The Goddess of Small Victories

July 14, 2014
Grannec depicts the life of historical mathematical prodigy Kurt Gödel and his mismatched but devoted wife, Adele, in this overly earnest debut. In 1980, young translator Anna Roth, tasked by her mathematician parents, visits the widowed Adele in a nursing home and tries to persuade her to release Kurt’s papers for study. Adele recounts her early life, beginning with her first meeting with Kurt in Vienna. Older and worldlier than Kurt, the earthy Adele holds considerable allure for the young genius, but only gains his iron-willed mother’s consent to marry him when Kurt flees Nazi Austria just after the outbreak of WWII for a position in the United States. In Princeton, Adele is initially lonely, but soon makes friends, with Einstein, no less. Meanwhile, in chapters told in the third person from Anna’s perspective, the young woman learns valuable lessons from the older woman in everything from beauty to standing up to her smothering family and oppressive bosses. Yannec’s attempts to evoke period can be clumsy, as when, in 1955, Adele listens to the radio and asks her friends, “Do you know Chuck Berry, ladies? They are calling this ‘rock and roll.’” More off-putting, though, is the afterword’s admission that the novel’s premise—Adele’s reluctance to part with Kurt’s papers—is utterly untrue.

August 1, 2014
Art and math mingle in Grannec's debut historical novel, which hinges on the life of logician Kurt Godel. In 1980, a Princeton student named Anna receives a difficult task: to befriend Godel's cantankerous widow, Adele, and convince her to donate her late husband's papers to the university archives. Grannec alternates between this plotline and Adele's narration of her life with the tortured Godel, a genius whose quirks-reluctances to eat or leave his home or publish his work-eventually mutated into impairments. The boldness of Adele-a former dancer and, to many on the Princeton faculty, a philistine-contrasts with the reservation of Anna and Godel in each of the respective timelines. For a while, this creates powerful thematic unity-especially in the early chapters, which focus on twin seductions: Adele's of Godel in late 1920s Vienna and Anna's of Adele more than 50 years later. The novel's middle stretch feels more diffuse, however, the intellectual material drifting away from the emotional material. It seems that Grannec has set out to write one of those sweeping literary works that balances the historical with the personal. As such, she gives us World War II, McCarthyism, the Kennedy assassination, etc., populating her narrative with guest appearances from the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Yet her settings and characters feel like shadows-mere glimpses of history. While the female protagonists, Adele and Anna, are fascinating and three-dimensional, Grannec often makes them passive in both action and thought; the former is understandable, though the latter-especially during the novel's long dinner parties, where dialogue takes over and interiority gets left behind-is questionable. Grannec never finds a convincing emotional counterweight to the dense mathematics and philosophy discussed throughout. An intellectually challenging, though occasionally lopsided, deconstruction of the notion of "the great man."

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2014

In French author Grannec's first novel, which focuses on real-life couple Kurt and Adele Godel, love is more powerful than anything, from family disapproval to mental illness. Adele devoted her life to taking care of her mathematical genius husband, a paranoid recluse who never showed her even the smallest affection. Kurt, who believed that others were trying to poison him, ate less and less, eventually dwindling to 66 pounds and dying of anorexia. The novel alternates between Adele's memories of her difficult marital life and the efforts of a young woman named Anna, who has been charged with the task of gaining Adele's trust in order to secure rights to her late husband's papers. The women develop a true friendship that comes to mean a great deal to both of them. VERDICT While some of the mathematical discussions are hard to follow, the book offers insight into a little-known historical figure, as well as a portrait of Kurt's close friend, Albert Einstein. And Adele, who always lived in her husband's shadow, rightfully takes center stage, with readers marveling at how love can survive when it receives no nourishment. For fans of Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind.--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2014
Acclaimed as the genius who strolled the streets of Princeton arm-in-arm with Einstein, Kurt Gdel here appears as the enigmatic shadow of his irascible widow, Adelethe feistiest resident at a Pennsylvania retirement home. In this impressive first novel, Grannec makes readers invisible companions of Anna Roth, emissary for Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, as she tries to pry from Adele the trove of papers left behind by her late husband. Though loath to part with those papers, Adele shares her tangled memories of how she improbably traded her role as sexy dancer in a Vienna cabaret for that of plucky wife of a distinguished mathematician fleeing Nazi Europe for America. An outsider both to her husband's rarefied intellectual pursuits and to his privileged social circle, Adele still recognizes Kurt's revolutionary incompleteness theorems as portents of a cultural crisis in reason and certainty. By shrewd intuition, she also understands how her spouse's very insistence on sound reasoning leaves him vulnerable to lethal paranoia in an era of McCarthyite hysteria. Privy to Adele's at-times acerbic, at-times tender exchanges with Anna, readers share with both women the task of deciphering a baffling life, a tragic death. Painstakingly researched, seamlessly translated, this is historical fiction of exceptional daring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)