The Geometer Lobachevsky

by Adrian Duncan

'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

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Russia, Irish Literature, Novels, Book Club

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2022

Reviews

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting read, with an incredibly powerful ending.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure I ever imagined myself reading a book that combines events in the life of a man who fears persecution if he returns to his homeland in the Soviet Union, the surveying of Irish bogland and seaweed farming. And I probably wouldn’t have had it not appeared on the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

The Geometer Lobachevsky contains some wonderful descriptions of the wilder parts of Ireland and I liked the gentle rhythm of the life of the islanders described in the second part of the book. I also loved the amiable humour of Nikolai’s attempts to spell Irish names.

Nikolai arrives as an advisor but is happy to get stuck into the job of surveying the bog in preparation for large scale peat extraction even if he can’t get the team led by Rhatigan to understand the shifting nature of the area they’re trying to survey. Perhaps it’s in the nature of things to think you’re on solid ground even when you’re not? Having adopted a false identity in order to cover his tracks and fled to a small island on the Shannon estuary, Nikolai learns the secrets of seaweed harvesting from the families who live there. But although he might join in with things, he remains somehow always isolated from others.

There is a theme of old versus new that runs through the book. Old crafts are being lost, labour intensive tasks are gradually being mechanised and the landscape is being changed by the building of new factories and houses with modern amenities. You get a sense it’s being done to the local people not for them.

Many of the characters exhibit obsessionial traits. Rhatigan, the chief surveyor, is a perfectionist when it comes to the accuracy of surveying. One of the locals, French, has a ‘museum’ full of curiosities, such as many different types of hammer, that he has collected over the years. Nikolai himself becomes obsessed with observing the moon through a telescope in order to make precise topographical drawings of its surface. And once on the island he witnesses a prolonged and dangerous attempt, led by the son of one of the local families, to split a huge boulder seemingly for no other reason than to prove it can be done.

Right from the beginning of the book there’s an ominous sense that a bleak future in one form or another awaits Nikolai. Having seen friends (possibly lovers?) persecuted for their views, he’s afraid of what will happen to him if he returns to the Soviet Union. He describes himself as living every day ‘tired with fear’. The book’s dramatic ending proves he was right.

Given the title of the book it’s no surprise that Nikolai sees things in terms of shapes, angles and geometric patterns. I’m afraid this is where I struggled with the book because the geometrical stuff went over my head. No matter how hard I tried I could not envision the existence of a curve in a straight line or a straight line in a curve. Where Nikolai looks at the incoming tide and sees ‘plummeting curvatures’ I just see the incoming tide. Where he sees a wetland ‘mapped out with a constantly collapsing Cartesianism of intensities’ I have no idea what that is. I think this prevented me forming a stronger connection with the story. Although I admired the wonderful writing, I was left with the feeling that this is a book I was not quite clever enough to appreciate fully. (3.5 stars rounded up to 4)

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

fucking great read, wrote it up here https://analoguehumanist.wordpress.co...

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soviet mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky is helping develop the peatlands of County Offaly for a government scheme in the 1950s, away from his home and family, and in a strange land. Despite trying to fit in with his colleagues, mainly through drinking heavily, he is lonely and homesick.

He receives a letter from the Ministry of State Security in Moscow telling him to return home. He decides not to, and after a period of running around London after a fake passport, hides out on an island in the Shannon, where he harvests seaweed, practises his geometry, and visiting a similarly exiled dog on a nearby adjacent island.

Duncan's writing is original, he is a great teller of stories, and this becomes more compelling once Nikolai goes on the run, in the second half. Its a deceptively quiet novel in that there doesn't is a whole lot going on, but meanwhile the reader is getting well acquainted with the landscape and the characters which add greatly to the enjoyment of the novel overall.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because it was on the 2023 shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Novel, a place I have discovered many historical novels that I enjoyed.

