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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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