Books: The Indian Clerk

Thanks Paul for recommending the Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt. This is not a book I would have chosen on my own as math terrified me when I was in school. The right side of my brain never worked properly. I even picked a major in college, journalism that is purposely designed for “math idiots.” And I’m proud to say I knew quite a few. And for you math lovers, I know, “math is beautiful.” So I approached the Indian Clerk ready to put it down as soon as I encountered a quadratic equation: ax^2+bx+c=0. But I actually made it through right to the last word. I kind of glanced and glared over the equation parts and I’m sure I missed a lot, but I think I got the gist of the story, at least the important parts, the relational parts, the tension between the true life characters of British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Indian genius and mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 1913 Cambridge don Hardy receives a letter from Ramanujan filled with 9 pages of equations. Fascinated Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlwood, conclude Ramanujan must be a genius and plead with him to come to Cambridge to work with them. Ramanujan arrives and the story proceeds from here told entirely through Hardy’s perspective. Through it all we see their relationship moved along by brilliant mathematical triumphs, illnesses, honors, sexual repression and emotional distress. This book has much to offer, especially to gay readers, but it also has quite a few faults. I think the problem is that David Leavitt had a tremendous amount of interesting material to work with; a power relationship, suppressed homosexuality, racial prejudice, the vestiges of British imperialism in Indian, etc, but Leavitt just couldn’t make it all gel enough to move the story along at a reasonable pace. And this is where the book falters. I think all the good ingredients of the recipe [plot] weren’t given the proper emphasis and weren’t put in at the right time__ if I may posit a bad analogy. Don’t get me wrong. I think this book is worth reading. Leavitt does a wonderful job recreating the rarified world of WWI era Cambridge. It’s just I thought it could have been better. This was difficult material to work with. The characters had an intense inner life, but a dull outer appearance. However, couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the dialogue in the book: When Ramanujan lay dying, G.H. Hardy tells him that that the taxi he rode over in was number 1729, "a rather dull number." Not so, responded Ramanujan, it's the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Wow is that romantic or what?