Einstein vs Winterson

I had to read Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson for a literature class, and I took great issue with it! I can safely say that I did not prejudge the book, I was ready to love it. As I began reading and was introduced to the characters I wanted to read up on their significance - i.e. perhaps the Alice was a reference to Alice in wonderland, one of the guys is called a Don Juan, so i wanted to read up on him too, and then I thought about looking into the meanings of the astrological signs etc that are in it. I'm glad I didn't - that all would have been a waste of time.

Some people like this book, and I don't know why. It reminds me of a person who just rubs you up the wrong way - goes on about him/her-self, thinks they have it worked out, have strange ideas that you are embarrassed even to talk about because they're so ridiculous, and just an indulgence in their own art - even though they don't know anything about artists... something like this.

The book tells the story of Alice, the son of a conservative jew (i've read that she doesn't even get the Jewish culture down very well, but i know nothing of it) who is married to a scientist (a time-travel scientist... ?). Unfortunately for her, he ends up having an affair, so she throws his stuff out the window, and sleeps with the woman who took her husband... and Alice has a diamond at the bottom of her spine, which got there because her mum swallowed it while she was pregnant.

So the themes of the story (just to illustrate that I didn't miss the point) are: 1) the unconventional love triangle, and 2) the inability of science to sufficiently explain and justify human experience. I understand well the significance of these ideas, and they are good.

However, the unconventional love triangle isn't expressed too well in Winterson's writing because it seems a bit overborne by her apparent hatred of men. So the man is a 2-dimensional pig: unapologetic, unfaithful and condescending. The Alice character doesn't get heaps of sympathy because she is too vague and lacks integrity. She can throw her husband's junk out the window, and say she's upset, but you would never quite believe her.

Throughout Winterson's writing she can't help but throw in sentence fragments, references to masturbation (in walking down the street, one has to notice that a cement mixer is "jacking its load"... because that's just what one notices??) and other various unnecessary vulgarities.

Now, to what I really disliked - her use of Science. It's a good idea to talk about science and its relationship to the human experience, but if you are going to talk about science, please at least read something. In the world of Winterson, people considered the world flat until the 1600s (so why did Columbus try to find a west route to the indies... why then did Eratosthenes estimate the "circumference" of the earth around 200 BC???? - interesting story here... Columbus used a map that didn't use Eratosthenes predictions, as a result severely underestimating the size of the earth, maths is great). Also, she talks quite a lot about Einstein's theory of relativity, about time-travel and clocks, but she has absolutely no idea about it. I may as well write a story that rejects the practices of modern day schools because students are made to hang upside down and eat apples.

The fortunate upshot of this, was that it prompted me to read Einstein's Relativity since I couldn't understand how Winterson could possibly be right. Einstein's nice little book is merely an introduction, with very little mathematics. It contains the Lorenz transformation, which looks at time experienced in relation to the speed of light (it's this function that is used to make the prediction that passing the speed of light is impossible, as once speed > c, you have the square root of a negative number). Einstein is a very accessible writer, and if you're not too interested in reading Relativity and seeing what all the fuss is about, you could read his Ideas and Opinions - he's quite funny.

So my problem with Winterson, is that she's pretentious and just generally unlikeable. One of those writers who equates writing something controversial with writing something profound. She leads her readers up an unorthodox stairway to nowhere and says "see! I told you", and the less resilient will say "ah yes, you're right" rather than "i think you've confused yourself". In this way, I think post-modernism is sometimes reminiscent of The Emperor's New Clothes, they're all trying to trick us into thinking they're geniuses!

my first murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, is probably the most sci-fi oriented of Murakami's novels. Like all good sci-fi, Murakami begins with an idea and explores it within the well established rules of the world - i.e. things still need to make sense, there is a difference between sci-fi and a far-fetched plot... that is my belief anyway.

This novel threads two stories, one which takes place in a future world, the other in the unconscious of the protagonist. The End of the World component is rife with Jungian symbols and archetypes: the wall, the shadow, the gate-keeper - each developed according to Murakami's own ideas. In the Hard-boiled wonderland, the protagonist is getting a little confused and persued for what a code that is in his head (he is a human encryption device... lovely idea). Murakami's talent here is to describe interesting details of the worlds he creates as if he were writing a "normal" novel. The opening scene describes a simultaneous counting process where coins are counted and backwards and forwards simultaneously. In the End of the World, the dream-reader is given a riddling description of a song as "some words spoken quickly, others stretched out", which i also found quite beautiful in its own way.

As with all of Murakami's novels, he likes to give a couple of nods to his favourite authors, in this one we hear about Mersault from the Outsider (coming to mind because he apologized all the time) which adds another dimension to Murakami's work that makes him interesting beyond the telling of a good story.

This was a nice introduction to Murakami. It's an interesting and well-executed story. It is one that I would perhaps recommend to others as it is not as depressing as something like Norwegian Wood (not my interpretation of depressing anyway... i guess there is The end of the world to consider). The book ends with one of Murakami's trademork ambiguous drop-offs. One is reading, feeling that everything is coming together and then a final sentence forces a reinterpretation of everything just mentioned. All stars.