Customer Reviews

The Indian Clerk: A Novel

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A fictionalized account centered on the relationship of the great British mathematician G.H. Hardy and his even greater "discovered" protégé, Srinivasa Ramanujan, offers rich possibilities. The story presents ample opportunity for exploration and comparison of Hardy's academically cultivated genius versus Ramanujan's more raw and naturalistic or (divinely?) inspired form, the power relationship between mentor and mentee, the color divide between English and Indian, the hangover of imperialism in the England/India relationship, the role of race prejudice in science and mathematics, cultural differences, early feminism, and sexual orientation.

To his credit, author David Leavitt does indeed tackle many of these issues in THE INDIAN CLERK. Following more or less chronologically the historical record of the Hardy-Ramanujan collaborations at Cambridge, Leavitt retells the story largely through Hardy's blindered eyes. Leavitt opens with the Englishman's first receipt of Ramanujan's unsolicited mathematical writings and closes more or less with the Indian mathematician's return to Madras not long before his premature death. In between, there are mathematical collaborations, cultural adaptations, battles with illness, honors and awards given or refused, and a profound sense of emotional isolation for both men. However, because we see these events from Hardy's emotionally stunted perspective, we never really get to know Mr. Ramanujan. We learn a great deal about Hardy's life - his social backwardness, his cold family relationships, his pacifist stance in World War I, and especially his so-called "non-practicing" homosexuality (as his English collaborator Littlefield actually described it) - but what we learn about the more intriguing Ramanujan comes as much from what is not said and done as from what is.

An unfortunate consequence of Leavitt's authorial choices is that G. H. Hardy comes across about as warmly as Arnold Schwarzenegger's humanized robot in the "Terminator" movies. One can almost imagine Hardy responding to one of his colleagues about Ramanujan's welfare by saying, in monotone, "Talk to the hand." Similarly, Hardy's homosexual encounters with the deceased but aptly named Russell Gaye and the injured soldier Thayer have all the emotional power of a mathematics textbook. Worse for this story, Ramanujan himself appears as a sort of savant of the mathematically trivial. Despite multiple references to the still unproven Riemann hypothesis and a theory of partitions, many of the examples of Ramanujan's work refer to highly composite numbers and his arcane, often spectacularly peculiar mathematical identities, infinite series, and continued fractions. Leavitt's inclusion in the book of some of these formulas serves makes Ramanujan's body of work seem irrelevant to the less informed reader, a handful of silly formulas. The classic "death bed" story of Ramanujan's human calculator response to the number 1729 only adds to the incorrect sense that the great Indian mathematician was hardly more than an arithmatician of uncommon intuition and skill. It does not help Leavitt's cause that twice in the book, on pages 21 and 169, the beginnings of the prime numbers are listed as "2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19..." when 9 is demonstrably not a prime.

One of the charms of Leavitt's story is the almost casual passing through of such great lights of early 20th Century thought as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, and D.H. Lawrence. Each leaves his imprint as seen through Hardy's eyes, yet at the same time the very power of their presence recasts Hardy as a minor figure in his own story. The smaller these great men make Hardy look, the more petty and inconsiderate he looks as well. This is particularly true of his incessant efforts to extract from Ramanujan even the slightest vestige of mathematical material, irrespective of the latter's health. Leavitt further indicts his narrator in Ramanujan's death by suggesting that Hardy self-centeredness and indifference to the Indian's emotional and social needs contributed to his health decline.

THE ENGLISH CLERK is a moderately engaging tale of an intelligent man and an undeniable genius, the former in a privileged position of power, the latter subservient and beholden. Their relationship replicates the Great Britain - India relationship and foreshadows the events to come with Gandhi in the 1940s. On balance, however, the two main figures lack the necessary warmth for readers to empathize with their respective plights, and Ramanujan remains frustratingly more of an unknown than should have been the case.

When the Indian mathematician Ramanujan lay seriously ill he was visited by the English mathematician G.H. Hardy who remarked 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.

This is a fictional biography of those two men, who stood out as great mathematicians of the early 20th century. Hardy felt that Ramanujan was perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Sad, then, that Ramanujan died at the age of 33. The reader profits in two ways from this book as it is an elegantly literate novel, and it provides a great deal of accurate information about these two men's lives (Leavitt provides a 6 page bibliography at the end of the book).

It's a book by David Leavitt, and thus you will find his usual references to the gay life. Well actually it sometimes seems as if most of the characters are gay. That shouldn't bother the average straight reader, though, as you quickly become absorbed in the life of these two men. Famous personages of the time such as Bertrand Russell, and Lytton Strachey wander in and out of the story. Ludwig Wittgenstein also plays a cameo role. World War I makes a somber appearance, and has its effect on the principals.

