The Genius in My Basement: the Biography of a Happy Man by Alexander Masters - review

The author of Stuart: A Life Backwards returns with another portrait of a friendly inadequate - this time a math prodigy who became chaotic former soloist

the time he made a successful first book by Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards

described in the first pages. Narrator masters of the street homeless Stuart Shorter, his biographer says that the first draft of the book is "bollocks boring". No offense to teachers addition, Stuart arrives with a brilliantly simple editorial intervention. "Do it backwards," he suggests. "It's more like a detective story. The boy who was murdered? You see, spelled backwards. "Master takes advice and provides, in turn, induce an incident to determine the nature of the relationship and build an attractive narrative.

The few British publishers who care about the issue can still take notes in Stuart. Suddenly, he realized what was naturally good at writing control - the sympathy of cooperation - but acknowledged the need to reorganize around a different concept. Thus, the book became a journey back to mental disorders and suicide (Stuart died by teachers more time to take his advice) in mental health and children - to find the causes. Everything that happens in the book between the subject useful and compelling biography is shaped and defined by this structure.

Similar cooperation unravels the process in the new book Masters, who is also an inappropriate persuasive - this time, an Eton-educated mathematical prodigy whose college has fallen into chaos confinement. Norton Simon was, until 1984, considered by many of his colleagues in Cambridge for a budding genius, which works to a high of hyper-dimensional mathematics. Norton has worked with John Conway in a great work,

Atlas of finite groups

, research on group theory in search of a mathematical entity they called the "monster".

The monster - seemingly - has something to do with the nature of the universe, despite all that the readers can read and write mathematically, or need to know that one of his pursuers , a man of great powers, now living in poverty in a basement in Cambridge, obsessed with train schedules. Enter Masters, who lives on the floor as a tenant of Simon, who suggested writing his biography - similar to those he had approached Stuart is the theme of your veterinarian can the manuscript, to intervene and change

be the kind of mind that is Simon changes are not as large structural in complaints relating to facts and details, particularly regarding the status of your basement, the Woking bus routes or their campaigns against motorists. The result is a comic portrait of tender, emerging through this process of mutual exchange. Simon is a singular and remarkable man whose eccentricities can not be reduced to clichés or Asperger type of madness ("the only mental illness is an excessive desire to obey the law of the local housing"). Instead, trace the outline of a simple, irreducible, unassimilable character.

• Chaos trouble on the ground floor is a product of the mental organization of high and low. When Simon speaks often grunts, which have a variety of meanings that illustrate typography Teachers and scribbles. The two men travel together, on one occasion in Woking ("face of biographical research") and, finally, to Norway, where Simon is more reality in the maps that define the landscape. He is a man of another dimension to survive in the world with the tools of abstraction and boxes of mackerel.
a compound accumulates

master of collage as the genius of Simon, and examines the nature of genius itself (which is never achieved by a simple job, concludes, but only through " pleasure "). But the reality in which mathematics, in short, Simon was a world leader, is beyond the scope of the masters, like most of your readers. Instead, attempts to make mathematical concepts accessible by scribbling pages of illustrations. Beautiful, though, remain unequal to what is or has been, through the mind of Simon.

Own world

intellectual field
Simon. What we, as readers, are interested in what made him turn the way he did, as a "person". Unfortunately - unlike Stuart - Simon is not interested in him, his parentage (Iraqi Jewish), family, or moments of his life. His gift was clearly mathematical begotten not made, formed by genetic accident rather than the event flow.

Masters

just some events that have a narrative potential, at a time to discover the childhood bullies who want to make excuses for how they treated their foreign comrades (Simon still unknown) and dispersion of the text with the incidents of his appearance as a child prodigy Simon get a IQ score of 178 impossibly high, his victory at the start of the Olympic Games in mathematics, sometimes anecdotal, as is asked to write "bikini" in a school competition and instead of coming up with "Picquigny" (after the Anglo-French treaty of 1475).
no case, however, seems well made or defeated Simon. Innate character can inspire a fascinating portrait, but because it is resistant to influence, is the enemy of history. And while Simon is full of fun writing critique masters can not provide a structural solution in the way that Stuart did. Will not happen to Simon to be seen as the result of a psychological drama.

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