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Overview
“Richly imagined [and] impressive” (New York Times Book Review), this critically acclaimed and emotionally charged novel about the strange and ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown—and unschooled—mathematical genius is historical fiction at its best: ambitious, profound, and absorbing.
Based on the remarkable true story of G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and populated with such luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spellbinding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world. A literary masterpiece, it appeared on four bestseller lists, including the Los Angeles Times, and received dazzling reviews from every major publication in the country.
Synopsis
“Richly imagined [and] impressive” (New York Times Book Review), this critically acclaimed and emotionally charged novel about the strange and ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown—and unschooled—mathematical genius is historical fiction at its best: ambitious, profound, and absorbing.
Based on the remarkable true story of G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and populated with such luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spellbinding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world. A literary masterpiece, it appeared on four bestseller lists, including the Los Angeles Times, and received dazzling reviews from every major publication in the country.
The Barnes & Noble Review
The standards used to assess a new work of fiction's success -- pacing, immediacy of characterization, shapeliness of plot -- often avoid the deeper character of the novel at hand, to say nothing of the pleasures peculiar to the novel form: chief among them is the immersion in a world of apprehensions, personalities, and shifting realities as the reader wanders, acquiring intelligence -- or merely things to ponder -- along the way. A novel doesn't always have to compel attention to reward it; that's one of the differences between literature and the movies. David Leavitt's eighth novel offers such distinctive novelistic rewards. The stage for its exploration of ideas, sexual identity, and class distinctions is set in January 1913, when mathematician and Cambridge don G. H. Hardy receives a curious letter from one S. Ramanujan, an obscure Indian clerk who will turn out to be one of the great mathematical thinkers of the era (in outline, the core of Leavitt's tale is true). As famous figures (Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence), momentous events (World War I), and deftly described mathematical ideas are woven into the melancholy tale of Ramanujan's astonishing Cambridge sojourn and Hardy's perplexed emotional life, the reader is transported -- courtesy of Leavitt's evocative prose -- to a plane of perception suffused with slowly unfolding satisfactions. --James Mustich
Editorials
Nell Freudenberger
Leavitt has a passion to inhabit the past, a particular novelistic impulse that goes beyond simple "animation" of history. The research that went into The Indian Clerk is impressive, but a good historical novelist has to do much more than get the facts right: he has to illuminate the relationship of his own time to the period he's writing about. The Indian Clerk is a story about guilt. It's about the impulse to save a foreign stranger (in spite of the fact that your idea of his country is no more than a couple of colorful cliches), and a story about a war in which the boys who die are most often poorer than the ones who stay at home. Reading it offers the pleasure of escape into another world, along with the nagging feeling of familiarity that characterizes the best historical fiction.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Ambitious, erudite and well-sourced, Leavitt's 12th work of fiction centers on the relationship between mathematicians G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). In January of 1913, Cambridge-based Hardy receives a nine-page letter filled with prime number theorems from S. Ramanujan, a young accounts clerk in Madras. Intrigued, Hardy consults his colleague and collaborator, J.E. Littlewood; the two soon decide Ramanujan is a mathematical genius and that he should emigrate to Cambridge to work with them. Hardy recruits the young, eager don, Eric Neville, and his wife, Alice, to travel to India and expedite Ramanujan's arrival; Alice's changing affections, WWI and Ramanujan's enigmatic ailments add obstacles. Meanwhile, Hardy, a reclusive scholar and closeted homosexual, narrates a second story line cast as a series of 1936 Harvard lectures, some of them imagined. Ramanujan comes to renown as the "the Hindu calculator"; discussions of mathematics and bits of Cambridge's often risqué academic culture (including D.H. Lawrence's 1915 visit) add authenticity. Hardy is hardly likable, however, and Leavitt (While England Sleeps, etc.) packs too much into the epic-length proceedings, at the expense of pace. (Sept.)
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