Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187721 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-04
• Released on: 2007-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by David Mason

David Leavitt's intelligent, ambitious new novel based on historical fact begins in 1936 with an aging professor at a podium. The renowned British mathematician G.H. Hardy has come to Harvard to lecture on the life and work of his friend Srinivasa Ramanujan, considered by many to have possessed one of the most beautiful mathematical minds of the past few centuries. A decade younger than Hardy (who was born in 1877), Ramanujan grew up in poverty near Madras in south India. He was barely noticed by the colonial establishment before Hardy and others, excited by letters from this erratic genius, brought him to Cambridge University. For the English dons, the younger scholar promised a fresh way of seeing number theory. For Ramanujan, the journey was an opportunity to find legitimacy and recognition unavailable to him at home. His years in England, 1914-1919, a period covered by the bulk of this novel, were triumphant but compromised by war, bigotry and his own illness.

Some readers may find it difficult to see the attraction of a story about pioneers of pure mathematics. Known principally as a "gay writer" for his early novels and story collections, Leavitt has also been drawn to historical material such as the Spanish Civil War and World War II in While England Sleeps -- a novel that got him in hot water when Stephen Spender sued him, alleging plagiarism and forcing Leavitt to remove material from subsequent printings.

But that is a hazard of historical fiction, isn't it? Another problem is technical: Merely quoting the letters and diaries of real people is not the same as fully imagining and recreating their lives. In The Indian Clerk, Leavitt's subjects are safely dead and relatively obscure outside the rarified air of the seminar, but they are not always vivid as characters. Periodically, we see Hardy giving the lecture he wishes he could give, a confessional narrative of emotional discovery that Leavitt has largely imagined: "When a mathematician works -- when, as I think of it, he 'goes into' work -- he enters a world that, for all its abstraction, seems far more real to him than the world in which he eats and talks and sleeps. He needs no body there."

But Hardy does have a body, and, for a repressed homosexual, it creates problems he cannot solve. He converses with the ghost of a lover for whom he feels a shadowy guilt. His professional partner, J.E. Littlewood, conducts a long-term affair with a married woman. Both men are accomplished in abstraction but failures at domestic life.

Then there is Ramanujan, who finds England a cold country with unbearable vegetables and no conception of spices. Because we know up front from Hardy's lecture that Ramanujan will die young, we ought to be able to feel more urgency in his pursuits. After all, Leavitt's novel is not only about intellectual idealists enduring wartime difficulties, but also about public and private lives, sexual repression and the decline of empire. As these men investigate the identities of numbers and sequences, we begin to see the larger implications of their ideas.

To Ramanujan, a Tamil Brahmin, math equals metaphysics, and equations are expressions of God. To Hardy, "God had nothing to do with it. Proof was what connected you to the truth." Other characters in the book, such as Alice Neville, wife of a junior colleague, and Gertrude Hardy, the don's disfigured sister, are more grounded, perhaps because Leavitt felt freer from historical record and could imagine them more fully as people, the first in love with Ramanujan, the second living a life circumscribed by gender and the success of her brother. World War I shatters the Empire, but it also exposes the frail underpinnings of these relationships. Cambridge itself is absorbed into the war effort as a hospital, its intellectual freedom subverted by the propaganda machine. The philosopher Bertrand Russell goes to jail for his pacific beliefs, while Hardy finds a safer compromise and manages to preserve his professorship.

But even with such intriguing material, the novel is only intermittently gripping. Paradoxically, the high quality of Leavitt's research often holds the narrative too close to biography. Cameo appearances by Ludwig Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence do not pay off dramatically. Scenes in south India have no light, no texture of heat, sweat, odor of any kind, and even England is a bit hazily conceived. At some point, historical novelists need to let go of their research and make use of their senses to embody and enchant.