This novel is not your typical historical novel. The lead character - Nicholai Lobachevsky - is Russian, sent on loan by the Russian government, in 1950, to Ireland to assist in a survey of peat bogland in connection with providing electricity to rural areas. The leader of the Irish survey team is named Rhatigan. He provides a local pivot point. While there, Nicholai receives a letter calling him back to Russia to a new assignment. Nicholai suspects it is a call home to a death sentence so he heads off to a small island in disguise as a Polish war survivor. There he works with each of the four families living there to farm seaweed. He was "led" to the island by a story told by a man named French who collected antiquities. After a few years on the island, Nicholai learns that Stalin has died and considers returning home to see family he was on less that great terms with when he left in 1950.

Nicolai decides to return and resumes his true identity. On his way back to Russia, he stops to spend a couple of days in Berlin with a cousin, which turns out not to have been a good idea.

There is a lot going on in this book beyond the story of Nicholai. I enjoyed it and will likely read more by Adrian Duncan.

[Rosko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy on ambience, but a bit light on the ol’ plot. There are some very moving/ interesting descriptions but is overly ponderous. Would probably recommend to friends/enemies who like peat bogs.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/x0xuKsZGHHc

[Joy McClean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would die for Lobachevsky
—
“…I realize that this void in him has an engulfing indifference from which I want to remove myself as soon as it is possible, before it begins to expand and raze what has meaning to me: a belief that what connects me to my past is worth keeping alive.”

[Odrán de Bhaldraithe · Rating 5 out of 5]

how does he fucking do it

[F · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best novel I’ve read this year? The best novel I’ve read ever? The inexorable progress of modernity is most keenly felt on Ireland’s midland bogs.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read some of the accolades for this and I think “Emperor’s new clothes”

[Manos Tsakiris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a Russian geometer's exile in Ireland.

Beautifully written, with descriptions of Irish landscapes that leap off the page.
The cruelty, of both land and people, is given to the reader in a unique way.
The Geometer Lobachevsky sees shapes everywhere, and through Duncan's profoundly inventive writing, we do too.
This is the first Adrian Duncan novel I have read but I will most certainly look out for his next ones.

[Annelies]

Pff, dit boek voelde alsof ik weer 17 was en iets voor mijn lijst moest lezen. Ik kocht het misschien wel vooral omdat de kaft prachtig is vormgegeven. Het verhaal van een wiskundige met een obsessie voor geometrische figuren en patronen die erachter komt dat de realiteit niet te meten valt spreekt me ook aan, maar helaas vond ik de proza taai en was er wel heel erg weinig plot te bekennen. Ik heb ook het gevoel dat er allerlei Betekenisvolle Details aan mij voorbij gingen, vandaar dat middelbareschool-leeslijst-gevoel. Tsja.

De zin in dit boek die me het meeste bij blijft is denk ik een citaat van iemand anders, maar ik kan niet terugvinden van wie:

"'Ancient empires vanish like morning mist,' I say to him. 'And they reappear,' he replies, 'with the clenching of a fist.'"

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

His best work yet. Streets ahead of his contemporaries.

