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.

Reserved for a wishlist tag.

I’m a longterm Winterson fan, but unfortunately this one fell a little short of my (albeit high) expectations. One of the things I love most about her writing is her absolute mastery over the rhythm and beauty of words, and in this regard there is no disappointment. But beneath the poetic beauty of the prose there was often not much being said that made a lot of sense. Sounds heretical I know. ;-)

I actually think she was being just that bit too ambitious and it came across as being rather self-indulgent. The sections on quantum physics were interesting enough, but didn’t do much for me in terms of the narrative. The whole thing seemed to somehow lack cohesion, although things did improve after Alice and Stella met. I also couldn’t get a good handle on any of the three main characters, feeling that I knew more about their parents than about them.

Winterson’s themes recur through most of her books: love and desire, time and space, boundaries and risk. There is a sentence on page 103 of my copy which could almost have come straight from The Passion . . . “There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”

Winterson always sets out to transcend boundaries and to unsettle her readers. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. This is not a bad book by any means; it was an interesting journey, just not a totally coherent one.

Off to New Zealand, now that its travelling companion has finally caught up.
Enjoy!

It has arrived, yay! Thank you crimson-tide - I LOVE the cover, and hope to enjoy the book more than you did. We'll see after it gets off the rather large and towering Mt TBR...thanks :D