Ramanujan, a self taught mathematician, is brought from India to Cambridge by Hardy who fills the role of Ramanujan's tutor. Mr. Leavitt does an excellent job of showing how the Indian struggles to adapt to the English way of life. There is a lot of humor in this as kindly hosts try to make edible vegetarian meals for him. English food is often bad enough as it is (I lived there for a few years), and the veggie meals were disasters.

There's not much real math in the book which will come as a relief to the mathematically challenged (and perhaps a bit of a disappointment to the mathematically inclined). Some reviewers have indicated that the characters weren't well developed, but I feel the exact opposite. Yes, G.H. Hardy comes across as a bit of a cold fish, but to my knowledge that's the way he was. In summary, I feel that The Indian Clerk is superbly written, the prose is elegant, and the story holds your attention throughout. By the way, Ramanujan is pronounced ra' mah' noo jan, the accent on the first two syllables.

The story has been told before. Not long before the first World War, G. H. Hardy, the well-known English mathematician, receives a letter from an unknown Indian clerk asking Hardy to review and comment on certain mathematical results. Hardy consults with J. E.Littlewood, another eminent mathematician, and together they decide the Indian might be a self-taught mathematical genius. After trial and tribulation they manage to get the Indian to Cambridge. Hardy and the Indian genius collaborate on some outstanding mathematical papers. The genius, far from home and comfort and family, gets sick, and returns to India to die. As for Hardy--Hardy has the satisfaction of knowing that he worked on nearly equal terms with the great Ramanujan.

A subtext of the story is that mathematical genius, like musical genius, is hard-wired in from a very early age. The corollary is that unless the genius is smothered or suppressed, it somehow gushes forth, like water.

In some sense "The Indian Clerk" is a historical novel, but then in some sense "Troilus and Cressida" is a tale about the Trojan War. David Leavitt, in telling a rousing good story, is poking and prodding and trying to figure something out. What exactly? Maybe he is drawing a parallel between mathematicians and homosexuals, both so formed before conscious choice kicks in. That's an element, but it doesn't go far to explain the book. Time and again, particularly in talking about the relationship of John Littlewood and Anne Chase, Leavitt plays with the tension between the human need to be connected and the human need to be unconstrained. But that's not what the book is "about." Maybe Leavitt is puzzling about the divisions in this world, on the one side the "large bottomed," on the other side the lean types who "think too much." Leavitt is intrigued by the issue, but he's also interested in a lot else. He certainly is interested in the math itself. From time to time he sticks some into the book, and then talks around it: which is a good thing: Hardy and Littlewood and Ramanujan are really doing math. The book is thick with incident and character and texture. Bertrand Russell shows up in the novel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Apostles, and the background noise of The Great War. Leavitt has carefully researched the historical record, and this gives him leave to use it for purposes of his own, although what his purposes are cannot be easily delineated. Probably that is just as well.

A mathematician friend, who doesn't much like the novel, challenges me to state why I like it so much. Not so easy. I like it because it's exciting. Because the novel's cheerful acceptance of Hardy and Littlewood and Ramanujan enlarges the area of acceptable behavior. Because the novel teaches me things. The book has an author's voice that is personal and authentic and that knows a lot that is worth knowing. "This is the way I see the world," Leavitt says, and if I don't always agree, it is a pleasure hearing his voice.

The premise for this novel, often recounted by reviewers, does not need to be rehashed here. Before WWI, the famed British mathematician Hardy receives a letter from an unknown clerk in far off India who demonstrates extraordinary mathematical skill. After some hindrances, Hardy brings the Indian clerk, Ramanujan to Britain, where the two collaborate and produce a series of extraordinary breakthroughs, seeking even to solve the long elusive Riemann Hypothesis. Through all of this, Leavitt shows great talent as a writer of historical fiction, bringing the period to life, along with a series of famous characters such as Bertrand Russell.

Unfortunately, Leavitt is no mathematician. Not only will readers wishing to understand the Riemann Hypothesis find themselves in frustration searching the internet to understand what he fails to explain well, but a series of errors obvious to any lay person leave you wondering about his basic understanding of this aspect of his work. While I suspect many have begun this work interested in learning about the curious historical personality dubbed "the Hindoo Calculator" eventually one realizes that this is far from the most interesting part of the story. Leavitt, writing mostly from Hardy's perspective, leaves Ramanujan's motivations and inner life as obscure to the reader as it is to his narrator. As such, the character becomes at best thin, and on occasion a mere cipher. Yet once you recover from this disappointment, one recognizes that in other ways this novel shines, if not in this purported central plot, then in the milieu through which the story flows.

