Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

Ten delightfully complex, dark and/or disturbing gems from arguably the greatest living short story master.

Inevitably, the “our Chekhov” cliché (attributed to Cynthia Ozick) has found its way onto the book’s dustjacket. Have those who repeat it ever read Chekhov? Or Alice Munro? Well, Munro is nothing like Chekhov. She’s in a class of her own.

The first nine stories all take place in Canada. Now, as a note aside: I don’t know much about Canada. It’s a huge and sparsely populated country. Apart from ice hockey, it gave us, off the top of my head, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Maynard Ferguson, Oscar Peterson, Kenny Wheeler, Diana Krall, Lhasa de Sela, Tanya Tagaq, Peaches, Lido Pimienta, Leslie Nielsen, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Keanu Reeves, Donald Sutherland, Rush, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cirque du Soleil... And, of course, Alice Munro. The Klondike Gold Rush inspired many a work by Jack London that I enjoyed reading as a kid. Yet the first thing that springs to my mind is The Lumberjack Song. Oh, the power of a stereotype.

To be fair, a wood cutter by the name of Roy actually is a protagonist of the short story called Wood. As Canadian as possible under the circumstances? Maybe. To me, Roy is a stereotypical Finn.

This curious diagram from Wikipedia shows the evolution of sections in Wood, first published in 1980 and then in its revised form in this collection (2009):

“The 2009 version comprises eight sections to the 1980 version’s three, and has a new ending.”

The title story — at 50+ pages, shouldn’t it be called a novella? — is quite different from the rest. It is based on the life of the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya (Sophia Kovalevsky in the story) and, as far as I can see, pretty faithful to historical events.

As another note aside: yes I heard about Kovalevskaya when I was in school, and later at the university. Not much though. The fact that she was not able to attend a university, let alone get any teaching job, either in Russia or abroad, was somehow glossed over^*. Her mentor, Karl Weierstrass — that Weierstrass, the author of an endless list of theorems — also appears in the story.

The amazing thing is, even here, even knowing how it’s gonna end, Munro’s stories and characters are not predictable.

If I were to choose three stories, it would be those that are narrated in the first person: Child’s Play, Some Women and Wenlock Edge.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would have called smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.
These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.
Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?
Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?
The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.
And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.
“Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

Some Women

*

Or so I thought until I came across the 1948 essay by Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina [1]. The author does not make any secret that Kovalevskaya was not employable in pre-revolutionary Russia — and adds that Currently in the Soviet Union, all conditions have been created for a woman to engage in science equally with a man, if this corresponds to her natural inclinations. Polubarinova-Kochina, a distinguished mathematician herself, lived through the birth and death of the USSR and died at the young age of 100.

1. Полубаринова-Кочина, П.Я. Софья Васильевна Ковалевская (очерк научной деятельности). В сборнике С.В. Ковалевская. Научные работы. Редакция и комментарии члена-корреспондента АН СССР П.Я. Полубариновой-Кочиной. Издательство Академии Наук СССР, Москва, 1948, стр. 313—342.

El verano de su vida

by Thomas von Steinaecker and Barbara Yelin
translated by Itziar Hernández Rodilla

Weightlessness. The speed of light. Multiple worlds.

With chapter names like these, you’d expect El verano de su vida (original title Der Sommer ihres Lebens) to be some sort of sci-fi comic. It isn’t though. As her Earth life comes to an end, Gerda mentally travels in time, to that summer of her life (note The Dark Side of the Moon poster on p. 41) and beyond.

All your life You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Did she miss her moment?

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by Oliver Sacks

After re-reading, earlier this year, Sacks’ brilliant Musicophilia, I finally got to this book. Considered by now a classic (at least, the 2015 paperback edition appears in “Picador Classic” series, so it must be one), it’s a fabulous read. Although the book was first published not that long ago, in 1985, I find the language noticeably dated, while the words such as defective, hysteria, idiot, moron, retardate, retarded, simple, with or without quotation marks, just make me cringe.

Like Musicophilia, The Man Who... is a collection of case studies which are more like short stories that could be enjoyed in any order. For me, A Passage to India is the most poignant and most beautiful chapter in the book.

The Twins deals with two autistic savants who spend their days playing a strange game of exchanging six-digit numbers.

I already had a hunch — and now I confirmed it. All the numbers, the six-figure numbers, which the twins had exchanged were primes — i.e., numbers that could be evenly divided by no other whole number than itself or one. Had they somehow seen or possessed such a book as mine — or were they, in some unimaginable way, themselves ‘seeing’ primes, in somewhat the same way as they had ‘seen’ 111-ness, or triple 37-ness? Certainly they could not be calculating them — they could calculate nothing.

