Posts Tagged ‘Benjamin Labatut’

12 Dec

My Favorite Fiction I’ve Read in 2023

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Another year. Here are my favorite fiction reads of 2023, and as always, fiction is all that really counts.

 

 

‘Glassworks’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith – ‘Glassworks’ is an intriguing and endlessly fascinating quirky family saga with one family member of each of four generations involved with working with glass in one form or another. The situations that Olivia Wolfgang-Smith creates for her characters are like no other I have encountered in fiction. They are unique and wildly inventive.

 

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray – Clocking in at 643 pages, ‘The Bee Sting’ was the longest novel I read this year and the most immersive. This long story of the Irish Barnes family held my interest throughout.

“We’re all different, but we all think everybody else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel the world would be a much happier place.”

 

‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason – ‘North Woods’ is the captivating story of a plot of land in western Massachusetts and the people who lived there through the years from colonial times until the near present when it is now advertised as Catamount Acres. What makes ‘North Woods’ a special delight is that the author Daniel Mason’s playful enthusiasm for his material shines through. It is written with a certain esprit with warmth and intensity.

 

‘My Phantoms’ by Gwendoline Riley – Having read two books by Riley this year that were excellent, Gwendoline Riley was my Writer Discovery of the year.

‘My Phantoms’ is a daughter’s portrait of her mother, a mother she cannot love or even like very much. I found this unsentimental approach to family life entirely refreshing. The author Gwendoline Riley has a gift for getting at the root of her characters’ personalities and for noting the subtle differences between people that might cause them not to get along with each other. Mother love is not an automatic thing.

 

‘Vera’ by Elizabeth von Arnim – ‘Vera’ was inspired by the author’s disastrous second marriage. Here are some words that describe the husband Everard: ruthless, domineering, merciless, cruel, without pity or compassion, malevolent, unrelenting, vindictive, demanding, trying. There is also “his extraordinary capacity for being offended”. This is a dark comedy.

 

‘Time Shelter’ by Georgi Gospdinov – ‘Time Shelter’ won the 2023 International Booker Prize. In the novel, each country in Europe must vote to decide what years of their past they want to return to, which years from the past really glowed for the people in that country.

“If Scandinavia couldn’t decide which of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also racked by doubt, but for opposite reasons.”

Time Shelter’ is a thought provoking novel that is quite playful and humorous at the same time.

 

‘Abyss’ by Pilar Quintana – The story in ‘Abyss’ is told by an 8 year-old girl which makes it easy to follow. Children as young as eight can sense the undercurrents that are roiling beneath the surface in their family. They have a front row seat for observing marital discord. What Elena Ferrante did for family and community life in Florence, Italy, Quintana does for family and community life in Cali, Colombia.

 

‘This Other Eden’ by Paul Harding – This novel is based on a real incident in United States history. Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Why is the government so anxious to evict them from their island? Many of the islanders have dark features, so white racism enters into it.

 

‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ by Donal Ryan – There are four main characters in ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’, all of them female and each of them from a different generation.

“You only get one life, and no woman should spend any part of it being friends with men. That’s not what men are for.”

The short two-page chapters in this novel made for a quick comfortable read.

 

‘Forbidden Notebook’ by Alba de Cepedes – In ‘Forbidden Notebook’, Valeria Cassati must make entries in her notebook surreptitiously. The other family members must not find out about it, which is not so easy to do with a husband and two college age children. She does not have a room of her own in their small house. Did keeping this forbidden notebook which was hidden from her family cause Valeria to seek out a life of her own, including this forbidden romance with her boss Guido?

 

‘The MANIAC’ by Benjamin Labatut – Here is a fictionalized biography of the real mathematician and scientist John Von Neumann. Von Neumann was one of those eccentric genius types who had difficulty tying his shoes, but came up with the stored-program concept for computers which allows them to do quite a few things these days.

 

‘Harold’ by Stephen Wright – Harold, the seven year-old boy, is in the third grade. Mrs. Yuka is his teacher. Harold’s mind wanders, a lot.

“He was in and out of paying attention like someone who was away and occasionally came by to pick up their mail.”

Of course this does present a problem for Mrs. Yuka.

The author Stephen Wright is a quite famous comedian, and ‘Harold’ is filled with the same kind of offbeat humor as Wright’s routines. Like Steven Wright, Harold looks at things from a different angle.

 

That’s all, folks.

