Leaning Toward Infinity

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Beautiful, inventive writing distinguishes Woolfe's American debut (the novel has topped bestseller lists in her native Australia for over a year). This is an unflinching exploration of the complex bond of love-and the pain of selfishness and longing-experienced by three generations of mothers and daughters in a family touched by mathematical genius. When the nuns at Juanita Fernandez's convent school discover Juanita's brilliance with sums, her mother quickly puts her to work predicting gambling odds. To escape this emotionally and intellectually stifling life, the lovely and practical Juanita marries the first man who woos her, a dreamy, unsophisticated carpenter who can count no higher than 10. They suffer a loveless marriage defined by Juanita's regret at having given up her search for a revolutionary mathematical theorem to raise children, by her obsession that her son, Matti, will complete her equation and by her slow descent into madness. In the end, it is Frances, Juanita's lonely and alienated daughter, who inherits her genius, finishes her work and brings some measure of harmony to the family. The story is told by Hypatia, Frances's own daughter, through her mother's eyes, as well as through Hypatia's letters and Juanita's journal. Woolfe's writing is charming and lyrical, punctuated by a sharp eye for detail. Even though her narrative is repetitive and confusing at times, it is also complex and layered, revealing its meaning only slowly. (Mar.)

Kirkus Reviews

Creating the feeling of a found document, prizewinning Australian writer Woolfe pieces together an intriguing and expansive novel of ideas—showing the ways in which love, motherhood, and mathematics wrap around the human soul.

Three generations of Montrose women emerge from the narrative: Hypatia writes of her legendary mother Francis, a gifted and acclaimed mathematician; Francis, in turn, tells the story of her mother, the brilliant, breathtaking Juanita. Meanwhile, Hypatia frequently offers her own narrative in the form of disgruntled letters to Francis, or in in the form of brief biographical commentaries on some of history's great mathematicians. The staggered segments of personal and historical chronology help shape the central story of Francis Montrose, who discovers for the world a whole new kind of number. Having devoted her life to building on the work of Juanita, Francis, a ridiculed amateur, is invited to a mathematics conference in Athens to present her incomprehensible conjectures, which are of "such fierce, austere beauty, you might think God is real." What she is really hoping to give the world is a tribute to her beautiful, aloof mother. Juanita, raised in an Australian convent when her Spanish father was mysteriously assassinated and her mother took to gambling, is a savant, a secret mathematical genius who spends her later married life scribbling groundbreaking theories on scraps of paper. Trapped in a life of domesticity while dreaming of infinity, she pins her hopes on her beautiful son, but it is the plain and ignored Francis who inherits the gift of the abstract mind and becomes obsessed with becoming her mother. As the climax of the story, Hypatia tells of the renowned "missing days" when Francis completes her theory on a deserted Greek beach and finally slips out from under the domineering ghost of Juanita.

A lovely novel, magical in its elevation of mathematics into a realm of divine beauty, charming in its depiction of the equally demanding sphere of motherhood.