella. The book is more poetry than prose; the plot gives some narrative structure and subject to the poetry. Winterson has a signature move here; she switches between the momentum of poeticized vagueness and the specificity of description, the logistics of novelistic events. For example, there's a bit where Uta, Stella's mother, craves diamonds as she's pregnant, and this detail looks like a poetic ripple, grouped with other ruminations on life, death, birth, transience, and value. But then Uta swallows a diamond, and it merges, in utero, with Stella's spine. Stella is tracked by the family who owns the diamond and intends to excise it post-mortem. This maneuver, where the subject of a vague poetic line permeates the plot with surgical specificity, Winterson makes with elegance and, sometimes, a humorous twitch.
Stella tells Jove this diamond story, and the whole time, we doubt its trueness because her sanity is put into question, and Winterson keeps reminding us of the sub-atomic joke of unstable matter, of a measurement that interferes with the object measured, of the limbo between definite, localized existence (matter) and the probabilistic tendency of existence that stretches over distances (energy/wave). In other words, is the diamond at the base of Stella's spine or over a few residential blocks of New York? Is it a thing, here, now or a wavelet of energy, here and there, and now and 10 years from now? Is it a plot detail that will affect subsequent events or a poetic rumination that, in its vagueness and irresponsibility, will have no bearing on the rest of the plot? Maybe it doesn't matter…unless you're the diamond guy.
April 23, 2023
“is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it? or to fall into her arms fire to fire? there is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”
honestly, i think this excerpt speaks for itself— this book is phenomenal. no other words for it. blending physics theory with questions on the nature of the universe and humanity with the triangle love affair that the plot revolves around, this novel is so gripping and thought-provoking; i couldn’t put it down.
as it is with the majority of jeanette winterson books, there is not very much of a plot. do not let this deter you, however, as her exceptionally unique writing style takes you on a journey through time and space, defying laws of science, chronological time, physical and mental boundaries, all while her character has not even moved a limb. her writing style is definitely not for everyone, and her work is not something i would recommend to beginner readers or people who don’t enjoy or aren’t accustomed to experimental, slightly difficult to read novels, however i absolutely LOVE her writing style. it’s entirely unlike anything i’ve ever read before and it always manages to leave me slack-jawed.
also, the triangle love affair?? woman (alice) falls in love with a married man (jove) and then proceeds to fall in love with his wife (stella)?? and these two women share the sweetest love that i have read about in a long time?? yes, it’s actually as incredible as it sounds. written in a letter dedicated to alice from stella, are lines like “stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that i explore” and “i say your name as a spell and leave my last word here as yours” HELLOOOOO??? beautiful. absolutely beautiful. these two make me want to weep. my hopeless romantic bleeding heart is wailing. and don’t even get me STARTED on the book’s ending. holy hell. no other words except for holy hell. not going to spoil anything, but i’ll just say it’s totally unexpected, totally insane, and SUCH classic winterson. it simultaneously somehow gives you closure yet leaves you wanting more.
all in all, i loved this book (if that isn’t painstakingly obvious). this is the sixth book i have read by this author and the skill of her craft has blown me away once again. it is such an experimental and unique novel, and yet it touches on the human condition in a way where, no matter who you are, you will find a piece of yourself in it, i promise you that.
honestly, i think this excerpt speaks for itself— this book is phenomenal. no other words for it. blending physics theory with questions on the nature of the universe and humanity with the triangle love affair that the plot revolves around, this novel is so gripping and thought-provoking; i couldn’t put it down.
as it is with the majority of jeanette winterson books, there is not very much of a plot. do not let this deter you, however, as her exceptionally unique writing style takes you on a journey through time and space, defying laws of science, chronological time, physical and mental boundaries, all while her character has not even moved a limb. her writing style is definitely not for everyone, and her work is not something i would recommend to beginner readers or people who don’t enjoy or aren’t accustomed to experimental, slightly difficult to read novels, however i absolutely LOVE her writing style. it’s entirely unlike anything i’ve ever read before and it always manages to leave me slack-jawed.
also, the triangle love affair?? woman (alice) falls in love with a married man (jove) and then proceeds to fall in love with his wife (stella)?? and these two women share the sweetest love that i have read about in a long time?? yes, it’s actually as incredible as it sounds. written in a letter dedicated to alice from stella, are lines like “stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that i explore” and “i say your name as a spell and leave my last word here as yours” HELLOOOOO??? beautiful. absolutely beautiful. these two make me want to weep. my hopeless romantic bleeding heart is wailing. and don’t even get me STARTED on the book’s ending. holy hell. no other words except for holy hell. not going to spoil anything, but i’ll just say it’s totally unexpected, totally insane, and SUCH classic winterson. it simultaneously somehow gives you closure yet leaves you wanting more.
all in all, i loved this book (if that isn’t painstakingly obvious). this is the sixth book i have read by this author and the skill of her craft has blown me away once again. it is such an experimental and unique novel, and yet it touches on the human condition in a way where, no matter who you are, you will find a piece of yourself in it, i promise you that.
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