 

 

4 Dec

‘The MANIAC’ by Benjamin Labatut – The Life of a Genius, John Von Neumann

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The MANIAC’ by Benjamin Labatut    (2023) – 354 pages

 

There is little question that John Von Neumann was one of the most intelligent humans of the 20th century. This Hungarian Jewish mathematician, real name Janesi Von Neumann, came up with the idea of stored-programs on a computer in the early 1950s. Up until that point, computers were little more than glorified calculators. The stored-program concept allowed the same computer to be used for millions of different uses which is where we are today. Earlier he was also one of the scientists and mathematicians who worked on the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb and later the hydrogen bomb. Von Neumann was also a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and his papers on the subject are still read today.

Von Neumann was one of those eccentric genius types who had difficulty tying his shoes.

“We owe so much to him.

‘Cause he didn’t just give us the most important technological breakthrough of the 20th century.

He left us part of his mind.”

First we are with Von Neumann in his birthplace of Hungary. Neumann was one of a group of scientists and mathematicians knows as the Hungarian Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Von Neumann was fortunate to be able to move his family from Hungary to the United States in 1930. In the United States he did all he could to defeat the Nazis.

“It did not help, of course, that soon after he met Godel the Nazis came to power and began to persecute us, but to him that was not really a surprise, only the starkest confirmation of his total disillusionment with human decency and the ultimate proof of the sway that irrationality held over the human race.”

The maniac of the title of this novel is not John Von Neumann as some might be expecting, but instead it is the name given to the first stored-program computer. MANIAC = “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer”.

“I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel Prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known Von Neumann for the better part of my life.” Eugene Wigner

Benjamin Labatut’s first novel, ‘When We Cease to Understand’, was a revelation. This fiction describing the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century was unique and like nothing I had read before. ‘The Maniac’ is more a continuation of that first book rather than a revelation.

The first 272 pages of ‘The MANIAC’ are pretty much a straight fictionalized biography of Von Neumann. However the last 75 pages of the novel make a sharp turn in another direction. As we mentioned, Von Neumann was a pioneer in artificial intelligence. The oriental game of “Go” is even more complex than Chess. In 2016, South Korean Lee Sedol was the world champion Go player. Starting March 9, 2016, Lee played a five-game match, broadcast live, against the computer program AlphaGo, developed by a London-based artificial intelligence firm Google DeepMind. After Lee Sedol lost three games to the computer, Lee finally won a game.

After defeating another human champion, AlphaGo has developed into an unbeatable force.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

13 Dec

The Top 12 List of My Favorite Fiction that I Have Read in 2022 (Plus 1 More)

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

 

Here we go again. Another year is almost over, and here again is a list of my favorite books which I read this year. This year definitely has the most fiction by woman writers of any of my end-of-year lists. This appears to be a trend. Of the 53 Notable Books in the Fiction and Poetry category for 2022 in the New York Times recently, 38 books were written by women and 15 books were written by men.

Click on either the bold-faced title or the book cover image to see my original review for each work.

 

‘Trust’ br Hernan Diaz (2022) – Of all the fiction I read in 2022, ‘Trust’ is my favorite, no question. A rich person can buy the past he or she wants even if it is counter to the facts, if we let them. One of the features which make ‘Trust’ an outstanding novel is the smooth and effective way that Hernan Diaz handles four different sources so that we readers wind up with a full picture.

 

‘The Art of Losing’ by Alice Zeniter (2017) – Here is a multi-generational saga covering about sixty years of this Algerian, now French, family. In the last section, the granddaughter returns to Algeria. This is history made poignant and vivid.

 

 

 

‘Marigold and Rose’ By Louise Gluck (2022) – This very quick novella made me want to go further into the poetry of Nobel Prize winning Louise Gluck. That is one of my goals for the upcoming year.

 

 

 

 

‘Shrines of Gaiety’ by Kate Atkinson (2022) – Nightclub life in London in the 1920s is going strong. World War I is over, time to celebrate and enjoy living. ‘Shrines of Gaiety’ is a superior entertainment.

 

 

 

 

‘O Caledonia’ by Elspeth Barker (1991) – This deliberately humorous Gothic is a parody of the English family novel, a large family in which one girl child, Janet, just does not fit in.

 

 

 

 

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (2010) – A father drives his young daughter to the farm of her aunt and uncle whom she hardly knows. They packed a suitcase for her, so she knows she will be staying but does not know for how long. Like Anton Chekhov, Claire Keegan understands that what your characters don’t say is sometimes more important than what they do say and what the author doesn’t write is sometimes more important than what the author does write.

