★ 03/28/2016
In this remarkable first novel from Oulipo member Audin, the lives of French and German mathematicians serve as vectors, but the enduring tragedy of the two world wars remains unsolvable: a "zone of ambiguity, the grey zone." Pieced together from journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, notes, and interview transcripts, the stories of Robert Gorenstein and Christian M. begin similarly: both are young, talented French mathematicians who are wounded in action during WWI, and both fall in love with the same young nurse, Marguerite. Deeply Catholic, Marguerite refuses to marry the Jewish Gorenstein, despite her feelings for him, and chooses a life with Christian, who is prone to rage and increasingly sympathetic to Nazism. In a fit of madness, Gorenstein commits an unspeakable crime, but even lifelong confinement in an asylum doesn't prevent him from continuing to amass professional achievements; his academic correspondents come to include André Silberberg, another French-Jewish mathematician whose life is imperiled by the Occupation. Audin's smart, deeply empathetic text is enriched by recurrences, coincidences, and invocations of European poetry, including Dante's Inferno and Faust, since numbers alone cannot make sense of the war's aftermath: the lives senselessly ended, spared, or quietly destroyed, like Silberberg's erstwhile girlfriend, Gorenstein's niece, who after the war's end "always lived alone." Audin's focus is on "the private events... do they not form a sort of chain that holds the threads together—the very fabric of history?" (May)
In her use of multiple forms—diaries, letters, newspaper articles, interviews—within Oulipian constraints, Audin delivers elegant proof of the unsolvable.” — Susan Harris, Words Without Borders
"Polymorphous and fluid, the book considers how our lives find their shape, and which details are amenable to history’s telling." — Scott Esposito, Times Literary Supplement
"Audin smartly introduces new figures and new turns to constantly shift the reader’s investment—as we move into the war we’re confronted with the horrors of the concentration camps, but also with those who endured and survived, and we feel the rampant terror among occupied cities but also the courage of those who resisted." — Jonathan Russell Clark, The Kenyon Review
"This is an unconventional novel that has many layers and makes you think about love, history, war, racism, rebellion, caring, and many other things but most of all about telling a story. Highly recommended." — European Mathematical Society
"This weird little puzzle of a novel is about mathematicians in wartime, and it's only the second book published in English by a female member of the Oulipo. Audin, a French mathematician, scavenges different forms and styles (a fairy tale, a diary, newspaper clippings) to create a sort of literary mixtape. Perhaps the best comparison is Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth—like that novel, it gives you the rare, head-scratching feeling of not being able to say what exactly makes it so good. Maybe it's the precision of the details—but you wouldn't expect any less from a mathematician, would you?" — Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly (Best Summer Books 2016)
"A story about mathematics and love . . . Throughout the novel, there is a clash, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, between the icy objectivity of mathematical theory and the messy chaos of everyday life. . . . The 120 Days of Sodom, the notorious unfinished novel by The Marquis de Sade, ends in a simple math problem. It reduced all the atrocities, carnage, and outrage into a formal exercise a student would do for homework. Audin performs the same operation, constantly reducing and distilling narrative until nothing remains but pure numbers. Although, since 20th century history and personal love is involved, the numbers are anything but pure." — Karl Wolff, New York Journal of Books
"Audin wants us to think about how our stories get told and how our history gets constructed. She never lets us forget that her novel is first and foremost an artifact; she has put its pieces together artfully, but its unique form ensures the artifice is on display. Audin’s Oulipian constraints implicitly argue that wartime narratives — and ultimately all narratives — are necessarily partial." — Rebecca Hussey, Full Stop
“Rich with the sciences, history, and literature (with sustained references to The Inferno and Faust), the novel’s interconnected stories still remain deeply human. Beyond all the myth and the math, Days prompts the unsettling question: Once it’s over and gone, what does a life really add up to?” — Corine Tachtiris, World Literature Today
Included in Rain Taxi’s Fall 2016 print edition
This is a novel for those who like a little experimentation in their fiction...Audin uses a different form for every chapter, including letters, fables, psychological reports, diaries, interviews, newspaper clippings, and more. The effect is stunning. If you’ve read and liked other novels set in wartime, you’ll want to pick this up for an entirely different experience of what the fiction of war can be." — Book Riot (Recommended Books)
"Numbers are the markers of human life: dates, ages, addresses, social security numbers, bank accounts, even concentration camp tattoos and prison badges. With numbers we seek to sketch the outlines of—or worse define absolutely—an identity. Memories will fade and stories warp, but records can indicate that so and so was born on this day, that he graduated on this date, that he lived this many years. By tracing the record of when and where, we can attempt to reconstruct a life. But of course there is more to a life than the simple record of place and time. What is a life of a hundred years, marred and disfigured too young, a life of anger and bitterness compared to the brief four months of a young, passionate love affair? How does one truly measure the value of a life lived? Audin doesn’t presume to answer, but her mesmerizing first novel poses the question with artful grace." — Chris Phipps, Diesel: A Bookstore (Oakland, CA) (Staff Pick)
"In this remarkable first novel from Oulipo member Audin, the lives of French and German mathematicians serve as vectors, but the enduring tragedy of the two world wars remains unsolvable. . . . Audin's smart, deeply empathetic text is enriched by recurrences, coincidences, and invocations of European poetry, including Dante's Inferno and Faust, since numbers alone cannot make sense of the war's aftermath: the lives senselessly ended, spared, or quietly destroyed" — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"Audin focuses on a handful of top-flight French mathematicians caught up in the two wars, and this type of character, quite rare in novels, somewhat distinguishes her tale from other similar accounts of the tragic fates awaiting brilliant minds. . . . The story diversifies, at times playfully (à l’oulipienne), but ever with an acute hidden edge. . . . Feeling is in shards, as it were. Given the fate of the European Jews in general and, in this novel, that of André Silberberg and other Jewish mathematicians in particular, a strong point is being made: what matters is not emotional connection, but rather gathering scattered bits of fact, piecing some of the puzzle back together, and restoring the identities and thus the full-blooded faces of those whom the Nazis sought to efface. " — John Taylor, Arts Fuse
"While not shying from the admission that bald figures can bring us to our knees with despair—just think of the incomprehensibly large numbers of dead in any reporting on genocide—the novel suggests that words turn innocent numbers violent. And it’s the mathematician, finding symmetry in the seemingly senseless, who uncovers the transcendent human stories buried under generations of historical devastation . . . an elegy, an invocation of memory, made all the more bittersweet when told in numbers." — Amanda Sarasien, Reading in Translation
"Audin’s prose transfixes immediately—bleak, brief sentences that bring to mind other French-language literary luminaries like Duras, Bataille, and Beckett. Audin finds humor in the abrasive and absurd..." — Timothy O'Donnell, American Microreviews & Interviews blog
"A novel that is so original it almost defies description. . . . As the reader works her way through the book’s many voices, the reader experiences a depiction of the processes by which we make choices and compromises during difficult times . . . Given its intellectual and stylistic richness, I don’t doubt that this title will be one of my favorites of the year—and one I’ll be rereading sooner, rather than later." — What If Knits
"Audin plays with codes, numbers, and dates to create a fascinating and unsettling story."— Le Temps