Leavitt does a fine job bringing to life the oddities of British academia, with its secret societies, strange traditions, and rampant class chauvinism. He also gives the reader an interesting view into the transformative effects of WW I's horror on what in their positivism, many pre-war intellectuals clearly imagined as a society heading inexorably towards utopia. Indeed, the rank suffering and wonton destruction of the war are so well presented, one often finds oneself forgetting about the entire mathamatics plot line, and bemoaning when the author returns to the Hardy-Ramanujan relationship.

As one can tell, this long work is far from perfect. Yet Leavitt's thoughtful efforts and interesting character studies are certainly worthy of consideration. Perhaps in the future some other novelist will be able to climb into Ramanujan's head, but that will be another novel, for another time.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but I am not sure that others would. A cross between fact and fiction, it tells the story of two men, Srinavasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematical genius from India, and G. H. Hardy, England's most celebrated mathematician, who brought Ramanujan to England just before the First World War, and either enabled or exploited him, depending on one's point of view. The result is a sprawling novel of great scope that touches on many things besides mathematics. But it rather lacks focus and veers awkwardly between arcane detail and invented romance.

The math first. In A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, physicist Stephen Hawking notes the advice of his publisher that each equation he included would lose him half his readership, so he restricted himself to one. David Leavitt, however, includes at least a dozen equations, many of them quite difficult. But whereas Hawking aimed to demystify complex ideas, Leavitt emphasizes their complexity. In order to demonstrate the brilliance of Ramanujan's insights and why he was described as the greatest mathematician of his time, Leavitt must first display the extreme difficulty of his subject, a closed world where the most significant advances might be appreciated by fewer than a hundred people. For non-mathematical readers, this juggling act will involve reading right past the technical bits to enjoy the character-driven novel that lurks behind them.

Leavitt, who has clearly done much research, has a taste for in arcana of all kinds. The principal setting of the novel is Trinity College Cambridge, where Hardy is a Fellow. Leavitt delights in details of academic politics and the activities of a secret society known as the Apostles, the members of which seem to have divided their time between learned discourse, sophomoric rituals, and homosexual ribaldry. But as this clique apparently included half the British intelligentsia of the period -- including Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey, and briefly Ludwig Wittgenstein -- these goings-on are not without interest. As a Trinity man myself and the son and father of mathematicians, even the arcana held a personal fascination for me; I am not sure that they would do so for other readers.

So what IS the focus of the book? It may be a failing of the fictionalized-biography genre that this is so difficult to answer, because facts tend to spread out while the novelist needs to zero in. I felt much the same with Colm Toibin's best-seller THE MASTER, about Henry James. Hardy, like James, appears to have been a mostly-inactive homosexual; both books are sensitive studies of sexual sublimation, though that is hardly their main theme. But the sadness of unfulfilled romance does seem important to Leavitt, who devotes much attention to the unresolved affair of one of Hardy's colleagues, the declining marriage of another, and the invented but unreciprocated passion of this man's wife for Ramanujan himself. But these are all things that go on around the Indian; they are not part of his story. Leavitt has a most interesting treatment of English pacifism when War breaks out -- he freely acknowledges Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy as an influence in this regard -- but that too has little to do with Ramanujan. A more relevant theme, though relatively minor in the book, is the question of spirituality; in contrast to the atheist Hardy, Ramanujan was a devout Hindu who believed that many of his ideas came to him by divine inspiration. But despite Leavitt's fascinating portrait of British life during the First World War, Ramanujan himself is still almost as mysterious as the undiagnosed illness that struck him half-way through his English sojourn, and eventually sent him home to die at the age of 33. He remains, in the words of his most famous mathematical contribution, the Ramanujan Conjecture.

An easy read, this book was ultimately disappointing. I bought it because it showed up on several "best of 2007" lists. If these lists are to be believed, then it was not a good year. Why disappointing? Two reasons.

Firstly, the tale about one of the most interesting epochs in 20th century intellectual history is missing from this book. The idea that a relatively unschooled person could penetrate mathematic so deeply and an establishment Cambridge Don would recognize and then promote this person should make for a great intellectual story. However, nowhere in the book do we get a sense of why Ramanujan was so amazing, or the how this collaboration fit into the history of mathematics. Rather, we are fed a steady diet of Hardy's sexual predilections (which I have no idea of their truth, and ultimately is not all that interesting). What could have been exciting intellectual drama ends up soap opera.

Secondly, at no point do we see things through Ramanujan's point of view. While there is a long history of Orientalist/Colonial writings in which Asians serve as place holders and projections of Northern European sensibilities, it is disappointing to find this in the 21st century and in a book that is apparently highly regarded. The book presents the subjective views of Hardy (mostly), but also other minor characters, such as the wife of another professor who develops a crush on Ramanujan. Nowhere do we find out what Ramanujan thinks or feels. We only know what others think of Ramanujan. He is never a person in this book. The book should have been named "The Cambridge Don." That would have been more accurate, even if not any more satisfying.

