Customer Reviews

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In glittering prose that swirls through time and place with an almost surreal quality, Janna Levin dances along the knife edge of madness that haunted the genius of two seminal figures of 20th Century thought, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. Levin mixes biography and fiction to recall these two men's magnificent intellectual accomplishments, Godel's mathematically renowned Incompleteness Theorem and Turing's theoretical conception of the calculation device that ultimately became known as the Turing machine. Added to this mix are appearances by two other lions of modern thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Oskar Morganstern.

Rather than belabor the content of these men's discoveries, however, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES focuses instead on these tortured souls, geniuses both, whose lives ran in parallel with but the briefest of near-intersections. As her story alternates between her two protagonists, Levin introduces Kurt Godel as pathologically introverted, a man whose self-confidence can be shattered by the merest "tssk, tssk" from a more outspoken peer who disagrees. Godel, a man who labored in anonymity and whose name is still largely unrecognized by the general public, is presented by the author as having a weak physical constitution, thin to the point of self-starvation. His illness is only compounded by paranoia that he is being poisoned, if not by his food, then by his heating stove.

Alan Turing, subject of the theatrical production "Breaking the Code," is considered by many the father of modern computing. However, he is remembered as much for his homosexuality as for his vital role at Bletchley Park, England, in World War II, leading the British effort in cracking the Germans' Enigma code-making machine. Levin imagines Turing in all his peculiarities, from his boarding school experience of being bound helpless beneath a dormitory room floor and his Asperger-like difficulties with social interaction to his compulsive behavior with regard to foods of similar color and his ultimate death by suicide.

Both of Levin's "man-children," are nearly incapable of caring for themselves, Godel dependent on his devoted, self-effacing wife Adele Nimbursky and Turing on his friend and wife Joan Clarke. The author draws diverse connections between the two men, ranging from their philosophical ruminations and conversations with the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to their presence at Princeton to the story of Snow White and its device of the poisoned red apple. Yet despite its biographical focus, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES is also a discourse on epistemology and the notion of free will. "How do we know what we know, and indeed what do we really know?" are questions that torture Godel, the man who literally imprisons himself in his room and starves himself to death while convinced he is merely exercising his free will in doing so. Turing, on the other hand, imagines human will as nothing more than the pre-ordained responses of a complex biomechanical system, human as computing machine, to be replicated someday by a programmable computing machine.

The triumph of Jenna Levin's work derives from placing the reader inside the psyches of two solitary and deluded geniuses. The result is an emotional roller coaster ride, alternating among moments of white-hot intellectual clarity, the grayest of self-doubts, and the blackest of despairs. These insights are delivered through an unidentified and omniscient "I," a 21st Century New Yorker searching as well for truth but only glimpsing it, however hazily, at the edge of peripheral vision. Thus it is with the reality of Godel's and Turing's lives - the truth can never be directly seen, but only inferred from a sideways glance.

A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES effectively mixes biography, psychology, philosophy, and mathematical logic into a compelling story that is at once informative and entertaining. While regrettably a bit light on the breadth and depth of Godel's life's work, this is nevertheless a book that is easy to recommend for its intriguing protagonists and its approach to two of the human wellsprings of 21st Century thought. Cleverly conceived and stylishly executed, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES proves that Janna Levin is no ordinary physics professor.

A dancing monkey? That does magic tricks and speaks French and recites the great po'ems of yore and that can even joust on tigerback?? Now image you said yes and I gave you a Yorkie terrier. That sense of disappointment is how I felt when I read this book.

You've got two eccentric crazy scientists with beautifully messed up lives and childhoods. It seems like everything they do in their personal lives was scripted by Douglas Adams. Yes they die tragically and stupidly and miserably: because their lives, again, are so strange as to be beyond the scope of fiction. It seems as though it would take great skill and effort to turn these amazingly interesting lives and write a biography that's as interesting as a treatise on tapioca pudding.

Regrettably, Levin has that substance-sucking skill and made that neo-Herculian effort to put all this into one slender volume replete of soul and vitality. What should be a gripping entertaining read is, instead, simply depressing. Oddly, Levin seems to have a great mind for the sciences is also gifted with a deep understanding of literary conventions. She makes some interesting choices in which conventions to include (like adding herself in at random point of the novel for no more effect than to make a reader say 'Wow, that's odd) and which conventions not to use, like parallelism. You'd think that if an author was writing about the lives of two respected mathematicians and both were riddled with mental and emotional problems, drawing parallels between the two would be a great way to form cohesion. But Levin bravely thrusts cohesion aside and allows the book to mire itself in what becomes random details of these people's lives.

Now, sorry for the harshness. I was truly amazed at how mediocre a story was made of this Godel and Turing. I would strongly suggest reading upon the these two characters in greater depth (along with Tesla, my personal favorite). Turing's tale is especially sad and complex as his efforts made a huge difference in winning WWII and yet his treatment by government officials was astoundingly harsh and cruel (for example, for being a homosexual, he was imprisoned and medially castrated.)

If you are looking for interesting books to bone up on your science knowledge, there is no better book than Billy Bryson's History of Nearly Everything.

Alan Turing was a self-absorbed, lonely kid, with abysmal social skills. Today he might be diagnosed with a variant of autism. He was also a genius who developed some of the basic concepts underlying the computer. Kurt Goedel was a fearful, reclusive young man who grew into a paranoid man in constant fear of being poisoned. He also was a mathematical genius whose ideas are still being studied. Janna Levin is a living professor of mathematics who tries to bring those two great minds together in a slightly fictionalized version of their lives.

