SEMMANT

A troubled wunderkind creates an enigmatic robot.

When readers first encounter Bogdan Bodganov—the cybernetics genius in Babenko’s intriguing debut novel—he’s confined to a mental institution, a “hospital for VIPs” in Madrid. Attractive nurses care for him as he reflects on a tumultuous life. Born in a small village in the Balkans, his parents sent him to a special boarding school in Manchester, England, where he eventually studied “microphysics,” married an artist and cheated on her with identical twins in Paris (among others). He ended up in Marseille, where he met Lucco Mancini, a swindler who introduced Bogdan to the currency markets and showed him the quick fortunes that could be made by preying on the uninformed optimism of investors. Almost out of boredom, Bogdan invented stock-predicting gadgets for Mancini, but the two parted ways, and Bogdan landed in Madrid (evocatively described by Babenko), a city he hates, where he played the market and invented Semmant, a sentient robotic computer program enabled by “neuron quanta” to self-doubt and self-correct (in one startling scene during Semmant’s creation, Bogdan returned to his computer to find the screen staring back at him). As Semmant continued to grow and master the stock market, Bogdan fell in love with the alluring Lidia Alvares Alvares, who excelled at making people famous and (unlike all his other paramours) had genuine curiosity about Bogdan’s various obsessions. After the two parted, Bogdan created an artificial variation of her called Adele, further complicating an enjoyably complicated plot. In a narrative thick with obfuscation, the reader can never quite be sure what’s real.

A winning satire on greed and fallibility that also doubles as a parable about finding love.