Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Indian Clerk
    Unavailable
    The Indian Clerk
    Unavailable
    The Indian Clerk
    Ebook630 pages10 hours

    The Indian Clerk

    By David Leavitt

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook


    The extraordinary true story of the discovery of one of history's greatest mathematicians in rural India. His life is the subject of the major film The Man Who Knew Infinity

    'Excellent ... His Hardy is a superb creation' Sunday Telegraph
    'A loving exploration of one of the greatest collaborations of the past century, The Indian Clerk is a novel that brilliantly orchestrates questions of colonialism, sexual identity and the nature of genius' Manil Suri

    January, 1913, Cambridge. G.H. Hardy - eccentric, charismatic and considered the greatest British mathematician of his age - receives a mysterious envelope covered with Indian stamps. Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self-professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of solving the most important mathematical problem of his time.

    Hardy determines to learn more about this mysterious Indian clerk, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a decision that will profoundly affect not only his own life, and that of his friends, but the entire history of mathematics.

    Set against the backdrop of the First World War, and populated with such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, The Indian Clerk fashions from this fascinating period an utterly compelling story about our need to find order in the world.

    In 2016 a film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, inspired by the same life on which this book is based, was released, starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 17, 2009
    ISBN9781408806821
    Unavailable
    The Indian Clerk
    Author

    David Leavitt

    David Leavitt's first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was published when he was just twenty-three and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a BBC film, and While England Sleeps was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. With Mark Mitchell, he coedited The Penguin Book of Short Stories, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and cowrote Italian Pleasures. Leavitt is a recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He divides his time between Italy and Florida.

    Read more from David Leavitt

    Related to The Indian Clerk

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Of Fire And Fury

      Sep 11, 2021

      Of Fire And Fury
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Dynasts Dilemma

      Oct 29, 2022

      The Dynasts Dilemma
      7 min read

    • Article

      Exodus The Truth

      Mar 26, 2022

      Exodus The Truth
      13 min read

    • Article

      From The Editor-in-chief

      Jun 11, 2022

      On October 2, 2021, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) Mumbai zonal director Sameer Wankhede led a sensational raid on Cordelia, a luxury cruise ship, and arrested 20 people who had come for a spot of merrymaking, confiscating what the sleuths claimed wa

      3 min read

    • Article

      One Man, Many Realities

      May 13, 2019

      One Man, Many Realities
      5 min read

    • Article

      God Save This Queen

      Feb 27, 2021

      God Save This Queen
      1 min read

    • Article

      Wrinkles In Time

      Aug 9, 2020

      Wrinkles In Time
      17 min read

    • Article

      The Caged Bird

      Jan 9, 2021

      The Caged Bird
      17 min read

    • Article

      Editor-in-chief

      Aug 21, 2021

      On August 15, 2022, India celebrates 75 eventful years of being the world’s largest democracy. There is much to be grateful for. At Independence, we were an impoverished, underdeveloped nation, where just over 18 per cent of the people could read or

      3 min read

    • Article

      An Apprenticeship

      Dec 1, 2021

      An Apprenticeship
      39 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

      Dec 3, 2017

      One thing you could always say for me: I was a finisher. I may not have been a great reader, but by God I was dogged, and if I made it through the opening 10th of a book, then I was going all the way to the end. Though this started as merely an incli

      7 min read

    • Article

      Ulysses: Good or Bad?

