Leaning Towards Infinity: How My Mother's Apron Unfolds into My Life [Hardcover]

Sue Woolfe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997

Woolfe combines the politics of academia and the travails of motherhood to fashion a moody, contemplative meditation on the relationship of mothers and daughters. "A book to be treasured by those who've experienced the conflict between work and motherhood."--The Herald.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sue Woolfe's biography states that she knows nothing about mathematics. With the central event of her novel set in 1994, she ought to have had a fairly easy job of finding out how math is done and discussed nowadays, and who does it and why. However, Woolfe's determination to humiliate her main character, middle-aged prodigy Frances Montrose, with the scorn of a unanimously badly behaved, testosterone-driven male mathematical establishment leads to her to untruth, fatally undermining the premise and effect of her novel. Deliberately demonizing men as mates and as mathematicians is sexism of the worst kind. The multigenerational familial dissonance and harmony of this book, its redeeming features, are lost in Woolfe's caricaturing of men and women and a science she does not understand.

From Kirkus Reviews

Creating the feeling of a found document, prizewinning Australian writer Woolfe pieces together an intriguing and expansive novel of ideas--showing the ways in which love, motherhood, and mathematics wrap around the human soul. Three generations of Montrose women emerge from the narrative: Hypatia writes of her legendary mother Francis, a gifted and acclaimed mathematician; Francis, in turn, tells the story of her mother, the brilliant, breathtaking Juanita. Meanwhile, Hypatia frequently offers her own narrative in the form of disgruntled letters to Francis, or in in the form of brief biographical commentaries on some of history's great mathematicians. The staggered segments of personal and historical chronology help shape the central story of Francis Montrose, who discovers for the world a whole new kind of number. Having devoted her life to building on the work of Juanita, Francis, a ridiculed amateur, is invited to a mathematics conference in Athens to present her incomprehensible conjectures, which are of ``such fierce, austere beauty, you might think God is real.'' What she is really hoping to give the world is a tribute to her beautiful, aloof mother. Juanita, raised in an Australian convent when her Spanish father was mysteriously assassinated and her mother took to gambling, is a savant, a secret mathematical genius who spends her later married life scribbling groundbreaking theories on scraps of paper. Trapped in a life of domesticity while dreaming of infinity, she pins her hopes on her beautiful son, but it is the plain and ignored Francis who inherits the gift of the abstract mind and becomes obsessed with becoming her mother. As the climax of the story, Hypatia tells of the renowned ``missing days'' when Francis completes her theory on a deserted Greek beach and finally slips out from under the domineering ghost of Juanita. A lovely novel, magical in its elevation of mathematics into a realm of divine beauty, charming in its depiction of the equally demanding sphere of motherhood. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 393 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; First edition. edition (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571199054
• ISBN-13: 978-0571199051
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,164,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Demanding, rewarding, stunning, February 28, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Adelaide, South Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leaning Towards Infinity: How My Mother's Apron Unfolds into My Life (Hardcover)

A demanding, but very rewarding exploration of the destructiveness of unrecognised genius, through the lives of three generations of women. The mother is on the verge of discovering a new form of mathematics, but is driven mad by social isolation and betrayal. The narrator, her daughter, attempts to piece together her work. Meanwhile, her daughter is trying to get her attention ... A stunning novel.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Infinite reading, March 20, 2000

By 

saliero (NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leaning Towards Infinity: A Novel (Paperback)

I wanted this book to continue. I loved it. I read it about the same time as some other books ...Hanna's Daughters was one, and I thought it had every bit as much to say about mother-daughter relationships. Also 'Gut Symmetries' by Janette Winterson, which I did not like...this had more to say about the mathematical woman genius.

It makes the point rendered over and over by Dale Spencer in 'Women of Ideas and What Men have Done To Them' but in a fictionalised account, well plotted and without the hyperbole to which Spender is prone.

Woolfe is a good writer, and her use of language approaches the delights of Arundhati Roy in God of mall Things (but never surpasses).

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful piece of writing, July 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Leaning Towards Infinity: A Novel (Paperback)

I loved it. Beautiful piece of prose. Funny, sad - some of the relationships heart-wrenchingly so. Haunted me for a long while after.

I think Carol Shields fans would like it.