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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
What a beautiful and mesmerizing book. I didn't so much read it as get lost in it, finishing it in little more than a day. Katherine is a Mathemetician, professional, respected, and accomplished. In the novel she looks back on her life, particularly the early stages of her career which were inextricably bound up with the story of where she came from.
In post-WWII America, numbers come naturally to Katherine from an early age, but the world of mathematics is never a natural fit. She is always the only woman, and almost always the only person who is not white (she's half white, half Chinese). The system is stacked against her in ways large and small, but despite her intelligence, she is not the kind of person who can use her confidence and boldness to push her forward against the tide.
Some of her insecurity is natural, but much of it is tied deeply to the mother who abandoned her as a child. As she grows up, this gets even more complicated when she discovers that hardly anything she knows about her family is true. Katherine's journey searching for her own identity, her family, her history, and her career all end up coming to a head together.
I have a particular soft spot for books about women in STEM and this one hit the spot. (It's the second 2019 release I've read and enjoyed, after LOST AND WANTED by Nell Freudenberger, about a female physicist and a difficult friendship.) It's clear Chung has dug deeply into Mathematics and that Katherine's brain hums with potential, but it also has the kind of family saga and historical drama you'd find in a book like PACHINKO. (If I was going to give this book as a mashup, it would be something like PACHINKO + Weike Wang's CHEMISTRY, books I both enjoyed very much but with very different styles, I see this one as melding them somewhat.) Deep and meaty enough topics about race, identity, and gender that it would be a perfect fit for any book club looking for a rewarding read.
In post-WWII America, numbers come naturally to Katherine from an early age, but the world of mathematics is never a natural fit. She is always the only woman, and almost always the only person who is not white (she's half white, half Chinese). The system is stacked against her in ways large and small, but despite her intelligence, she is not the kind of person who can use her confidence and boldness to push her forward against the tide.
Some of her insecurity is natural, but much of it is tied deeply to the mother who abandoned her as a child. As she grows up, this gets even more complicated when she discovers that hardly anything she knows about her family is true. Katherine's journey searching for her own identity, her family, her history, and her career all end up coming to a head together.
I have a particular soft spot for books about women in STEM and this one hit the spot. (It's the second 2019 release I've read and enjoyed, after LOST AND WANTED by Nell Freudenberger, about a female physicist and a difficult friendship.) It's clear Chung has dug deeply into Mathematics and that Katherine's brain hums with potential, but it also has the kind of family saga and historical drama you'd find in a book like PACHINKO. (If I was going to give this book as a mashup, it would be something like PACHINKO + Weike Wang's CHEMISTRY, books I both enjoyed very much but with very different styles, I see this one as melding them somewhat.) Deep and meaty enough topics about race, identity, and gender that it would be a perfect fit for any book club looking for a rewarding read.
Something in my chest that had begun to uncoil days after I read this book seized up again while I wrote this review, as quickly as if someone had held a light to kindling.
There’s a wordless agony to reading stories about women who wanted more freedom than the world wished to give a woman. I often felt myself running with a swift, clear rage—the feeling like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat, leaving my mouth tasting of ash. But a thrum of awe still fills me, along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of hope, in spite of all the coursing anger, knowing that—although cast out, ostracized and dispossessed—the bolt of these women’s triumph always slid home.
Forceful, cerebral and immaculately controlled, “The Tenth Muse” is a dazzling portrait of a young woman who refused to fit the shape of the small space the world left for her.
Katherine had shone brighter, by a great deal, than was normally permitted a woman. The Riemann hypothesis was the mystery that had opened her mind like a door, and she has never doubted that the path to it would one day open, stark and clear before her feet. Katherine’s desire to come out on top was born out of the conviction that she didn’t have to be her opponents’ equal to be considered a worthy contender—she had to be better. But in her obsession with cracking the uncrackable equation, an underlying crisis emerges: young and drifting, Katherine is searching for identity, and answers to the tragedy that had ruptured her family forever.
From its first sentence, “The Tenth Muse” grabs the reader with its directness and earnestness. “I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman,” Katherine begins, “looping into myself, interrupting.” Thus, standing knee-deep in the rubble of her life, Katherine starts delicately piecing it back together, losing her footing and slipping, but rising every time to scrabble forward—one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages—toward the realization that only at the end of one’s life can one look back and see lucidly the prices they paid along the way.
Katherine chronicles her own tale, and the novel spasms with her remembrance like synapses firing in the dark. The novel spans a number of difficult decades and Katherine’s memories are seized up, measured and weighted: her mother’s face, glossy with joy, beaming through her haze, and her subsequent absence, like having a rib wrenched from her side; the lovers she naïvely refused to see anything about except their most engaging qualities which she then cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all their less desirable ones; the male colleagues who had made the mistake of believing her discomfort would be like theirs; her works, validated and stolen in one fell swoop; the loss of her brilliance, the withering of her grace, all the things that had to be worked and learned through errors and trials, and above all, her indigence over inequality, the plight of women in the world, and the madness that rose from a new creeping certainty: that there is only so much forcing of the world a woman can do.