Leavitt recreates with generous detail and fact the world of Trinity College circa WW1. The plot is moved along by characters who might be difficult to write about--introverted or even rather schizoid mathematicians with interests far removed from those of ordinary people. The true life characters, one might expect, were rather mild individuals having a strong inner life but not particularly exciting in the usual sense. What is unusual is how Leavitt manages to understand this type and create an interesting story with such meager material. Perhaps Leavitt has staked out this type of rather distant mind, as in his book on the English mathematician Turvey. Despite little in the way of conventionally exciting material, the book is engaging, and one can also marvel at these improbably gifted individuals. Impressive is Leavitt's ability to grasp that rarified world, deal with their concerns in their own terms, and attempt discussion of the mathematical problems that busied them. The type of muted character whose life is of the mind, and, not only of the mind, but of mathematical abstraction is difficult to bring to life. Yet, the inner monologues of these perhaps inaccessable men ring true. Though, Ramanajum himself seems somewhat remote as a character, this may not a defect of the book, but rather due to the type of person himself--a mathematician who is somewhat colorless and abstract, even rather flat. Hard material to work with,indeed, but Leavit manages the ambitious task and created, for this reader, an interesting world, and characters brought to life by nuance. Damon LaBarbera, PhD, Panama City

I will not attempt to improve upon the descriptions of the book that others have provided. I will say that Mr. Leavitt may have done a himself, and the reader, a small disservice by titling the book The Indian Clerk, insofar as the title seems to promise a story of and about Ramanujan. Instead, Leavitt uses Ramanujan to provide the book's unifying framework: the book is really about a time and a place (Cambridge before and during WW 1) while trying to tie together important ideas about cultures colliding and complex people whose lives change forever (or, in some cases, don't change at all) as they cope with love, separation, war, longing, desire and the life of the mind (including, of course, mathematics). Leavitt uses a particularly challenging device--the unreliable narrator (Hardy)--through whose eyes we see Ramanujan and dozens of other characters, places and events. And to make things more complicated, Hardy's own perception changes over time so that the story unfolds on many levels simultaneously.

Leavitt does not always succeed but the fact that he mostly succeeds is simply marvelous. Leavitt has faithfully recreated the world in which Ramanujan lived for several years while being faithful to the people, the places and ideas that are the subject for the novel.

Don't read this book if you want a historical novel that will hand you "Ramanujan" in one piece. By the time you put the book down, however, you will know "Ramanujan", and the world he lived in, very well, indeed.

At the November 2009 meeting, the NYC LGBT Center book discussion group had a very nice sized group that read "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt.

The discussion was interesting. A number of people (including myself) thought that the novel was a good read and historical piece although it had problems. A number of readers hated hated hated the novel and the author's inability to connect with his characters or readers. (Needless to say, I don't think we'll be reading any more David Leavitt in the near future.) I think that those of us who rather liked it thought that it was "novelistic," that is, a good combination of slowly revealing plot and character and historical events, although it was hard to emotionally connect with the characters, who had repressed Victorian personalities and were only interested in numbers.

Those who didn't like it thought that the writing was flat, the unlikeable characters unmotivated, and the historical period not illuminated by the too-many events depicted (such as the appearances of famous individuals at Trinity and the Great War). I think that we all agreed that some of minor characters with more imagined stories - rather than historically accurate stories - were better. I'm thinking of Littlewood's mistress, Anne Chase, and Alice Neville, who falls in love with Ramanujan.

So this was a very mixed evening of reviews, but I was surprised by the vehemence of the bad reviews.

David Leavitt takes historical figures and facts of the early 20th century in England, and weaves a complicated story of personal relationships and mathematical genius on the pages of his novel, The Indian Clerk. The title refers to Srinivasa Ramanujan, who in 1913 from his accounts clerk desk in Madras, India, sent a nine-page letter about prime numbers to Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy. Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlewood recognize Ramanujan's talent and agree that he should come to Cambridge. Once there, he and Hardy work hard on math proofs. The orderliness of math contrasts well with the disorderliness of the relationships in this book. Genius can always be difficult in their personal relationships, and the many geniuses in The Indian Clerk make for lively and complicated relationships. Lovers of math will find the formulas in the book and their discussions to be intriguing. For the rest of us, there's sadness about all the personal aspects of unfulfillment in the emotional lives of all the key characters. Husbands and wives are estranged; lovers are separated; homosexuality is closeted and Ramanujan dies an early death for a reason that could have been avoided if the selfish Hardy had paid more attention. For those readers who reach the end of the book with questions about what was fact and what was fiction, Leavitt provides a final section of the book that sorts much of that out.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)