The Mathematician's Shiva
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DEBUT FICTION For readers of This Is Where I Leave You and Everything Is Illuminated, “a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history and humor” (Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here) When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics, and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. As a ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela’s shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves—even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes or desperately scrutinizing the mutterings of her African Grey parrot—Sasha must come to terms with his mother’s outsized influence on his life. Spanning decades and continents, from a crowded living room in Madison, Wisconsin, to the windswept beach on the Barents Sea where a young Rachela had her first mathematical breakthrough, The Mathematician’s Shiva is an unexpectedly moving and uproariously funny novel that captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to achieve the impossible.
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Most novels ostensibly about math feature math as a [a:Dan Brown 630 Dan Brown https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399396714p2/630.jpg]-ian McGuffin, approximately equivalent to magic: we take these numbers and then Do Math and then the secret to the universe pops out-style. That is not the Mathematician's Shiva. This is a book written by someone who clearly loves and understands math. The whole novel is basically a love poem to math, and cold Wisconsin winters, supported by knowing winks at academic culture and a heavy dose of Madison in its setting. Out of that comes a charming family story, staring all middle-aged+ protagonists (shout-out to Jon, who's into that sort of thing), as well as some thoughtful exploration of the meaning of religion, and specifically Judaism to a bunch of hard-nosed skeptics who don't literally believe but still gain value, the difference between intelligence and genius and the areas of the world where gender discrimination is alive and well.I'm not totally sure who this novel was actually for, but as an academic Eastern-European Jewish math-enthusiast, cross-country-skiing-enthusiast who was born and raised in Madison, I enjoyed it largely as a “hey, look at that, someone wrote a book just for me!” I'm not sure whether a broader audience would appreciate it.
