To do this, the novelist borrows one of many conventional devices, a large literary twine not very original, to avoid falling into a kind of biography that would probably taste the same as obscure esoteric mathematical formulas of his character. Here is a young librarian Princeton, Anna Roth, who is charged by the Director of the IAS to recover posthumous document entitled the "Nachlass" (in German inheritance) to the widow of Gödel, Adele. A widow now confined to a nursing home where she awaits death. A widow at once cantankerous and engaging the young woman will have to conquer. What was supposed to be a simple mission will prove infinitely more complicated, the game rules defined by Adele, and as and when the two women will discover and learn about one another. For Adele, Anna is her reason to attach to the life he has left stranded and finally find some joy after a whole life of sacrifices and sorrows. For Anna, Adele became a kind of mentor that will finally allow him to get rid of his demons especially with men. Between the two women will establish a deep friendship which construction is the second theme of this thick novel.
Yannick Grenier to complete his book had to see tons of documentation and swallow many books of great intellectual rigor. For Gödel was not anyone. Pure spirit, haunted by the search for perfection and mathematical elegance, he also passionately philosophy attempting a rapprochement between axiomatic mathematics and philosophy of Husserl or Leibnitz who are among the most hermetic philosophers ever. He was also and above all a man with serious psychiatric problems and psychotic, eternal valetudinarian, eating sparingly and with extreme suspicion as his phobia to believe that everyone sought his life or his honor was permanent.
Born in Vienna, he was one of his many scientific pushed by the Nazis to emigrate to the United States where he was welcomed at Princeton he was never to leave. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein who saw nothing more gratifying than a walk with Gödel. He skirted his life Oppenheimer who made his protégé, Pauli, Morgenstern and a cohort of Nobel or Fields Medals.
For him, Adele gave up everything. His weirdness and soon his madness restreignirent social relationships. They lived frugally, abhorring her husband to beg any recognition. His wife's family hated the whole life, she was a lovely cabaret dancer and therefore the perfect illustration of a bad marriage for one who came from a bourgeois family. All her life, she had to try to solve his equation to her, one that was to love a genius, to protect himself and his madness, while protecting itself and renouncing exist simply for its own even.
All this Yannick Grenier shows us with a wealth of detail and an ability to account for high intellectual imaginary dialogues between all these wonderful minds that crossed in the gardens of Princeton. It is also the limit of the novel, very long to read, requiring constant concentration, sometimes drowning in nonessential convolutions. No doubt he would have benefited from being cut by a hundred pages which would have made her smoother playback. But all the same, we should acknowledge the performance of a first novel of great intellectual rigor.
Published by Editions Anne Carrière - 2012 - 469 pages
Find my reading notes on thierrycollet-cetalir.blogspot.com
