Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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).

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.

I was disappointed in this novel with its layers upon layers of women and their daughters - chains rather than layers. And one of the women - shock, horror - had invested her hopes in her son who mysteriously disengages himself from the family. Of course I tried not to be influenced by the feminine in the message - and I have read many women writers (Anna Kavan is one of my favourite dozen writers and 'Let Me Alone' one of my top ten novels) - but I found myself trying to suppress the masculine in me, trying not to object to the way many men are portrayed in this novel.
In the end there were too many tears, too many disappointments, not enough mathematics, too many twists and turns, too many identical viewpoints. I have never actually attended a mathematics convention (and I wonder if Ms Woolfe has either), but I found the one described in 'Leaning towards Infinity' totally unconvincing.