[Queen Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. This is a strong 4.5 and I rounded up rather than down because I’ve seen so many bad reviews for what I think are weak reasons. Specifically, not being able to follow the “math” in the first part is not a problem with a book, but a problem with the reader. I look to whether a book is well written from a language perspective, then a plot perspective, is it a good story, does it hold together. This one does extremely well. I think Adrian Duncan is a lovely writer, he writes gorgeous prose.
Having said that, I will admit the first section of this book can appear technical. I had no problem with it however. I am not a mathematician, an engineer of any sort, nor am I a surveyor. I did do well in math(s) at school and I confess a general curiosity about land surveying — but nothing beyond scouting badges.
OK, so I could also say this book could have been a stab at a couple of short stories that then came together as a single novel. Story 1. Russian surveyor is invited to Ireland in the 1950s to help with surveying the Midlands for building infrastructure such as a national electrical system. Not everyone in Ireland trusts a Russian as WWII is still in their minds and things aren’t going all that well in Russia. Our Russian has a great idea for staking measurements — using nailheads to steady the stakes. Great idea until a huge storm hits the Midlands and lightning strikes every nailhead burning up every stake and destroying all their work. Story 2. Our Russian is on an Irish island in the Shannon estuary where 4 families predominate and he works for all 4 harvesting seaweed. Things did not go well for him, he is hiding his identity and is working under a false name and false passport as a Polish emigre seeking solitude and a closer relationship to God. He has a serious illness that isn’t getting better. 3. He returns to the Midlands, sees his former colleagues, everyone has changed, on his way back to Russia. 4. He stops in Berlin to visit a cousin on his way home.
There is so much built into this book — Irish writer living in Berlin — European history, Irish history and culture of the Midlands, the influence of the Civil War from the 1920s in Ireland still influencing people; WWII was much closer to, and had a much greater impact on Europeans than Americans, the Russian Revolution, WWII and Russia, the death of Stalin. All of these come up and are addressed in the book but you have to be paying attention. His time on the island points out the cultural differences between the islanders and the mainlanders, the old ways of doing things against the advent of electricity and tract housing to the Midlands.
There’s the microcosm of Ireland and Europe, but there’s also the microcosm of the Russian protagonist and his relationships with the Irish surveyor who requested he come to Ireland to help out — the Russian never really enters the community. On the island, generally considered a more closed community, he makes closer ties — it’s a smaller community — but he leaves there too, aware his illness is worsening and thinking he should go home now that Stalin is dead. He returns via the Midlands and his old acquaintance and while the Midlands and his friend have “advanced” with tract homes and electricity, his time on the island only served to increase the distance between them. But it is Berlin, with his cousin, with his family, frequently our closest relationship, that the rubber hits the road.
It’s a great story, but it’s also great food for thought.

[Kriegslok · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is a small island that lies half of a mile to the north-west of the sliver of beach at the foot of my hill. They call this tiny land mass Ilon ier Mjor - island of the big man."

Lobachevsky is a Russian mathematician and land surveyor. Sent abroad to further his studies in calculus, he ends up in Ireland surveying peat bogs for the growing turf burning power stations. While there he receives a letter recalling him to the Soviet Union to take up a new position. Fearful that this new position will be horizontal and beneath the earth, Lobachevsky becomes an exile and refugee. 

Adrian Duncan paints a picture of Ireland in which you can smell the peat and the sea, his writing is as positively intoxicating as a good Irish whiskey. There is a strong cast of characters with whom Lobachevsky interacts or passes in the course of his sojourn. Lobachevsky's retreat to a tiny western isle off the Irish coast provides a perfect picture of a way of life still disconnected from the frantic modernisation of the mainland. These paces of life and the impact of geographic location on personal outlooks and opportunities is conveyed beautifully. Lobachevsky is frequently haunted by ghosts from his Soviet past that occasionally take form in the local Irish culture he is now immersed in causing him to muse on the similarities and difference in cultures.

Lobachesky's relationship with an Irish surveyor colleague, Rhatigan, runs through the book, both men are familiar with each other's countries, cultures and share a profession. Rhatigan speaking of the Soviet Union states "The developments in your country ... stemmed from hatred of the Czars. Our projects emerge from the wish to show fairness to our fellow worker, not hatred to what came before''. There is a backstory running through the novel concerning Lobachesky's time in the Soviet Union, his hopes, fears, losses and his love for a writer killed in the Terror, under the iron rule of Stalin.

"I understand from him speaking like this that in this place images do not come from pictures, or the shape of what is illustrative in pictures, but that images come from words and that fleeting images of this kind are a private thing."

[Nathalie (keepreadingbooks) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think you either get The Geometer Lobachevsky or you don’t, and I definitely didn’t. I think the blurb is selling a very different book, to be honest, though I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly why it isn’t what it says it is – but for one, we hardly spend any time on the small island that is ostensibly supposed to be his place of exile. The final chapter was striking but felt unnecessarily brutal and sudden. The entire book turned out to be somewhat sad and tragic, in a way that felt slightly pointless to me.

Every time I thought I was on the verge of understanding the message, the author seemed to change direction and employ a new philosophical lens. Each time this happened, the narrator spoke as if some foundation for his current philosophical musings had been laid earlier in the story, but most of the time that foundation had happened off the page, in an interaction we hadn’t seen. It constantly felt like something was missing, that I was supposed to know something that hadn’t been there in the first place.

