Product Description

A celebration of love in all its frailty, confusion and excess. Set on board the QE2, and in New York and Liverpool, Gut Symmetries explores parallel lives, loves and universes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63503 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Typical Tryst
The construction of the story blends myth and reality in unique way. However, inspite of this, the story is your typical affair between married man and woman (also married woman and woman), a subject that is common to hundreds of other works of fiction. In the end, a boring read.

Style Redeems Story
This is certainly one of the most interestingly written books I've read. Essentially, it concerns a love triangle between an Italian physicist, his Austrian-Jewish poet wife, and another physicist, this time Liverpudlian.

However, it's not an average love affair story, being manipulated by Winterson's style so that it becomes much more. While I found her use of language extraordinarily beautiful and cannot fault her ability to string a sentence or come up with a stunning metaphor, I found the style unnerving at first: I didn't realise for a couple of chapters that it is told from the point of view of more than one character, and then found myself confusing the narrators.

Having said that, I did settle into the style pretty quickly, and it was this style that caused me to enjoy the book to the extent that I did.

But it is not without it's faults. Winterson can get away with devoting a chapter to describing the circumstances of birth of each of her protagonists because these little stories are so well told, but while the backstory is important to some degree, the detail she goes into isn't entirely necessary.

And at times she stops telling the story and breaks into short-sentenced paragraphs of, to but it bluntly, rubbish, that read like an address to a lover. Many of them start "Walk with me" so watch for those three words.

I did enjoy Gut Symmetries, but it did take me a while to get into, and I didn't start enjoying it as much as I like to enjoy a good book until almost three quarters of the way through the book, when the story became much more interesting.

Overall: gorgeously written, but for the most part not much of a story. Recommended if you like that sort of thing, but lacking in part.

Sumptuous
Its lyrical, poetic and really all the marvelous fantastic writing one expect from Jeanette Winterson. THe narrative is captivating and her use of language is thought provoking and as always spot on.