chrisq

We saw the 2008 movie of this (John Hurt, Julie Cox, Elijah Wood, Leonor Watling) a while ago, and were charmed by it even though the "mystery" part of it didn't seem to make much sense. The book, despite some continuity problems, is a lot more coherent. The landlady of an Argentinian student mathematician in Oxford for his PhD is murdered; he and a distinguished mathematician who was an old family friend of the dead woman assist an astonishingly well educated copper in the quest for this killing and the series of "almost imperceptible murders" that follows. The joy of the book lies not so much in the mystery plot, although that's (despite aforementioned qualms) fair enough, as in the frequent digressions as the central characters discuss (sometimes cod) mathematical philosophy; my favourite part of this was the consideration that more than one mathematical series might be defined by the same first three terms. In case that might sound forbidding, it isn't. This is great entertainment; I can imagine, though, that the publisher's efforts on the cover to make it seem like just another murder mystery must have led to some mightily puzzled commuters . . . The translation is generally very good, although every now and there's a glaring mistranslation (because literal Spanish rather than colloquial English) of a single word. I blame the copyeditor for not picking these few instances up.

2023-02-27 06:50