Katherine stains the page with herself, and the tone of her voice, urgent yet measured, gives the impression that she is unburdening herself to a patient and sympathetic interviewer. The result is a profoundly searching book—one that could potentially be frustrating for readers who require propulsive plots and clean resolutions, as it offers neither. Still, Chung makes it work beautifully by impeccably building a sense of inexorable apprehension as we begin to discern elements of self-deception and omission in Katherine’s narration, and secrets swell to bursting with world-shaking promise.
As the novel probes the secrets and lies that thrum beneath the surface of Katherine’s family, The Tenth Muse demonstrates, heartbreakingly, how acts of brutality—even those distant in time and geography—cast a dark shadow over relationships. Through Katherine’s voice, The Tenth Muse also explores the cold outer limits of ambition, and each word falls sharp, like a butcher cutting meat. (“Don’t you know the rule,” they said, “that the price of your dearest wish is always everything you have?”) Katherine’s want, hard and spare, took hold of her, driving out the fears, the ones people tried to give her, tried to put into her heart with dark looks and patronizing smiles. But Katherine not only navigates her gender in a male-dominated field—she navigates her mixed race as well. Ethnicity, gender—these things don’t matter until they do, and it’s as exquisitely articulated as anything this thoughtful author has put to the page.
The central message of Katherine’s character arc is one that I should’ve seen coming, but didn’t and felt fear in me, gleaming like water, when I finally realized the author’s goals for her. That said, The Tenth Muse isn't all grim. The heart is always able to beat with a new rhythm and this sentiment is core to the novel. I won’t dare spoil the context, but the final words spoken still shudder through my mind: “in the end, we can only unlock our own locks, we have only the gift of ourselves.”
Highly recommended!
There’s a wordless agony to reading stories about women who wanted more freedom than the world wished to give a woman. I often felt myself running with a swift, clear rage—the feeling like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat, leaving my mouth tasting of ash. But a thrum of awe still fills me, along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of hope, in spite of all the coursing anger, knowing that—although cast out, ostracized and dispossessed—the bolt of these women’s triumph always slid home.
“All my life I’ve been told to let go as gracefully as possible. What’s worse, after all, than a hungry woman, greedy for all that isn’t meant to be hers? Still, I resist. In the end we relinquish everything: I think I’ll hold on, while I can.”
Forceful, cerebral and immaculately controlled, “The Tenth Muse” is a dazzling portrait of a young woman who refused to fit the shape of the small space the world left for her.
Katherine had shone brighter, by a great deal, than was normally permitted a woman. The Riemann hypothesis was the mystery that had opened her mind like a door, and she has never doubted that the path to it would one day open, stark and clear before her feet. Katherine’s desire to come out on top was born out of the conviction that she didn’t have to be her opponents’ equal to be considered a worthy contender—she had to be better. But in her obsession with cracking the uncrackable equation, an underlying crisis emerges: young and drifting, Katherine is searching for identity, and answers to the tragedy that had ruptured her family forever.
From its first sentence, “The Tenth Muse” grabs the reader with its directness and earnestness. “I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman,” Katherine begins, “looping into myself, interrupting.” Thus, standing knee-deep in the rubble of her life, Katherine starts delicately piecing it back together, losing her footing and slipping, but rising every time to scrabble forward—one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages—toward the realization that only at the end of one’s life can one look back and see lucidly the prices they paid along the way.
Katherine chronicles her own tale, and the novel spasms with her remembrance like synapses firing in the dark. The novel spans a number of difficult decades and Katherine’s memories are seized up, measured and weighted: her mother’s face, glossy with joy, beaming through her haze, and her subsequent absence, like having a rib wrenched from her side; the lovers she naïvely refused to see anything about except their most engaging qualities which she then cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all their less desirable ones; the male colleagues who had made the mistake of believing her discomfort would be like theirs; her works, validated and stolen in one fell swoop; the loss of her brilliance, the withering of her grace, all the things that had to be worked and learned through errors and trials, and above all, her indigence over inequality, the plight of women in the world, and the madness that rose from a new creeping certainty: that there is only so much forcing of the world a woman can do.
Katherine stains the page with herself, and the tone of her voice, urgent yet measured, gives the impression that she is unburdening herself to a patient and sympathetic interviewer. The result is a profoundly searching book—one that could potentially be frustrating for readers who require propulsive plots and clean resolutions, as it offers neither. Still, Chung makes it work beautifully by impeccably building a sense of inexorable apprehension as we begin to discern elements of self-deception and omission in Katherine’s narration, and secrets swell to bursting with world-shaking promise.