 

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ by Benjamin Labatut (2020) – The stories of these strange brilliant scientists and mathematicians are intriguing. Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein. These are the individuals who have created our modern world.Although all of the persons in this book are real people, and their circumstances have been well-documented, there are fictional flourishes in describing some of the incidents in the lives of these physics and chemistry geniuses that go beyond what the author could possibly know and thus this is a fiction based on real events.

 

‘Lolly Willowes’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926) – Here is a serious comedy about a single woman who finds a very unusual, definitely bizarre, and highly effective way to achieve her goal. And what is Laura’s goal? To keep her other family members and anyone else from interfering in her single life.

 

‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura (2021) – Often the best style is one that does not call attention to itself and proceeds ahead in a reliable straightforward manner. This lucid style as well as the interesting story sold me on ‘Intimacies’.

 

 

 

‘Paradais’ by Fernanda Melchor (2021) – At first, this story of the two teen boys Fatboy and Polo seems quite comical, but it takes a dark, dark turn. Both Fatboy and Polo are sixteen years old. Having been a young guy myself at one time, I know that the author has nailed it, how a young guy’s mind works or doesn’t work. The two misfit teenagers Polo and Fatboy are as memorable a team as George and Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men’.

 

‘The Shades’ by Evgenia Citkowitz (2018) – Here is a modern English Gothic fiction with cell phones. The individual sentences are clear, meaningful and well-written, and they held my interest throughout.

 

 

 

‘Black Cloud Rising’ by David Wright Falade (2022) – This is a rousing lively novel dealing with a little-mentioned aspect of the Civil War, a troop of black soldiers marching in the South of the United States during the Civil War freeing the slaves on the farms and plantations there. This is a dramatic stirring historical novel.

 

And one more…

‘The Maid’ by Nita Prose (2022) – And one final luxury hotel murder mystery told from the point of view of Molly, one of the maids at the hotel. It is the first novel by Nita Prose. This is not heavy-duty or demanding like some of my reading. I enjoyed this lighter fare and the engaging personality of Molly the Maid for a change.

 

 

Happy Reading!

 

13 Jan

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ by Benjamin Labatut – Our Amazing Terrible World of Science

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ by Benjamin Labatut   (2020) – 188 pages        Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

 

I try to keep up with the major happenings in this world of ours. Yet until I read ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ I had not ever or even heard of the Haber-Bosch process, the process developed in 1907 used to extract nitrogen directly from the air.

“The Haber-Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 billion to 7 billion in fewer than a hundred years. Today nearly fifty percent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention. The modern world could not exist without “the man who pulled bread from air”, in the words of the present day.”

And I thought I was well-read.

Fritz Haber, the German Jewish scientist who invented this process, somehow escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 only to die shortly thereafter. The cyanide poison gas Zyklon which the Germans used during World War I was also produced by Haber and his team. After World War I, Zyklon was banned for use in warfare. However the Germans modified Zyklon into Zyklon B and used it in gas chambers to poison the Jewish concentration camp inmates. Many of Haber’s relatives were murdered by the Nazis in this fashion.

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ is about those scientists and mathematicians who have shaped our modern world for better or worse. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the name, has always intrigued me although I still do not understand it. In this book we meet the odd eccentric man who developed this principle, Werner Karl Heisenberg.

In a feverish fit of delirium which lasted for days on the island of Heligoland in 1925, Heisenberg shaped his strange revelations into a publishable article.

After Niels Bohr read Heisenberg’s paper, Bohr wrote to Albert Einstein.

“Heisenberg’s latest paper, soon to be published, appears rather mystifying but is certainly true and profound and will have enormous implications.”

“And spare us any resort to the repulsive algebra of that cursed Wunderkind, Werner Heisenberg!” Erwin Schrödinger said to them provoking a fit of laughter among his colleagues.”

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is the entire basis of quantum theory which explains how everything works at the sub-atomic level as both wave and particle. That is as much as I know.

However the stories of these strange brilliant scientists and mathematicians are intriguing. Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein. These are the individuals who have created our modern world.

But is this book fiction or non-fiction?

Although all of the persons in this book are real people, and their circumstances have been well-documented, there are fictional flourishes in describing some of the incidents in the lives of these physics and chemistry geniuses that go beyond what the author could possibly know and thus violate the standards of non-fiction. The book starts out almost totally factual with its portrayal of the German chemist Fritz Haber, but it uses more fictional devices as it goes along. For example, how does our author know there was a tingle running down Schrödinger’s spine?

The author himself states in the Acknowledgments that “This is a work of fiction based on real events.”

Fiction or non-fiction, it makes for fascinating reading.

 

Grade:    A