Friday, February 6, 2015

Ms. Hen reviews GUT SYMMETRIES and ponders on the strangeness of being critic who is a purse



GUT SYMMETRIES
by Jeanette Winterson

Ms. Hen recently read GUT SYMMETRIES by Jeanette Winterson. She has read other books by the author, and once again, she was not disappointed. Winterson is a master craftsperson when it comes to the art of prose. Ms. Hen was swept away in the story of love and despair.

GUT SYMMETRIES is about Alice, a physicist who has an affair with another physicist, then meets his wife and starts an affair with her. Intertwined are the history of physics and formulas about the time space continuum and the way the world turns and changes.

The most fascinating passage in the novel is when Stella’s mother decides she has a craving for diamonds when she is pregnant with Stella. The old Jewish men have their diamonds sitting around the kitchen table and Stella pops them all into her mouth. The men try to get all the diamonds back, and they do except for one, which is lodged in Stella’s spine when she is born. The diamond cannot be removed without crippling Stella permanently.

When Ms. Hen read this, she couldn’t help but wonder about the logistics of having a diamond in her spine. She wiggled her spine around to try to wonder what it would feel like. Of course, nothing like this could really happen. Only in fiction.

GUT SYMMETRIES is reminiscent of AN INVISIBLE SIGN OF MY OWN by Aimee Bender in the way that it is about the obsession with the world of science or math. But GUT SYMMETRIES is a more sophisticated, international version of the story, taking the reader to Nazi Germany, New York City in the forties and fifties, and Liverpool, England.


Ms. Hen liked this novel because it was like reading poetry in the form of prose. Every fiction writer should aspire to write like this because it reads like listening to music. Interspersed are bits of dialogue in the form of a play. Ms. Hen enjoyed this because she likes things that are weird. After all, she is an accessory that writes reviews. If that’s not weird, then Ms. Hen can lay eggs.

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