Tenth Muse

I loved this book! Part of it is that I had always been the one female in math class who not only understood but was excited by all of it! My undergraduate degree is mathematics, and my graduate courses were all either math or mathematics/computer science cross listed! The book itself does not go into mathematics at all, but all of the mentions and political difficulties mentioned were interesting and relevant. My husband – boys ABD for a PhD in mathematics was also tangentially interested.
But the relationships between people, mathematicians, Jews, and lovers was particularly gripping! My Masters thesis is graph theory, and my PhD dissertation – hasn't ever been finished due to disagreements between me and my advisor and my laziness in writing – was also graph theory, so it in total was very pertinent to me. The fear of claiming someone else's work or of not being allowed to do your own is VERY relevant, and the possibility of any of that getting in the way of relationships or friendships is unfortunate but real.
Kat's whole history is enthralling and reasonable. It made me feel for her so much, and I kept wanting to say "No, no, no! Don't give it away!" and "gosh, I hope they make it!", so it had me on the edge of my seat for a lot. I finished reading it for book club, but book club isn't until March 1, so I may need to reread it before then so that I can remember names (which I can never do) and details for the meeting at beginning of next month…

Pros:

• •Gives an excellent feeling of what the academic world would be like for a brilliant woman who comes of intellectual age in the 1960s.


• •Centers around higher mathematics in a way that I, who had to go to summer school in math after getting a forty-two on my final exam in ninth grade, could understand.

Cons:

• •It's not until two-thirds of the way through that things get moving and the characters become people you care about instead of fictional biographical sketches.


• •Good enough prose, but some clumsy sentences and none that really soar.

 I wanted to make an impression my first day of graduate school, and I planned what I would wear, how I would walk, where I'd sit, and where I'd direct my eyes. I'd filled out in my final years at college and had been made aware that I had come to be considered attractive. I understood the choice was to be seen or be invisible. I decided I wanted to be seen.
 I wore a white silk blouse and a pencil skirt and pumps with shinny little heels. A watch, some lipstick, and a string of pearls. I sat at the front of the giant hall, in the first row, so that no one would miss me as they walked in. There's a picture of our class from that first day, and even now when I look at it, I can see the defiance in the way I stood—shoulders back, gaze level at the camera, studiously conspicuous and also unconcerned.

Addendum: A few days after I read this another level of it occurred to me, a level that made the story a sad one. The narrator searches for her past in much of the book and finds it but what she never really finds out about is herself. It's significant that she never has a successful long-term relationship. Of course, the correct thing to say is that such was and still is the plight of brilliant women and there's much truth to that, but there are many such women who achieve both personally fully enriching lives and success in their professional careers. A meaningful clue to this is in a puzzle the narrator gives us, of a boy who wants to propose to a girl on the other side of a river but can only do so by sending a ring in a locked box. It's a story of love, yet she has made it an exercise in logic.