The Goddess of Small Victories
“The Goddess of Small Victories is a pitch-perfect comedy of manners set on an intellectual Mt. Olympus in mid-twentieth-century New Jersey. Albert, Oskar, Oppie, Johnny, and Kurt are the reigning deities. Mathematical gossip and conspiracy theories are served up with birdbath-sized martinis and three-inch steaks. Domestic relations appear to be governed by Godel‘s Incompleteness Theorem. Yannick Grannec‘s portrait of the marriage-of-opposites at the heart of the novel is pure genius.”
Sylvia Nasar, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author
Princeton University, 1980. A young and unambitious librarian named Anna Roth is assigned the task of retrieving the records of Kurt Gödel-the most fascinating and hermetic mathematician of the twentieth century. Her mission consists of befriending and ultimately taming the great man's widow, Adele, a notoriously bitter woman set on taking belated revenge against the establishment by refusing to hand over these documents of immeasurable historical value.
But as Anna soon finds out, Adele has a story of her own to tell. Through descriptions of Princeton and Vienna after the war, the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, the pressures of McCarthyism, the end of the positivist ideal, and the advent of nuclear weapons, Anna discovers firsthand the epic story of a genius who could never quite find his place in the world-and the private torment of the woman who loved him.
Praise