The Goddess Of Small Victories
Yannick Grannec, Willard Wood (translator)
Other Press, Sep 9 2014, $26.95
ISBN 9781590516362
In 1980, the Institute for Advanced Study sends archivist Anna
Roth to the Pine Run Retirement Home in Pennsylvania to persuade obstinate widow
Adele Gödel to release the papers of her late husband, brilliant troubled
mathematician Kurt. Anna says she would
like to catalogue the Nachlass so that those qualified can study it. She also explains she reads the rarely used Gabelsberger
shorthand; the style Kurt employed.
Adele tells the visitor how they met in Vienna and though several
years older than Kurt with his mother’s reluctant approval they married. When the Nazis annexed Austria, Kurt and
Adele fled eventually arriving in America, but treated as enemy agents due to
their accents. While she did everything
to make her disturbed mate’s life easier over the five decades together, for
the first time Kurt, still distressed, found acceptance at Princeton because of
his brilliant work.
This is an intriguing biographical
fiction that focuses on the mentally tough widow and through her filter we see
the great but mentally ill genius. Although
distracting from the fascinating main storyline, a well-written secondary
subplot re the relationship between Adele and Anna further shows the strength
of the older woman; as she encourages her visitor to be all she can be with
what she wants out of life. With real
persona like Einstein; documented incidents (with footnotes) and events like
the A-bombs and the Cold War to anchor time and place, readers will appreciate
The Goddess Of Small Victories.
Harriet Klausner
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