      Feb 2, 2018

      Ulysses: Good or Bad?
      10 min read

    • Article

      Dinner with Martin Amis

      Oct 3, 2019

      Dinner with Martin Amis
      9 min read

    • Article

      La Otra Historia

      Jun 30, 2022

      La Otra Historia
      14 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Oh, Corona

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books The Lights by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover) According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture c

      7 min read

    • Article

      All My Tomorrows

      May 10, 2022

      It was Misha’s first day minding the shop, and already she’d broken the fifth rule. Always lock the door immediately. When you had the most valuable merchandise in the universe, you had to take the utmost precautions. She hadn’t meant to disobey. It

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Horror, The Horror: Rereading Yourself

      Aug 12, 2019

      Here is a secret about writers, or at least most writers I know, including me: we don’t like to read our published work. The post The Horror, The Horror: Rereading Yourself appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Miseducation of Henry Adams

      Jun 30, 2017

      The running joke of the book is that Adams continually fails at everything he turns his hand to: he speaks repeatedly of not being able to understand, of being left out of the conversation, of being excluded, of failing, of not being equal to the tas

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Indian Clerk

    4/5

    9 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I thought this would be a book about the Indian mathematician. It is a book about an English mathematician, Hardy, and his colleagues and family. And Cambridge. And England. Even the servants. But the young man from India is presented in your basic inscrutable style. His life is hinted but never shown. And what is shown is always through the English eyes. No natives need apply.
      If I wanted to learn more about the English I would watch PBS.
    • 2/5
      tough to get into
    • 3/5
      If there were a "truth in book titles" law, this novel should really be called "The Cambridge Don." Bravo to David Leavitt for doing a lot of research on Cambridge intellectuals in the period immediately before and during the First World War. Who would have thought you could write a 500 page novel about early 20th century mathematics and make it interesting? Here's the rub: based upon Leavitt's effort here, it's probably not possible. Actually, the "campus politics" aspect of the book keeps the plot simmering for the first 200 pages or so. It's fun to read about the "naughty" Cambridge Apostles, and the conflicting egos of Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other intellectual bigwigs who make their appearances here. And the Indian mathematician of the title, Srinivasa Ramanujan, is fascinating enough, even though he is treated entirely from the outside. The problem is there's not enough of interest - not enough plot - to justify the lengthy treatment that the author provides. And the central character through whom the novel is refracted, a cranky bachelor don named G.H. Hardy, becomes tiresome company halfway through the book.
    • 4/5
      I struggled with this book to begin with but I have to stay I enjoyed it in the end. Its an interesting tale of pre-war politics in a University and the clash of cultures when an indian genius challenges mathematical thinking.For me it expresses the upper class delusions during this period of history as well as the way other cultures were misunderstood. If you pick the book up, keep with it! Its worth it in the end
    • 4/5
      The recognition and description of genius is a tricky enterprise, so I applaud the author for the skillful account of events (true and invented) surrounding the short and brilliant life of the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan. One also gets a great feel of the period, masterfully portrayed through the eyes and feelings of Hardy who was the instrument of bringing Ramanujan to England and also his collaborator. The overall feeling is that of melancholy and human frailness, though, and it was with me throughout the reading of the book...
    • 4/5
      G.H. Hardy, acclaimed mathematician, seeks to help a math prodigy from India come to England to further his development. The chilly Hardy is dismayed to find that this genius is not only one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, but also a complex human being that brings with him a baggage of personal problems and cultural barriers. "The Indian Clerk" is closely based on the real life of Ramanujan and captures the Edwardian England of those left at home during World War I.
    • 5/5
      Perfectly evoking the ivory tower intellectual life of Trinity College, Cambridge and English society and attitudes in Edwardian times, Leavitt delivers a superb fictionalized biography of two men, focusing on the relationship between theoretical mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Ramanujan, the Indian self-taught genius.Hardy’s war with God, social convention, Ramanujan’s quirks, his mother’s illness, and his sister’s unfulfilled potential leave the impression of a hard-working rationalist nearly lacking in all human understanding. By contrast, Ramanujan remains a mystical, insecure, frail, and estranged exotic transplant, yet working just as much as Hardy as they collaborate (with Littlewood) in an attempt to solve the Reimann Hypothesis, which remains to this day the "Holy Grail" of modern mathematics and one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems.
    • 5/5
      - enticing book, obstensibly about Ramanujan, really about social manners