One Hundred Twenty-One Days
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- CHF 11.00
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- CHF 11.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
"Audin plays with codes, numbers and dates to create a fascinating and unsettling story."—Le Temps
This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter—at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary—locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience.
Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this remarkable first novel from Oulipo member Audin, the lives of French and German mathematicians serve as vectors, but the enduring tragedy of the two world wars remains unsolvable: a "zone of ambiguity, the grey zone." Pieced together from journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, notes, and interview transcripts, the stories of Robert Gorenstein and Christian M. begin similarly: both are young, talented French mathematicians who are wounded in action during WWI, and both fall in love with the same young nurse, Marguerite. Deeply Catholic, Marguerite refuses to marry the Jewish Gorenstein, despite her feelings for him, and chooses a life with Christian, who is prone to rage and increasingly sympathetic to Nazism. In a fit of madness, Gorenstein commits an unspeakable crime, but even lifelong confinement in an asylum doesn't prevent him from continuing to amass professional achievements; his academic correspondents come to include Andr Silberberg, another French-Jewish mathematician whose life is imperiled by the Occupation. Audin's smart, deeply empathetic text is enriched by recurrences, coincidences, and invocations of European poetry, including Dante's Inferno and Faust, since numbers alone cannot make sense of the war's aftermath: the lives senselessly ended, spared, or quietly destroyed, like Silberberg's erstwhile girlfriend, Gorenstein's niece, who after the war's end "always lived alone." Audin's focus is on "the private events... do they not form a sort of chain that holds the threads together the very fabric of history?"