Several scenes do stand out -- Alice asking Gertrude to show her glass eye, for example, or passages depicting the war's impact on the university. There's a terrible gravity in seeing how slowly people apprehend the value of Ramanujan's life, but Leavitt has not found the narrative shape that would allow us to feel what Hardy eventually understands: "It is only as [Hardy] enters the porter's lodge that it hits him. Zero and infinity. The things we can never know because they are unknowable and the things we can never know because there are too many of them." If that abstraction were made to resonate through the lives of his characters, The Indian Clerk would have been more successful than it is.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Based on a lecture given by a real-life Hardy in 1913, this intellectual and historical novel explores the beauty of mathematics, the nature of creativity, sexual repression, class relations, and the frailty of human connection-all set against the decline of empire and war. David Leavitt, best known for While England Sleeps (1993), impressed critics with his research and the novel's accessibility; even his discussions of the Riemann hypothesis and the secret order of the primes offered them interest. Leavitt depicts his characters, however, less successfully. A few reviewers complained about Ramanujan's ambiguity, questioned his decision to characterize Hardy as gay, and criticized cameos of historical figures such as D. H. Lawrence. The Indian Clerk is a flawed but intriguing look into the zeitgeist of the British Empire in the early 20th century.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

chatty gay sensibilities
The writing flows smoothly, on and on and on. Maybe, with some heavy editing, cutting the length by half, this book would be worth the effort to read it. It seems to have very little "point" to it. Endless salon chatter. Maybe the history of England during that time is enough for some people. As literature, it's worthless.

Mathematical Redemption
Creative artistic accomplishment can triumph over other more tawdry human experiences. That seems to be the message of this book, and the particular artistic accomplishments of this tale are not literary or musical, but mathematical, to the delight of this reader. Among the accomplished mathematicans with roles in this story, the leading character seems to be Hardy rather than Ramanujan, in spite of the title. No matter.

There are some intriguing though trivial puzzles in the book's wording. Other reviewers have commented on the erroneous inclusion of 9 in a list of the prime numbers. Also, it is fascinating to consider that educated Englishmen of a century ago might have used colloquialisms such as "het up" and "if I had my druthers", phrases that Southerners like me feel downright proprietary about.

Interesting, but not for the reasons advertised

The premise for this novel, often recounted by reviewers, does not need to be rehashed here. Before WWI, the famed British mathematician Hardy receives a letter from an unknown clerk in far off India who demonstrates extraordinary mathematical skill. After some hindrances, Hardy brings the Indian clerk, Ramanujan to Britain, where the two collaborate and produce a series of extraordinary breakthroughs, seeking even to solve the long elusive Riemann Hypothesis. Through all of this, Leavitt shows great talent as a writer of historical fiction, bringing the period to life, along with a series of famous characters such as Bertrand Russell.

Unfortunately, Leavitt is no mathematician. Not only will readers wishing to understand the Riemann Hypothesis find themselves in frustration searching the internet to understand what he fails to explain well, but a series of errors obvious to any lay person leave you wondering about his basic understanding of this aspect of his work. While I suspect many have begun this work interested in learning about the curious historical personality dubbed "the Hindoo Calculator" eventually one realizes that this is far from the most interesting part of the story. Leavitt, writing mostly from Hardy's perspective, leaves Ramanujan's motivations and inner life as obscure to the reader as it is to his narrator. As such, the character becomes at best thin, and on occasion a mere cipher. Yet once you recover from this disappointment, one recognizes that in other ways this novel shines, if not in this purported central plot, then in the milieu through which the story flows.

Leavitt does a fine job bringing to life the oddities of British academia, with its secret societies, strange traditions, and rampant class chauvinism. He also gives the reader an interesting view into the transformative effects of WW I's horror on what in their positivism, many pre-war intellectuals clearly imagined as a society heading inexorably towards utopia. Indeed, the rank suffering and wonton destruction of the war are so well presented, one often finds oneself forgetting about the entire mathamatics plot line, and bemoaning when the author returns to the Hardy-Ramanujan relationship.

As one can tell, this long work is far from perfect. Yet Leavitt's thoughtful efforts and interesting character studies are certainly worthy of consideration. Perhaps in the future some other novelist will be able to climb into Ramanujan's head, but that will be another novel, for another time.