Product Description

This is a remarkable fiction debut from a young female physicist obsessed with two giants of twentieth century science: Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of the age, and Alan Turing, the breaker of the Enigma code. Janna Levin tells their parallel lives in a haunting story of tortured genius, persecution and death. Godel became delusional and paranoid to the point he starved himself to death. Turing, despite his brilliant war work, was hounded to destruction because he was homosexual. Both men devoted their lives to the highest truths of abstract nature, yet were unable to grapple with the everyday world. A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES is a haunting, elegaic story that flows back and forth between Turing, Godel and the author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2500160 in Books
• Published on: 2010-01-21
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

THE TIMES
"intriguing...engaging......vivid."

NEW STATESMAN
"The ethereal brilliance of these men seeps into the very form of the novel.... the emotional struggles endured by both men are here given a universal resonance. Crucial relationships are evoked with a convincing and potent tenderness: the tragedies that ensue are genuinely heartbreaking."

M John Harrison, THE GUARDIAN
'a prose sometimes poetic and surprising, always visceral, dense and interesting.'

Customer Reviews

Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
I bought this one because I had read "The Semantics of Murder" by Aifric Campbell and was interested in reading other novels about the Vienna Circle. Brilliant and eccentric scientists are perfect hunting ground for novelists but the difference is that Levin is a professor of physics and this is her first novel. The book has some serious structural flaws - the first person narrator who intrudes upon the story is completely superfluous to requirements. But as character study of genius and obsession the portraits of Kurt Godel and Alan Turing are compelling and lovingly done. There are wonderful vignettes - Wittgenstein for example - and pre-war Vienna is powerfully re-created.

Almost as good as its title
A compelling and haunting début. Compelling despite the headlines, despite the fact that it is 'faction', written by a young, talented and attractive female physicist, dealing in numbers and maths and things us normals can't grasp, and despite the expectation that it couldn't be as good as its title. It is compelling because Janna Levin is a very good writer. Despite their extreme contrasts, neither Turing nor Gödel descend into caricature or hyperbolic farce. They cut haunting figures not because they are great logicians but because their frailties seem so palpable, even minor, in the context of their times and thought. The book's occasional weakness is a certain upbeat insistence on the metaphysics of the math - of worlds turned upside down by abstract thought and revelations that shake the foundations of science. It is not so much that this doesn't work (it does) or that it unmasks Levin as a dry mathematician playing at literature (she displays a quite stunning turn of phrase, decent pacing and an accomplished eye for the human). On the contrary, the weakness is a tendency to oversimplify and infantilise the intellectual dimensions of Turing and Gödel, to render what they struggled with simple enough for us to understand quickly, and hence not worth the angst. Moments smack of worthiness, of 'A Madman Dreams...' as a gateway drug to Principa Mathematica or late Wittgenstein. The result is that, if anything, the logical and mathematical dimensions are undersold. A little bolder, a little more comfortable with the reader having to wrestle with the concepts, a little less self-conscious, and this would have been not only compelling but stunning.

A Truly Poor Work
Though on a very interesting subject, this is a truly poorly written book, adopting the style of a cheap romance novel. Much of the book reads like a fifteen year old girl's high school writing assignment:

"The Cafe Josephinum is a smell first, a stinging smell of roasted Turkish beans too heavy to waft on air and so waiting instead for the more powerful current of steam blown off the surface of boiling saucers fomenting to coffee. By merely snorting the vapors out of the air, patrons become overstimulated. The cafe appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second--the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room, which appears in the mind only third. The coffee is a fuel to power ideas. A fuel for the anxious hope that the harvest of art and words and logic will be the richest ever because only the most fecund season will see them through the siege of this terrible winter and the siege of that terrible war."

...and somehow manages to make the stories of Turing and Goedel incomprehensible and tedious. How this book received good reviews from the press is an absolute mystery. One of the only books I have ever felt compelled to throw away after finishing.