Leaning towards infinity: How my mother's apron unfolds into my life - Softcover

Woolfe, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091832284 ISBN 13: 9780091832285

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

"This is not my story. It is the story of Frances Montrose, an Australian woman with no formal mathematics training who carried across the world, in a borrowed suitcase bulging with a friend's balldresses, something no one knew about. The discovery of a new number."I can barely add up so I can't tell you much about her mathematics. Only to say she was a genius. And she was my mother, my love, my emptiness. Her mathematics was her secret passion and her curse. And my curse too."Hypatia Montrose"FirstI think it all began because of the shape of my mother's breasts. And it definitely began with something my mother wrote on the margin of a page stuck on the Frege said that the straight line connecting any two points is already here before we draw it. Underneath it, she'd made two dots, pressing the nib of her fountain pen so hard the swelling scarlet ink stained the white paper. She always wrote in scarlet ink until she went mad.And of course, there was the advertisement. Many things became linked because of it, in the way that you might be sitting in a cafe and suddenly a stranger stands at the door in an ordinary brown coat, but because of the fall of light on the brown coat you cry out, fragments from the past are linking and unwinding in you.Or a man might walk across a room wrapped in a white towel, with windows behind him, nothing more momentous than windows, and mountains are behind the windows, only mountains, but their light is turning him emerald, turquoise, purple - so he moves inside a jewel, and tears start in your eyes.

About this title

Review

Sue Woolfe's biography states that she knows nothing about mathematics. With the central event of her novel set in 1994, she ought to have had a fairly easy job of finding out how math is done and discussed nowadays, and who does it and why. However, Woolfe's determination to humiliate her main character, middle-aged prodigy Frances Montrose, with the scorn of a unanimously badly behaved, testosterone-driven male mathematical establishment leads to her to untruth, fatally undermining the premise and effect of her novel. Deliberately demonizing men as mates and as mathematicians is sexism of the worst kind. The multigenerational familial dissonance and harmony of this book, its redeeming features, are lost in Woolfe's caricaturing of men and women and a science she does not understand.

From Kirkus Reviews

Creating the feeling of a found document, prizewinning Australian writer Woolfe pieces together an intriguing and expansive novel of ideas--showing the ways in which love, motherhood, and mathematics wrap around the human soul. Three generations of Montrose women emerge from the narrative: Hypatia writes of her legendary mother Francis, a gifted and acclaimed mathematician; Francis, in turn, tells the story of her mother, the brilliant, breathtaking Juanita. Meanwhile, Hypatia frequently offers her own narrative in the form of disgruntled letters to Francis, or in in the form of brief biographical commentaries on some of history's great mathematicians. The staggered segments of personal and historical chronology help shape the central story of Francis Montrose, who discovers for the world a whole new kind of number. Having devoted her life to building on the work of Juanita, Francis, a ridiculed amateur, is invited to a mathematics conference in Athens to present her incomprehensible conjectures, which are of ``such fierce, austere beauty, you might think God is real.'' What she is really hoping to give the world is a tribute to her beautiful, aloof mother. Juanita, raised in an Australian convent when her Spanish father was mysteriously assassinated and her mother took to gambling, is a savant, a secret mathematical genius who spends her later married life scribbling groundbreaking theories on scraps of paper. Trapped in a life of domesticity while dreaming of infinity, she pins her hopes on her beautiful son, but it is the plain and ignored Francis who inherits the gift of the abstract mind and becomes obsessed with becoming her mother. As the climax of the story, Hypatia tells of the renowned ``missing days'' when Francis completes her theory on a deserted Greek beach and finally slips out from under the domineering ghost of Juanita. A lovely novel, magical in its elevation of mathematics into a realm of divine beauty, charming in its depiction of the equally demanding sphere of motherhood. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0091832284
• ISBN 13: 9780091832285
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 393