Levin writes with elegant precision, but ultimately her account, hewing closely to the record, adds little to what’s already...
In her first novel, Levin, using two mathematical geniuses, showcases the life of the mind.
The Austrian Kurt Gödel (1906–78) and the British Alan Turing (1912–54) never met, but they were intensely aware of each other’s work. Levin, a mathematics professor, cuts between their life stories. We meet Gödel in 1931 at a café gathering of the Vienna Circle founded by philosophy professor Moritz Schlick (later murdered by a Nazi student). Its members, in Wittgenstein’s shadow, oppose religion and mysticism. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems cause him to break reluctantly with Moritz, another tribulation for a paranoid individual fearful of food poisoning. Despite being mothered by his guardian angel Adele, a nightclub dancer, he must spend time in a sanatorium before leaving for the U.S. and Princeton with Adele. Years later, he will die there from self-starvation, bitter at inadequate professional recognition, unlike Turing. The Englishman now has the higher profile, thanks to the successful play Breaking the Code. His difficulties begin in boarding school, where some boys bury him beneath floorboards. He’s rescued from this traumatic ordeal by his friend Chris, the (unrequited) love of Turing’s life. At Cambridge, Turing rejects God, embraces materialism, debates Wittgenstein and dreams of thinking machines. As a Government cryptographer during the war, he breaks the Germans’ Enigma Code, an important contribution to the Allied victory. But Turing’s homosexuality catches up with him, dooming his engagement to a fellow cryptographer. After the war, involved with a thief, he guilelessly incriminates himself and is sentenced to castration. A broken man, he kills himself by eating a poisoned apple. Levin highlights intriguing details (apples, blue liquids, visits to psychics) that unite these tormented men, whose intellectual journeys may give readers a frisson. It’s a fair bet, however, that the lurid material will resonate more, and that their achievements as trailblazers will be overshadowed by, their plight as victims.
Levin writes with elegant precision, but ultimately her account, hewing closely to the record, adds little to what’s already available.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4030-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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