On a smaller scale, this kept happening with character descriptions too. As an example, a woman and her small child are on a ferry with the MC, Lobachevsky. Lobachevsky studies this woman and her movements and describes them to us; how her child is climbing around on her and then attempts to get to Lobachevsky, only to be halted by a harness he wears. At this point, the mother looks at her child for a while, before “returning to her book”. Only, the book hasn’t been mentioned before. It creates a dissonance with the image the reader creates in their head and thus a disruption, because now I have to go back and revise the scene and place a book in her hands. I kept checking earlier pages to see if I had missed something. If I have to be mean about it, I’d say it’s bad writing.

In short, this wasn’t a great reading experience, but I was fascinated by the kelp harvesting that’s described on the island – I’d happily read a whole book about that!

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book based on a real person, though the story has been fictionalized. Lobachevsky, Nicole, is sent to the Irish midlands where the Irish government is developing the vast bog in the center of the island to harvest turf to convert to energy. The Russians have been doing this for years, and the Irish hope to have some guidance in developing their own resources.

This short book (under 200 pages) is written in four parts. In my book club discussion, two people thought that each section could have been a short story. The first section, full of calculations and details of surveying the area, was not easy to follow at times. Lobachevsky spells the Irish names using Russian phonetics. Once I figured that out, this section was easier to understand.

In the second part, Lobachevsky relocates to an island where he tells the residents he is a Polish Catholic on a religious pilgrimage. He has gone here to avoid being called back to the Soviet Union. He works side by side with the islanders for two years harvesting seaweed. In the third part, he returns to the bogs and sees the progress that has been made. He decides to return to the Soviet Union, supposedly to see family. Stalin has died and he expects things to be different. This is part four, and the end of the novel.

This is a novel that one of our discussants called post-modern. It is creative, and unexpected in places. It is a book that is well worth reading, and the effort at times it takes. As much as Lobachevsky works with numbers, though he says he is a poor mathematician, he is also someone who loves language. Some of the most interesting passages talk about language, or contain stunning language. He is an engineer of sorts - of the bog, and of language.

[Marc Faoite · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second of Duncan's books that I have read (the first being his short story collection Midfield Dynamo). I was very taken with the voice here.

Viewing rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century through foreign eyes is a useful conceit. Our titular character is destabilized by his outsider-ness, though, we learn, in many ways he has always been an other, but here the very instability of the waterlogged peaty ground on which he treads adds to this impression being (as it were) ungrounded.

There were a few plot points that I didn't quite get (which I can't go into here without spoilers).
The sudden change of setting from the bog to a very small island, where he assumes a false identity, allows us to see different aspects of the character that may not have been possible had he stayed in the midlands, but I felt invested in that setting and the evolution of the character in that setting and wanted to see more. We do eventually see more, but it feels a little didactic.

The misconstrued Irish names (places and people) made me smile at first, but the joke grew old very quickly.

The novel ends in mainland Europe (in its largest geographic sense) but at a pace that seems somewhat rushed compared to the monotonous sameness the character experiences in his two main Irish settings.

I was a little out of sorts with health issues during the reading of this book, so that may well have affected my reading.

A solid four start, voire four-and-a-half. This certainly won't be the last of Duncan's books that I will read.

[George Purdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 2022 to critical acclaim, Adrian Duncan’s ‘The Geometer Lobachevsky’ is a novel with a remarkably specific, albiet enthralling, narrative focus. Nikolai Lobachevsky, around whom the narrative is centred, is a Russian immigrant working in Ireland in the 1950s with the purpose of surveying marshland set for drainage. After beginning his work for the state-owned Bord na Móna, Lobachevsky receives an urgent message ordering his immediate return to the USSR. Given the previous death of his close friend Matvei at the hands of the Soviet authorities, Lobachevsky immediately comprehends the gravity of his situation and decides to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon Estuary. Observing the slow pace of life among the locals, the majority of whom work as seaweed farmers, Duncan’s narrative routinely lapses into meditations on particular aspects of Lobachevsky’s experience, including the intensity of the regular downpours, the idiosyncrasies of the islanders, and his mathematical musings. While this novel’s narrow choice of subject matter initially made for hard reading, I soon recognised this particularity to be the greatest asset of Duncan’s writing. Together with the novel’s impactful and poignant conclusion, this is a unique work of literature which I will be sure to remember.

