A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines [Paperback]

Janna Levin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2007

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The lives of Kurt Gödel (1906" 1978) and Alan Turing (1912" 1954) never crossed physically, but did intellectually: Gödel's incompleteness theorem implies a sort of Platonism, and Turing's mechanical decision theory implies, conversely, hard-nosed materialism. Levin, a mathematician, juxtaposes both lives in her debut novel. She begins with Gödel as a young man in Vienna, his incompleteness theorem destroying the line of inquiry (arguably spearheaded by Wittgenstein, who cameos)that argued math was complete in itself; his courtship with a nightclub dancer, Adele; his misunderstanding of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Alan Turing's not very charmed life is skewed not only by what looks like autism but by being hounded for his homosexuality in Britain"after breaking the German Enigma code during WWII. Turing is an innocent in many ways, while Gödel, a greater thinker, is a monster of selfishness; both, however, have a passion for the invisible that is hard to dramatize. Gödel becomes a paranoid old man, living with Adele (who comes alive through Levin's shrewd novelistic guesswork) in solitude in Princeton, and eventually starving himself to death. Levin is sympathetic to all concerned, but doesn't quite make a larger point, dramatic or otherwise. (Aug. 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Intelligent . . . compelling. . . . As Levin alternates between the lives of Turing and G?del, she delivers a convincing, palpably human portrait of solitary genius.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer“A simple work of genius.”—Toronto Globe & Mail“Her characters and their century come brilliantly . . . alive.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review“Like a lyrical mash-up, Levin interweaves the personal narrative style of her first book with taut prose evocative of Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams.” —Seed Magazine

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (September 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400032407
• ISBN-13: 978-1400032402
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #238,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Strange Beautiful World, March 9, 2007

By 

Little Borges (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Hardcover)

Janna Levin has created a strange and beautiful world in this relatively short, very readable, compelling book. She pushes the line between fiction and nonfiction. The book sticks close to the biographical facts of two historical figures, towering intellects of the last century. Their stories are told by someone you might at first assume is the author. Only, this narrator is unreliable, distorting their stories not with untruths exactly but with hyper-real prose. The imagery is too vivid and eventually slightly surreal to be true. Eventually the narrator, a self-professed liar, becomes unreal too and you realize you don't even know who the narrator is. Maybe the narrator is you. Maybe it is all in your mind. At first I didn't get what she was doing with the narrator but then it hit me. She's saying it's all in our minds! This book makes you think about truth, the pursuit of truth, beauty and weakness.

I also found particularly compelling the descriptions of thought itself and the loneliness that can result from getting lost in your own world. I do have a science background but I shouldn't think you need a background in mathematics to appreciate the power thinking has over every aspect of our perceptions.

The subtle melding of fact and fiction is, well, subtle. Not everyone will get it. Not everyone will like it. But if you do get it, it's powerful. This book is special, a little gem.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Bad Start That Becomes An Amazing Read, March 15, 2008

By 

William Melendez (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Hardcover)

Although Levin is an amazing physicist, her first foray into the world of literary fiction is, on first read, not so amazing. That said, the subject matter of her novel is more than fascinating and so, the fact that her storytelling and craftsmanship as a writer is more than lacking at the beginning of the book, the story sells itself as a tour de force in its fictionalization of the lives of two geniuses who struggle with a deep awkwardness with life.
At the beginning of the book the prose is almost a torture to read: some times overwrought,
'While they continue to play an anomalously quiet game, the pit of dread is jostled and falls deep into the fertile gastrointestinal soil where it begins its life cycle. Will it fester as an ulcer, or blossom into rancid abnormal cells? That depends on how each chooses to tend that messy garden';
and at other times over the top,
'The iron frame of Kurt's bed was a brutal conductor of the chill singeing his hand so sharply as he hoisted himself awake this morning that it might as well have left a burn, and the cloud of condensation that escaped from his damp mouth could have been smoke'.
The narration changes from past tense to present tense in the same paragraph! While her prose changes drastically for the better midway through the book, this irritating tendency to write a single scene as happening in the past as well as in the present continues unabated.
But, amazingly, halfway into the book it seems as if another Levin is writing the book. A Levin who is confident in her craft and skilled in turning a single moment of the story into a soaring monument of poetry. What happened! Whatever happened it happened for the better. Levin takes command of her themes and infuses them into poetic states throughout the character's events. The most striking example of the preceding can be found on pages 138-9. Levin takes an ambitious but dangerous chance at explaining the event that informs a young Wittgenstein's philosophy. While she humbly admits that this something of Wittgenstein is the unspeakable that 'we must pass over in silence' from his Tractatus, she dares to speak to that silence and she actually makes it reveal itself to the reader.
The moments like that in the story pay of with dividends which have the effect of apologizing for the early writing of an amateur.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Story brings these men and their struggles to life, September 25, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Hardcover)

Most people think of science and art as distinct, incompatible things. Janna Levin, in her first novel, brings those assumptions into question. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines follows the lives of two prominent scientists, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. The two were great geniuses of their times, and made scientific discoveries that changed the world: Godel proved mathematically that mathematics is limited in what we can know; Turing imagined and developed a machine to break the Nazi Enigma Code and subsequently paved the way for the invention of the computer.

But while you follow these mathematic achievements, you never get bogged down in their details. Levin does an excellent job referring to the science without derailing the narrative by attempting to explain it. The story is really about the personal struggles of these men of genius, their social ineptness, their anguish, their battles with faith and desire. The two men never met. The story alternates chapters between their two lives - Godel in Vienna in the 1930s and Turing in England from the 1930-1950s. But Turing knows of Godel's work, is affected by it, and their stories feel right being told together like they are.

Reading this book, you can imagine the pain of being socially outcast, of being misunderstood because your genius in one area renders your mind incomprehensible to other people, and your life an oddity that people pity or fear. By doing thorough research into the lives of Godel and Turing, Levin was able to base her fictionalized account on solid ground. What she imagines, with compassion and keen insight, is the anguish of their inner lives. Because of her own background in science (Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy), she understands the mathematics behind Godel's and Turing's achievements. She also, however, bridges the gap between that science and the art of storytelling, to depict their personal struggles, their day-to-day lives, loves, and the pain of being a human being trapped within a genius that separates you, in a specific but real way, from the rest of the world.

Armchair Interviews says: Such geniuses.

Interesting interview with Levin can be found on the website of the science magazine Seed, March 2007.