Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.
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"intriguing...engaging......vivid." (THE TIMES )
"The ethereal brilliance of these men seeps into the very form of the novel.... the emotional struggles endured by both men are here given a universal resonance. Crucial relationships are evoked with a convincing and potent tenderness: the tragedies that ensue are genuinely heartbreaking." (NEW STATESMAN )
'a prose sometimes poetic and surprising, always visceral, dense and interesting.' (M John Harrison THE GUARDIAN )
"a lively, engaging and ultimately tragic picture of two men obsessed with abstract truth yet struggling to find their place in the everyday world... Fact or fiction? Truth or lies? The book gets you thinking about the big questions but Levin's light style and tone ensure it remains accessible even to those of us who fall outside the scope of genius." (TIME OUT )
"fine passages" Three stars (BIG ISSUE )
as "the ideal author for this novel about two tragic geniuses of mathematics... the perfect balance of science and insight... a fascinating book." (FINANCIAL TIMES )
"Occasionally... the descriptive passages are so beautiful that it takes your breath away." (BIRMINGHAM POST )
"eccentric, brilliant... the writing is lovely, and parts are truly funny... If you love science, you'll adore this book. A gift for all your left-brained friends." (EVENING HERALD DUBLIN ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
"The ethereal brilliance of these men seeps into the very form of the novel.... the emotional struggles endured by both men are here given a universal resonance. Crucial relationships are evoked with a convincing and potent tenderness: the tragedies that ensue are genuinely heartbreaking." (NEW STATESMAN )
'a prose sometimes poetic and surprising, always visceral, dense and interesting.' (M John Harrison THE GUARDIAN )
"a lively, engaging and ultimately tragic picture of two men obsessed with abstract truth yet struggling to find their place in the everyday world... Fact or fiction? Truth or lies? The book gets you thinking about the big questions but Levin's light style and tone ensure it remains accessible even to those of us who fall outside the scope of genius." (TIME OUT )
"fine passages" Three stars (BIG ISSUE )
as "the ideal author for this novel about two tragic geniuses of mathematics... the perfect balance of science and insight... a fascinating book." (FINANCIAL TIMES )
"Occasionally... the descriptive passages are so beautiful that it takes your breath away." (BIRMINGHAM POST )
"eccentric, brilliant... the writing is lovely, and parts are truly funny... If you love science, you'll adore this book. A gift for all your left-brained friends." (EVENING HERALD DUBLIN ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
A haunting and evocative story of imagination and genius.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Somebody should tell Dr Levin that being a good scientist and reading up on the life of Turing does not mean that one will write a good book about Turing. This so-called novel is melodramatic in the worst sense of the word, especially in its opinion of itself. Add to this the blatant stylistic inconsistencies and the gruesome physicality that Dr Levin mercilessly showers upon her reader - it will take me years to escape the image of Turing "salting his soup with his dandruff" - and you have the perfect book to forget on the bus. Pity the man who finds it.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By Booker Man
Format:Paperback
I bought this one because I had read "The Semantics of Murder" by Aifric Campbell and was interested in reading other novels about the Vienna Circle. Brilliant and eccentric scientists are perfect hunting ground for novelists but the difference is that Levin is a professor of physics and this is her first novel. The book has some serious structural flaws - the first person narrator who intrudes upon the story is completely superfluous to requirements. But as character study of genius and obsession the portraits of Kurt Godel and Alan Turing are compelling and lovingly done. There are wonderful vignettes - Wittgenstein for example - and pre-war Vienna is powerfully re-created.
By Lucy Kitt
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a great book. It focuses not only on the tragic Alan Turing but also on 30s Vienna. Part biography and part fiction this is an erudite and highly challenging novel I can't recommend enough.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By R. Wheeler
Format:Hardcover
Though on a very interesting subject, this is a truly poorly written book, adopting the style of a cheap romance novel. Much of the book reads like a fifteen year old girl's high school writing assignment:
"The Cafe Josephinum is a smell first, a stinging smell of roasted Turkish beans too heavy to waft on air and so waiting instead for the more powerful current of steam blown off the surface of boiling saucers fomenting to coffee. By merely snorting the vapors out of the air, patrons become overstimulated. The cafe appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second--the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room, which appears in the mind only third. The coffee is a fuel to power ideas. A fuel for the anxious hope that the harvest of art and words and logic will be the richest ever because only the most fecund season will see them through the siege of this terrible winter and the siege of that terrible war."
...and somehow manages to make the stories of Turing and Goedel incomprehensible and tedious. How this book received good reviews from the press is an absolute mystery. One of the only books I have ever felt compelled to throw away after finishing.
"The Cafe Josephinum is a smell first, a stinging smell of roasted Turkish beans too heavy to waft on air and so waiting instead for the more powerful current of steam blown off the surface of boiling saucers fomenting to coffee. By merely snorting the vapors out of the air, patrons become overstimulated. The cafe appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second--the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room, which appears in the mind only third. The coffee is a fuel to power ideas. A fuel for the anxious hope that the harvest of art and words and logic will be the richest ever because only the most fecund season will see them through the siege of this terrible winter and the siege of that terrible war."
...and somehow manages to make the stories of Turing and Goedel incomprehensible and tedious. How this book received good reviews from the press is an absolute mystery. One of the only books I have ever felt compelled to throw away after finishing.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Pablo K
Format:Paperback
A compelling and haunting début. Compelling despite the headlines, despite the fact that it is 'faction', written by a young, talented and attractive female physicist, dealing in numbers and maths and things us normals can't grasp, and despite the expectation that it couldn't be as good as its title. It is compelling because Janna Levin is a very good writer. Despite their extreme contrasts, neither Turing nor Gödel descend into caricature or hyperbolic farce. They cut haunting figures not because they are great logicians but because their frailties seem so palpable, even minor, in the context of their times and thought. The book's occasional weakness is a certain upbeat insistence on the metaphysics of the math - of worlds turned upside down by abstract thought and revelations that shake the foundations of science. It is not so much that this doesn't work (it does) or that it unmasks Levin as a dry mathematician playing at literature (she displays a quite stunning turn of phrase, decent pacing and an accomplished eye for the human). On the contrary, the weakness is a tendency to oversimplify and infantilise the intellectual dimensions of Turing and Gödel, to render what they struggled with simple enough for us to understand quickly, and hence not worth the angst. Moments smack of worthiness, of 'A Madman Dreams...' as a gateway drug to Principa Mathematica or late Wittgenstein. The result is that, if anything, the logical and mathematical dimensions are undersold. A little bolder, a little more comfortable with the reader having to wrestle with the concepts, a little less self-conscious, and this would have been not only compelling but stunning.
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