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The Mathematics of Love (2006)

par Emma Darwin

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3711768,467 (3.3)23
Remember this moment. These moments are rare. You are about to discover your favourite book of the year, the book you will give to all your friends, the book that will linger in your thoughts long after you've turned the final page. You are about to discover THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE. From the gentle Suffolk countryside to the battlefields of Waterloo and the ports of Spain, this is an extraordinarily moving account of war and the pain of loss, the heat of passion and the redemptive power of love.… (plus d'informations)
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Affichage de 1-5 de 17 (suivant | tout afficher)
A curious mixture of two stories: one set in the early 1800s, featuring a veteran soldier, the other taking place in 1976, featuring a rather loose teenage girl. The two are connected by the letters written by the soldier to a woman. The teenager, Anna Ware, is given copies of the letters by an art dealer when she is staying at a failed school that years ago was the home of the soldier, Stephen Fairhurst. She becomes intrigued by the story that is unfolding in the letters, and they cause her to think about her own life differently.

Stephen's story is told in the first person, in a style that is based on the novels of Jane Austen. I felt that the style was rather stiffer and, to me, irritatingly sluggish. I haven't read Austen for some time so I can't say for sure that she did not write like this, but I suspect her writing had a spark I find missing here.

I came to feel irritation at Stephen himself, partly because of my own sensibilities. Two incidents bothered me: 1) when he takes his favorite horse on a fox hunt, and 2) when he writes of having to have men under his command flogged. Both of these practices strike me as barbaric and I know that just because they were common then does not mean that everyone would have found them to their taste. His later actions, traipsing after a lost love and not bothering to meet the child he had with her, reinforced my feelings about him, for different reasons. I simply felt he was not that sensitive or thoughtful. He writes to his friend Lucy what it was like to have part of his leg missing, how difficult it was initially to get around. The details of his walking in pain struck me as self-serving. I guess I just didn't like the chap.

Thus it was a bit of a mystery to me why Anna would like his letters. I preferred Anna's story by a long shot. Frequently Anna's mother would leave her in various places while she went off with her current lover. At this time she sent Anna to her brother's school to spend the summer and perhaps more. Only, when Anna gets to the school she learns that it has failed and it is just her uncle, her mother's mother (unexpected), and a wild little boy named Cecil, clanking around the old house and making do rather casually. It's not too surprising that she jumps at the chance to get to know the neighbors, Theo and Eva. Theo and Eva introduce her to photography, the profession both practice, although their styles vary considerably.

As she reads about the budding love affair between Stephen and Lucy, Anna develops an attraction of her own, but her choice is not quite as suitable as Stephen's. Did the letters have anything to do with her actions? I did not see how, yet others may disagree.
( )
  slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 |
Wonderful book. normally I totally avoid anything romantic. I bought this book a long time ago and didn't read it until now. It moves between two times, past and present. I think I enjoyed the story in the past more although the teenager in the present came across as a very real character. Complex, sad, happy! ( )
  scot2 | Oct 26, 2019 |
well-crafted and involving story - or stories, rather, since there are two timelines being followed here. Post-Napoleonic europe I found to be wonderfully detailed and engaging, and I would have to say I liked this piece of the novel the best. However it wouldn't have been entirely complete without the complementing modern-ish timeline (I believe it was around the '70s, although thinking about it, I'm not sure it was ever stated... it *felt* like the 70s to me, however).

I also learnt a fair amount about the development of photography's beginnings in the one timeline, and the art photography was becoming in the other, although it by no means dominated the story - but it certainly made me look at my camera in a different (and more appreciative) way!

There were a few niggling issues - a few things were just confusing (the whole thing with Cecil, for instance, and Ray and Belle for that matter were never really explained), I'm not entirely sure what was up with the italic sequences at the end of chapters, and as others have said, I could have done without the sex. Most of all, without getting too detailed, I would have preferred it if she hadn't attempted to tie the two stories together right at the end; there were already plenty of mirrors and touchpoints between the two and what had been until then a lovely parallel became somewhat clumsy right in the closing pages of the story.

But overall: I very much enjoyed reading this book, and would definitely recommend it. ( )
  tarshaan | Jan 10, 2014 |
Going by other GR responses this seems to be either a love it or hate it book. I gave it four stars overall but there was one supernatural element that Darwin tried that she didn't quite pull off. Coming back to finish this review & others piling up when I can find time (I have notes so won't forget) unfortunately my study workload suddenly doubled.. ( )
  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 |
A well-crafted novel that switches between England and post-Napoleonic Europe of 1819, and the heatwave summer of 1979, the two segments sharing the location of Kersey Hall, Stephen Fairhurst’s Regency home and a temporary refuge for modern-day teenaged Anna, along with themes of loss, abandonment, and violence. Fairhurst is trying to rebuild his life after a war which has left him crippled, but finds little in English country society to keep him there; his travels into Europe bring him deeper understanding of himself and, eventually, lead him to confront a vital piece of his past. Anna has been dumped on an uncle she barely knows while her mother tries to sort out yet another new life for them, only to find herself defending her uncle’s unacknowledged child from their crazed, bitter, violent grandmother. She finds respite and consolation with the exotic European photo-journalists who rent the old stables next door, but this ends in grief when she finds herself falling in love with the much-older Theo. And then there are the old letters she’s given to read – letters from the long-dead Stephen Fairhurst.

A good book; just, somehow, not mammothly endearing. The acknowledgement page at the end tells us that it was written for the author’s MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and this may account for the slightly impersonal feel. ( )
  phoebesmum | Sep 9, 2012 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 17 (suivant | tout afficher)
Darwin’s two independent story lines suggest riches — the way the past and present, and sometimes even the future, can meet in artistic representation — that remain, for the most part, unexplored. Like her visual artists, Darwin plays intriguingly with light, shadow and perception, but her novel’s overall picture isn’t fully developed. Some equations remain to be solved.
ajouté par SimoneA | modifierNew York Times, Susann Cokal (Mar 4, 2007)
 
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But must not all these new prodigies efface themselves before the most amazing, the most troubling of all: that which at last appears to give man the power to create in his turn, to make solid the unreachable ghost which fades as soon as seen, without leaving a shadow in the looking-glass, a shiver in the water of the pool?

Nadar, Quand j'etais photographe, 1899
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Remember this moment. These moments are rare. You are about to discover your favourite book of the year, the book you will give to all your friends, the book that will linger in your thoughts long after you've turned the final page. You are about to discover THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE. From the gentle Suffolk countryside to the battlefields of Waterloo and the ports of Spain, this is an extraordinarily moving account of war and the pain of loss, the heat of passion and the redemptive power of love.

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