I returned to the ward the next day, carrying the precious book of primes with me. I again found them closeted in their numerical communion, but this time, without saying anything, I quietly joined them. They were taken aback at first, but when I made no interruption, they resumed their ‘game’ of six-figure primes. After a few minutes I decided to join in, and ventured a number, an eight-figure prime. They both turned towards me, then suddenly became still, with a look of intense concentration and perhaps wonder on their faces. There was a long pause — the longest I had ever known them to make, it must have lasted a half-minute or more — and then suddenly, simultaneously, they both broke into smiles.

They had, after some unimaginable internal process of testing, suddenly seen my own eight-digit number as a prime — and this was manifestly a great joy, a double joy, to them; first because I had introduced a delightful new plaything, a prime of an order they had never previously encountered; and, secondly, because it was evident that I had seen what they were doing, that I liked it, that I admired it, and that I could join in myself.

They drew apart slightly, making room for me, a new number playmate, a third in their world. Then John, who always took the lead, thought for a very long time — it must have been at least five minutes, though I dared not move, and scarcely breathed — and brought out a nine-figure number; and after a similar time his twin, Michael, responded with a similar one. And then I, in my turn, after a surreptitious look in my book, added my own rather dishonest contribution, a ten-figure prime I found in my book.

The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero

by Robert Kaplan

I just finished re-reading, with many long breaks, this book. The first time I read it was on my 2006—2007 New Year holidays in Stockholm and Helsinki. This time I enjoyed it more.

Zero, nought, nil, null, zilch, cipher... So many names for something that isn’t there. We take zero for granted, but it wasn’t always the case. The ancient Greeks had no word for it — or maybe they did? Odysseus introduced himself to Polyphemus as Outis (Οὖτις), “Nobody”; three thousand years later, Prince Dakkar followed his example by adopting the pseudonym Nemo.

Kaplan brings together mathematics, physics, history, philosophy and literature in a marvellously poetic way. Just listen:

So long ago in Greece, when Socrates was young and Parmenides old, the latter laid down a challenge we have sought ever since to pick up. All you can think, he said, is: ‘Being is’. You cannot think non-being, nothing, the void. Using negation, he told us we cannot use negation. All we can think is ‘Being is’. We cannot think motion, change, difference, past or future, here and there, you and me, since each requires thinking ‘not’. We can only think: ‘Being is’. How easy to trivialize Parmenides by teaching him to suck eggs: you cannot outlaw negation and proceed to use it. But Parmenides was a poet, and you miss the music if you point out to a poet that his love isn’t really a red red rose. Parmenides wanted us to stop talking and listen. Like the background hum from the Big Bang, Being pervades. It fills and is the world.

Two millennia later Leibniz heard what he said and recognized with joy the fullness of things. There were no gaps, there was no void, the small became smaller but never nothing. Just as the numbers were choked to bursting with numbers, the world they described was so silted up with beings that it was a continuous whole, a garden whose every leaf was again a garden.

“A Natural History” of the subtitle is a bit of a misnomer though.

Claudius Ptolemy (2^nd century AD) used the modified omicron, ō as “Hellenistic zero”.

The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, complete with zero, reached Europe by the 11^th century.

In Mandarin Chinese, 〇 (Pinyin: líng 🔊) is a word for number zero.

More photos related to numbers and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

by James Gleick

Apart from furnishing me with great quotes for my blogs, this may be one of the most fascinating books on information theory I’ve read. Considering that I was reading this book once a week, while travelling by train from Santander to Bezana and back (11 minutes each way), I managed to finish it, well, under four months.

I feared that, after the great start, it would continue in a less spectacular fashion, gradually losing the steam and eventually reaching the thermodynamic equilibrium with the literary noise around me. I’m glad to report that this didn’t happen. True, as we move closer to the present day, it becomes progressively out-of-date: think about the future of the cloud computing in post-Snowden era (the book was published in 2011). Thankfully, the author seems to be well aware of that.

After “information theory” came to be, so did “information overload”, “information glut”, “information anxiety”, and “information fatigue”, the last recognized by the OED in 2009 as a timely syndrome: “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.” Sometimes information anxiety can coexist with boredom, a particularly confusing combination. David Foster Wallace had a more ominous name for this modern condition: Total Noise. “The tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective” — that, he wrote in 2007, constitutes Total Noise. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed. To keep up with all the information we need proxies and subcontractors.

The Code Book

Continuing with last-century books, or rather, the books that I so meant to read last century. Yes, I distinctly remember reading a review of The Code Book in The Guardian, or Independent, or maybe both. Some 15 years later, I can confirm at last: it is good. It reads like a detective story... Well it is a collection of detective stories, mostly to do with cryptography and cryptanalysis — featuring Mary Queen of Scots, the Beale papers and, of course, breaking of Enigma — with a delightful digression into history of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Linear B.