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I close my eyes and await a trajectory I will find hard to compute and harder still to understand. I can smell that rain is coming”. Adrian Duncan’s novel The Geometer Lobachevsky is a quiet yet atmospheric story about Nikolai Lobachevsky, a Soviet mathematician working on a land survey in Ireland. When he receives a summons back to Leningrad, he is dubious and fearful, and so flees to the Shannon Estuary, where he hides in waiting, hopeful that one day he can return to his life. Duncan conjures the insularity of small-town life and community, as well as the sublime nature of these changing landscapes in 1950s Ireland, “clouds drifting by, slowly altering in the electric-blue sky, a window in the painted ceiling of a dome of a foundation-less baroque painting.” Here characters are in various levels of contemplation, thinking of home, the future, some brutish and cold, others with their own “interest in the language of movement and this un-suredness”. And all these epistemological differences fuel much of the novel’s tension, as Nikolai for instance “can tell we are at another sort of crossroads, but one that criss-crosses time more than space.” In both portraying and negotiating all these crossroads, Adrian Duncan has crafted a stirring, thoughtful tale.

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wonderfully evokes the cruelty of a modernising world to land and people. Rendered in annoyingly stilted language, perhaps meant to evoke a Russian-speaker's carrying over of his habits of speech into English; comes across instead as clumsy and awkward. Lobachevsky's preoccupation with his mother in the final movements of the story emerge from nowhere, not having been seeded earlier on, and feel artificial; his decisions are unpredictable and seem senseless. The verisimilitude of his earlier life in Offaly and the Shannon estuary falls away, leaving us with a novel that feels as dislocated from reality as the abstract geometries Duncan inexplicably describes to introduce each part.

[Prue Mansfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

On a January list of best reads of 2023, and the short list for the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, this was a lovely book. Who knew a geometer was a person skilled at geometry. A Russian man, Lobachevsky, is in Ireland, surveying the peat bogs so they can be drained. That is just about the plot. It is beautiful. I learned heaps about geometry, I loved that in the beginning of the book L is spelling the Irish names as he hears them, and then you learn what they are eg Kolim is Colm; the visual images had great clarity. And at the end, I said to myself...I loved that, but did I understand what is what about?

[Alan Bolger · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ The descriptive language in this novel is excellent in general, particularly in the scenes set on the island. Although, at times more could have been conveyed by writing less. The characters are also well developed, strangely the secondary ones more so than Nikolai himself. The world created by Duncan is really unique and makes the reader adapt and question their own interactions with their environment. The conclusion is a little detached from the rest of the novel but its open-endedness does give the plot itself some flexibility.

[Topher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of Russian Geometer in the UK working in the bogland in the 50s. Although this novel is short, it was very dense and packed with lots of information. There is a lot of technical descriptions as well as depictions of nature. These are not usually my taste, but I liked the undercurrent of this man on the run from his past. There is definitely an emotional depth that brims throughout the tale. I give this one a 4/5.

[Gary Homewood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Russian in exile in Ireland post WW2 surveying boglands. A man trying to escape history and politics.

Unusual, vivid, strange set pieces, and eerie landscape description. Definitely some László Krasznahorkai inspired imagery. Ultimately heart wrenching.

[Vladimir Smirnov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Неожиданно, ирландский роман о советском эмигранте. Ленинградский математик приезжает помочь с топосъемкой торфополей, и выясняет, что возвращаться домой нельзя. Узнаваемая ситуация, растянутая во времени, и много вопросов. Как жить? Найдется ли смелость вернуться? Кто ты?

[Alan Fricker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made me want to read Magnus Mills

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. Well crafted. Bogland descriptors engaging.

Images and characters too likely true for my own liking.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever. Confounding. A style I didn't always enjoy but my gosh the imagery and ideas - they'll be with me permanently