Gut Symmetries
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alchemy and astrology, their philosophical similarities to quantum physics and hyperspace and a love triangle turned menage-a-trois entwine in Winterson's acutely fascinating yet strained seventh novel (Art Objects, etc.). Though Winterson sets up the tale with a gorgeous, elusive promise (a "sister universe, contemplative, concealed, waits in our future... Can anyone deny that we are haunted?"), the basic plot is straightforward, even predictable. While giving lectures on the 15th-century alchemist Paracelsus aboard a cruise on the QE2, Alice, a bright young physicist, meets Jove, a married man and more established physicist also on the lecture-circuit whose crowd-pleasing specialty is time travel. The two fall breathlessly in love and begin an affair. Back in Manhattan, Jove's wife of 24 years, Stella, is heartbroken to learn of the liaison in a letter from Alice. She agrees to meet Alice at the Algonquin, however. There, after a self-conscious, elliptical conversation, the two women fall in love. They soon include Jove in their relationship. The finale involves Jove and Stella getting lost at sea on a solitary yacht-trip. Winterson's characters are more often mouthpieces for ideas than believable people. When Jove warns Alice,"I need time," Alice ponders Einstein's theory of time. Winterson's great talent and intellectual reach and originality are in evidence. but her crystalline prose is too icy for the passionate subject-matter. Awash in beautiful intellectual lights, like phosphorescence atop night waters, this love story drifts too far from the loamy shores of the heart and the gut.
