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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jun 2019, 304 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2020, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Michael Kaler
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In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.
The first thing I remember being said of me with any consistency was that I was intelligent—and I recognized even then that it was a comment leveled at me with as much disapproval as admiration. Still, I never tried to hide or suppress my mind as some girls do, and thank God, because that would have been the beginning of the end.
From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition?
On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her—their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.
Chapter 1
THERE IS NOTHING AS INTRIGUING AS A LOCKED door. Which is why in 1900 when David Hilbert presented the first of his twenty-three unsolved mathematical problems in his address to the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, he changed the course of scientific inquiry, and thereby the course of the world. Twenty-three locked doors to beguile the foremost minds of his time: twenty-three locked doors to stand in front of and circle throughout the century. To this day, twelve of these problems remain unsolved. In my youth, I dreamed of scaling the heights myself and drawing forth a solution—as gleaming and perfect as Excalibur. One day, I told myself, I would open one of Hilbert's fabled doors—join the honors class of mathematicians who have conquered one of those twenty-three problems, whose names will be known throughout time.
I've lived long enough to know now that no matter what one's contributions, one falls in and out of favor. Even Hilbert, ...
Introspective and affecting, Catherine Chung's The Tenth Muse charts one Chinese-American woman's fraught attempt to succeed in a field dominated by sexism and racism. An absorbing life story of pain, perseverance and triumph that establishes Chung as an accomplished writer of historical fiction...continued
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(Reviewed by Michael Kaler).
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Arresting in scope and its treatment of time, its prose at turns crystalline and richly balletic, this story pulls puzzle from puzzle--human, historical, and all too contemporary. J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Saints for All Occasions
The Tenth Muse is a must-read. This beautiful, captivating novel has it all: A riveting family secret; a heroine ahead of her time; and a brilliant historical narrative that sheds light on the way we live now. Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office Is Under Attack!
Catherine Chung's gorgeous novel, The Tenth Muse, about mathematics and identity, and the cost of being a talented and ambitious woman in a world preoccupied with male success, rushed over me like a wave and carried me out to sea where, pleasantly, I drowned. Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
Catherine Chung has written a deft, spellbinding emotional puzzle-box of a book, rich and intricately layered. The Tenth Muse slowly, carefully builds to turn your every expectation on its head, and reading it feels like a glimpse of what mathematics might be in the eyes of its ablest practitioners--both secret and sublime.
Through a compelling fictional storyline, The Tenth Muse draws attention to the sexism that pervades high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers, and charts an expansive global tradition of underappreciated female trailblazers. In this, novelist Catherine Chung joins a chorus of other American women writers, spanning fiction and nonfiction, engaged in recognizing the overlooked contributions made by women in the STEM fields.
Two of the most memorable of these titles are Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016) and Liza Mundy's Code Girls (2017). These works of science journalism bring to the surface repressed tales of exceptional women who aided America's scientific research. Hidden Figures narrates ...
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