The closer to the modern day, the more out-of-date the book becomes. Singh’s statement that “Possibly the greatest allies of the civil-libertarian cause are the big corporations” sounds surprisingly naïve even for 1999. Of course, September 11 attacks, War on Terror and NSA leaks all happened this century. Time for a new edition perhaps? Yes please, and a new challenge please!

The book is concluded with the Cipher Challenge, a set of ten messages encrypted in ten different ways. Needless to say, by now the web page where the updates on the challenge were supposed to be posted is gone. Luckily (for those, who is still interested), the author maintains the archive of this challenge. The £10,000 prize was claimed by a team of Swedish researchers one year and one month after the challenge was originally published.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano
translated by Shaun Whiteside

In my post from two years ago, I have mentioned this book. Last week, I actually have found time to read it (in English).

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and themselves. They stand in their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed in between two others, like all other numbers, but a step further on than the rest. They are suspicious and solitary, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. In his first year Mattia had studied the fact that among the prime numbers there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: they are pairs of prime numbers that are close to one another, almost neighbours, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from really touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, two twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough really to touch one another. He had never told her that.

Of course, the tragic loneliness of the two protagonists is nobody’s fault but their own. Yet the author made me to empathise and sympathise with Alice and Mattia. Especially with the latter who must be simply unbearable in the flesh. Instead of an unlikely happy end, Giordano gives us a much better thing: hope. Highly recommended.

Ball of Whacks

by Roger von Oech

Arriving to Boston Airport two hours early was a mistake. Apart from shopping, there is precious little to do, and shopping at the Terminal E is dismal. Finally, I wandered into Brookstone’s where I was able to get rid of some of my traveller’s cheques (another mistake, acquired some nine years ago and still not quite spent) to get Ball of Whacks® for Timur, another magnetic toy for Yuri and a universal power adaptor for Tamara’s new camera.

This little spot of retail therapy cheered me up. Timur enjoys playing with his rhombic triacontahedron and from time to time insists on us taking pictures of the models.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yōko Ogawa
translated by Stephen Snyder

Imagine the Professor, a retired mathematician suffering anterograde amnesia; and the Housekeeper, a young single mum with a ten-year-old son, whose job is to look after the Professor. He does not remember her from one day to the next. In fact, his memory lasts exactly eighty minutes.

This is a story of a wonderful friendship between the three, brought together by the paradox of memory, Euler’s formula and baseball.

A word of warning: in contrast to the math, the baseball terminology in this book is left largely unexplained.

Another word of warning: you may well want to cry in the end.

“I’m going to call you Root,” he said. “The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers.” And he quickly took off the note on his sleeve, and made the addition: “The new housekeeper... and her son, ten years old, √. ” At first I made us name tags, thinking that if the Professor weren’t the only one with notes clipped to him he might feel less anxious. I told my son to change his school name tag for one I made that read “√”. The experiment proved less successful than I’d hoped. No matter how much time passed, I was always the young woman who made painfully slow progress with numbers, and my son would be the boy who simply appeared, and was embraced.

P.S. The Housekeeper and the Professor is the first book of Yōko Ogawa I’ve ever read. I just learned that L’annulaire (The Ring Finger), the French movie that I saw couple of years ago, is based on her novel of the same name.

The Music of the Primes

by Marcus du Sautoy

I spent my last Christmas holidays with my friend’s family in Torino. One day, we were talking about the books, films and music and my friend has mentioned the book she just finished reading, La solitudine dei numeri primi by Paolo Giordano (at the time, it was not translated into English yet). By some inexplicable coincidence, I was just about to finish the book by Marcus du Sautoy called The Music of the Primes which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Recently, I came across the du Sautoy’s website designed by du Sautoy which includes, among others, such topics as maths in history, art, and music.

Knots: Mathematics with a Twist

by Alexei Sossinsky
translated by Giselle Weiss

A few weeks ago, Gilleain lent me this book by Alexei Sossinsky. I have finished it today. It is a curious little book. It was originally published in French (as Nœuds: Genèse d’une théorie mathématique) ten years ago, so I expect it to be not quite up-to-date. At first, it was a fascinating read to me. By chapter 6, my attention started to slip; in chapter 7, I found myself reading the same sentence three times without getting anywhere. It looks like by the last chapter the author himself wanted to finish the book as soon as possible, so he rushed through most of it without proper explanations, which is a shame. Even so, if the goal of the book was to get one interested in knot theory, then it has been achieved.