As the novel probes the secrets and lies that thrum beneath the surface of Katherine’s family, The Tenth Muse demonstrates, heartbreakingly, how acts of brutality—even those distant in time and geography—cast a dark shadow over relationships. Through Katherine’s voice, The Tenth Muse also explores the cold outer limits of ambition, and each word falls sharp, like a butcher cutting meat. (“Don’t you know the rule,” they said, “that the price of your dearest wish is always everything you have?”) Katherine’s want, hard and spare, took hold of her, driving out the fears, the ones people tried to give her, tried to put into her heart with dark looks and patronizing smiles. But Katherine not only navigates her gender in a male-dominated field—she navigates her mixed race as well. Ethnicity, gender—these things don’t matter until they do, and it’s as exquisitely articulated as anything this thoughtful author has put to the page.
The central message of Katherine’s character arc is one that I should’ve seen coming, but didn’t and felt fear in me, gleaming like water, when I finally realized the author’s goals for her. That said, The Tenth Muse isn't all grim. The heart is always able to beat with a new rhythm and this sentiment is core to the novel. I won’t dare spoil the context, but the final words spoken still shudder through my mind: “in the end, we can only unlock our own locks, we have only the gift of ourselves.”
Highly recommended!
“Like the world got larger,” I said. “No, like my mind expanded. Like my mind was holding the world, and the world was holding me.”
“Your mind beheld the mind of the world,” my mother said. “And it recognized yours in return.”
Catherine Chung’s “The Tenth Muse” is an engaging, informative, and heart-wrenching novel about an exceptional woman’s life. It is told from the perspective of a much older and wiser Katherine, who speaks of her life from early childhood in post-WWII small-town America, through her years as a Maths major at university, covering her awakening to the wonders of nature and science, her struggle to be respected in a male-dominated field, and her ongoing search for identity and belonging, whilst also giving short introductions to important women in the field of mathematics, and highlighting lesser known parts of WWII history. The scope is mindboggling, but Chung expertly weaves all these strands into a thought-provoking page-turner.
As a child of an interracial relationship (her father is American, her mother Chinese) with an unusual aptitude for maths and science, Katherine experiences a feeling of otherness from early on. From her primary school teacher shaming her for being too quick-witted in the classroom, to being underestimated by professors, both her race and gender only serve to increase the bias people approach her with:
“Even now, I feel impatient when asked about what being these things mean to me—the expectation that because my race and my gender are often the first things people notice about me, they must also be the most significant to me.”
However, Katherine doesn’t get bogged down by this – she is a natural-born fighter, stubborn and proud:
“I began to speak out of turn in classes, not waiting to be called on, but anticipating, jumping in, and asking for clarification. I had learned that if I waited to be called on, my turn would never come.”
Don’t let the theme of maths deter you from picking up this novel: Chung’s descriptions make the field approachable, and even fascinating – and this is coming from someone with barely any understanding of maths. The maths theme aside, this novel covers a wide range of aspects: questions of identity and belonging, abandonment, betrayal, a woman’s place in academia, family secrets, and individual ways of dealing with a difficult historical past. A thoroughly enjoyable read – highly recommended!
Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Thanks to Ecco Books for the free copy of this book.
Katherine is a young mathematician who has struggled her whole life to be taken seriously as a woman of color in her field. While attempting to solve a famous theorem, she travels not only across Europe but through her own mysterious family history, discovering secrets buried in wars and links across generations of women.
THE TENTH MUSE is a story about the many kinds of love - love for family, for work, for friends, for romantic partners, for yourself. And about how women are forced to choose between them, or sometimes given no choices at all. It's about a woman trying to carve out her own place in a world that isn't sure it wants her, that keeps shifting around her.
Please don't let the idea that this book is math-based scare you away from it. You don't need to know anything about any kind of math, and I want all of you to read this book. It is so beautiful and so heartbreaking. I felt literal, physical pain when THE THING happened with Peter.
I feel like I can't adequately explain it - it's just one of those books I want to clutch to my chest while also pushing it into everyone's hands.
Katherine is a young mathematician who has struggled her whole life to be taken seriously as a woman of color in her field. While attempting to solve a famous theorem, she travels not only across Europe but through her own mysterious family history, discovering secrets buried in wars and links across generations of women.
THE TENTH MUSE is a story about the many kinds of love - love for family, for work, for friends, for romantic partners, for yourself. And about how women are forced to choose between them, or sometimes given no choices at all. It's about a woman trying to carve out her own place in a world that isn't sure it wants her, that keeps shifting around her.
Please don't let the idea that this book is math-based scare you away from it. You don't need to know anything about any kind of math, and I want all of you to read this book. It is so beautiful and so heartbreaking. I felt literal, physical pain when THE THING happened with Peter.
I feel like I can't adequately explain it - it's just one of those books I want to clutch to my chest while also pushing it into everyone's hands.