Michele Audin

"He showed us the pale blue number on his forearm. A bit stupidly, I wrote this number down."

Nice to read the hagiography-biography of a collaborator for a change of pace, though there is a missed opportunity here in the smooth gyration from epistolary novel to documentary excavation, coming to rest at "bestseller." Oulipo is best employed as a tool for writing less bad. Though Auden writes better than most every mathematician, how much more do we attribute this to mastery of prose than to Oulipian structure games. One thinks the constraint (11 * 11) ought to have been imposed yet more stringently, since mathematicians only play with arithmetic on television.… (mere)

Solid, readable, but not all that exciting: a French mathematician writes a kind of Oxen of the Sun from Ulysses, only without the literary-historical smirking; or perhaps just writes a souped up version of Queneau's Exercises.

As for content, there's surely something odd in a novel by a mathematician, about mathematicians, in which all the mathematicians are fictional, but all the literary figures are historical--so you get Desnos and Balzac, for instance, alongside 'Mortfaus' (and its variant spellings) and Silberberg. Is this meant to be a grand intellectual statement about the complicity of science with fascism? Or is it just futzing around? Your answer to that question will no doubt depend on how high your regard is for Oulipo literature more generally.… (mere)