A mathematically inclined woman deals with her grief over the suicide of her lover, an entomologist who runs a flea circus, in this award winning novel.
Although the cover summary describes her as a "mathematician", I do not think I would have used that term as the main character works at a bank handling high level customer complaints. Still, the book includes many mathematical references, and even some mathematical stereotyping. For instance, she considers herself to be logical/scientific and suggests that she does not understand people and depended on her biologist boyfriend to explain them to her, she describes things (metaphorically) as scalene triangles or Möbius strips, and in the most mathematically explicit portion she writes the equation of motion of an object in free fall under gravity and uses it to compute various things having to do with his final moments. Two particularly interesting passages, from a mathematical fiction point of view, are her discussions of perfect numbers and the repeating patterns in the decimal expansions of rational numbers, which the author accurately describes mathematically but also attempts to intertwine in a literary way with the story and characters.
The character who narrates the entire book is terribly depressed, and probably mentally ill. (I'm too embarrassed to tell you what disgusting things she does with the fragments of her lover's bones she finds among his ashes!) So, do not look to this book for an uplifting experience. However, it is very artistic, which is -- I'm sure -- why it won the AWP Award. It is also not terribly mathematical, but the little math that is there resonates with the overall theme and that is why I'm including it in this database. |