The Geometer Lobachevsky
Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize and the 2023 Kerry Group Novel of the Year
Published on 31. March 2022
Book
Hardback
208 pages
978-1-78816-972-1 (ISBN)
Description
'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology ...'
It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'.
Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again
It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'.
Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again
Reviews / Votes
Intelligent, atmospheric and disarmingly moving * Irish Times Book of the Year 2022 * Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the Mitteleuropean fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Milan Kundera * Financial Times * A masterful meditation on exile ... by one of our most original writers * Irish Independent * He brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary . . . an original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms. -- Colm Toibin One of the most important, original and intriguing writers working now. This book is starkly moving, beautiful, sensual, and the way he writes dialogue is so phenomenologically precise it makes every writer I know wish they could write like him -- Niamh Campbell, author of * This Happy * Many have seen the tendency among Irish writers, from Joyce and Beckett up to Eimear McBride, towards experimentation as originating in this sense of foundational linguistic dispossession. With this novel, Duncan proves himself to be one of the most subtle explorers of this condition writing today -- Kevin Brazil * Literary Review * His best novel yet: a darkly ruminative tale of exile and endeavour, under whose surface move the tectonic plates of the twentieth century -- Rob Doyle, author of * Threshold * Not a huge number of literary novels tackle the world of work. Out of this rather unusual material Adrian Duncan has crafted a quiet, beautifully written, intellectually provocative and compelling story, an assured blend of mastery and mystery. -- Enda O'Doherty * Dublin Review of Books * A stunning novel of landscape ... No other novel I have read in some time has left such an unsettling impression... -- James Doyle * Bookmunch * A tender, thoughtful and often startlingly beautiful piece of literary fiction -- Alexander Wells * Ex Berliner * The Geometer Lobachevsky is filled with simple yet lyrical descriptions of landscape. In a literary world hurtling towards the multiverse, there's something grounding about narratives rooted in nature and infrastructure -- Mia Levitin * The Irish Times * Mathematics - the realm of the geometrician - is precise and orderly; there is, as our teachers used to tell us, only the one right answer. Language is a different, more porous, and more deceptive thing altogether. The Geometer Lobachevsky is quite the literary trick, delivered with precision engineering -- Pat Carty * Hot Press * A beautifully crafted synthesis of intellectual athleticism and aesthetic originality... -- Padraig Nolan * Totally Dublin * Lugubrious laconicism... Broad overarching themes - the idea of infrastructure as a building block of nationhood; the loneliness of exile - are subtly teased out -- Houman Barekat * Guardian *More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Profile Books Ltd
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
360 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78816-972-1 (9781788169721)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Adrian Duncan
The Geometer Lobachevsky
Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize and the 2023 Kerry Group Novel of the Year
E-Book
03/2022
Tuskar Rock
€11.49
Available for download
Person
Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer who originally trained as a structural engineer. His novels are Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020), and he published a story collection Midfield Dynamo in 2021. Duncan was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2021, longlisted for the 2021 Edge Hill Prize and won the John McGahern Book Prize in 2020.