Not a perfect novel, but easily Leavitt’s (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and The Invention of The Computer, 2006,...
The certainty attributed to mathematics is richly contrasted to the uncertainty of human relationships in Leavitt’s unusual and absorbing eighth novel.
It’s based on the lives of historical figures, British mathematician G.H. Hardy, a Fellow of Cambridge University’s Trinity College, and the unschooled mathematical “genius” who in 1913 writes Hardy an importunate letter, identifying himself as an obscure accounts clerk in Madras, India. Inferring from its content that the letter writer, Srinivasa Ramanujan, may be on the way to proving “the Riemann Hypothesis” (a paradoxical theory regarding the integrity and interrelatedness of prime numbers), Hardy arranges to bring Ramanujan to Cambridge, and thereafter becomes de facto mentor to the withdrawn, barely sociable young immigrant—a devout Brahmin. In a parallel narrative emerging from lectures that Hardy composes and delivers at Harvard University in 1936, the entire span of his spartan, lonely life (as a long-inexperienced homosexual) is revealed in the contexts of his relationships. The novel, which may remind readers of Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George, perhaps bites off more than it can chew. But it’s impressively researched, insistently readable and keenly sensitive to the ordeal of World War I and the fears of a nation and a culture aware that all that humans have achieved may be blithely obliterated.
Not a perfect novel, but easily Leavitt’s (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and The Invention of The Computer, 2006, etc.) best—and a heartening indication that this uneven writer has reached a new level of artistic maturity.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-040-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This new blank verse translation of the first “Canticle” of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece compares interestingly with some of the recent English versions by American poets, though it suffers particularly by comparison with Allen Mandelbaum’s graceful blank verse one. Its aim to provide “a clear, readable English version . . . that nevertheless retains some of the poetry of the original” is only imperfectly fulfilled, owing partly to moments of unimaginative informality (“In Germany, where people drink a lot”), though these are intermittently redeemed by simple sublimity (“Night now revealed to us the southern stars,/While bright Polaris dropped beneath the waves./It never rose again from ocean’s floor”). Translator Zappulla, an American Dante scholar and teacher, offers helpful historical and biographical information in an Introduction and exhaustive Notes following each of the poem’s 34 “Cantos.” Readers new to Dante may find his plainspoken version eminently satisfying; those who know the poem well may be disappointed by it.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44280-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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