The story unfolds in the darkening years of nazi Germany, and continues until the two men die in America several decades later. Their stories are sad, stories of loneliness and isolation and morbid introspection, and failing relationships. They never meet, but they are aware of each other's ideas. Their last years are abysmal. Periodically the author intrudes into the story as some kind of link between the characters. The brilliant concepts for which these men became known are touched upon but poorly explained, at least for those of us not in the field.

Author Janna Levin writes in a breathless, overwrought style, but manages to engage the reader in the hectic downward spiral of her characters' livs. These are interesting men and this reader would like to have known them better. All in all the book was somewhat disappointing. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

This book weirdly resembles Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness. (See my review of Incompleteness.) Both books were published within the last two years. Both books focus on the life and strange personal habits of Goedel, not his ideas. The authors, both PhDs from Ivy League schools who like writing fiction, can't help injecting themselves into their stories. The books even tell the same anecdotes: the Goedels' pink flamingoes; Goedel's indifference to Nazism in Vienna ("the coffee is wretched"); Goedel's checking himself into sanatoria; Goedel getting beaten by thugs and defended by Adele and her umbrella; Wittgenstein calling the lecture "parenthetical" when Turing doesn't show up; etc. It is as though Levin read Incompleteness, which was published earlier, and decided to fictionalize a good chunk of it and substitute Turing for Einstein.

Like the problem with Incompleteness, the unfortunate problem with Levin's novel is that it concerns the tabloid aspects of the lives of Turing and Goedel at the expense of their mathematical and philosophical ideas. Turing and Goedel are men of note and worth writing about because of their profound ideas, not because of their delusions, social ineptness, sexual habits, diets, or relations with women, strange as those aspects of their lives were. Unless those aspects are relevant to or elucidate the ideas themselves, any book about those aspects of their lives will just be a book about two odd men.

Goldstein fails to give an adequate nontechnical account of the incompleteness theorems. But at least she tries. Levin does not even make the attempt. In the entire 220-page book the only hint at the nature of the incompleteness theorems is a brief, probably invented, conversation at a meeting of the Vienna Circle in 1931 (pp. 87-94). The only explication of Turing's ideas is another, again probably invented, conversation between Turing and his one-time fiancée (pp. 160-168). The book is simply a novel of two strange mathematicians whose mental states finally got the better of them. The reader can't end the book any more knowledgeable about the incompleteness theorems or, for example, Turing's halting problem than when he started.

At least Levin devotes a large part of the book to Turing, instead of mentioning him nearly only in passing, as does Goldstein. And at least Levin, unlike Goldstein, puts Wittgenstein in the background - although not far enough -- where he belongs, instead of giving him center stage. But why Levin chose to write a fictional account of the lives of Goedel and Turing instead of a biography or a popular account of their ideas is baffling. Her storytelling style is nothing special. All that is here is an unentertaining novel about two mathematicians with bizarre behavior. Goldstein's Incompleteness is the better book, which is not saying much at all.

Anyone looking up this book on Amazon will likely be at least a little familiar with Turing and Godel and their contributions to modern science, and will not expect this book to be scientific or philosophically challenging. But few will expect a short novel this mushy, gushing, floral, and poorly edited. It comes off like a college creative writing project rather than an actual work of historical fiction, with the author/narrator standing in the way of the book's momentum at every turn.

Great idea for a book - but many people, particularly those in science, may find the style queasy and borderline unreadable...

I read this book with great anticipation. I am an engineer and have always been fascinated with the working minds of great mathematicians, physicists, chemists and so forth. Turing and Godel are two of the greatest mathematical mind of the 20th century and both had very troubled personal lives. A fictional account juxtapositioning their lives was an intriguing idea to me.

I had mixed feelings toward this book. I feel it does a good job of explaining the work of these two men to people who may have never heard of them. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science and Godel proved that there were truths within mathematics that could never be proven. I would have liked more depth on the relevance of their work on contemporary thought at the time and its relevance to us now. I think the author was trying to show that these socially disconnected men are forever embedded in the society they never fit into, but it was never explored deeply.

I was also a bit disappointed with the treatment of their troubled lives. Turing was very eccentric, possibly slightly autistic, and famously persecuted for open homosexuality. Godel was delusional and, perhaps, paranoid. I felt the author looked at these men too objectively. These are lives that demand empathy.

That said, this was an ambitious and original undertaking and I think it was very good effort by a new author. I did like the writing style and the comparisons and contracts of these two men. Occasionally, the author uses some awkward phrasing. Also, I think it will introduce many people to these great, but unfamiliar, mathematicians. So, I can recommend it and I will certainly look for more from this author.

One last thing before I go. Whoever proofed this book needs to go easy on the methamphetamine or something. There are several misspellings and unintentional grammatical errors. I don't normally comment on such things, but this was among the worst I have seen.

If you're looking for depth here, move along, there's none to be had. The last 50 pages or so was an exercise in self-control-all I wanted to do was to throw it in the garbage. I managed to read the entire book, and then I threw it in the garbage, not wanting anyone else to waste their time or money.

Some of the reviewers here would say I missed Levin's point, as there's plenty of non-fiction coverage of Godel, Turing, et al. if that's what I want.

To them I say, if Levin's wants to write fiction, she needs to have a story to tell, not a hope that one will materialize from faux-historical characterization.

There is no story here, the writing is pedestrian, unexceptional. That it was even published, and by a renowned publishing house no less, is beyond my comprehension.