In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi

[Diane]

Rating: 3 stars


An American physicist searches to uncover the secret identity of Hitler's chief scientist. A highly intelligent work of speculative fiction surrounding WWII and its aftermath. The book explores what might have happened if Nazi Germany beat us in developing the atomic bomb. As interesting as all of this sounds, much of the physics talk went over my head and I found the book to drag.

[Amanda]

I also gave this book 3 stars. I enjoyed it, and was finding it to be a 4 star book when I started reading it, but found the ending didn’t necessarily live up to the hype and intrigue established in the beginning and middle.
The two main characters are Francis “Frank” Bacon (yes, named after the famous one), an American physicist from Princeton who gets an invite to review files from the Nuremberg trials that mention the titular Klingsor, and Gustav Links, a German mathematician who undertakes the investigation with Bacon to uncover the identity of Klingsor. The book switches between their perspectives and largely includes Bacon interviewing fictionalized versions of real life scientific heavy weights from the time (Heisenberg, Bohr, Stark, Schrodinger), and flashbacks to Links’ life under the Reich (including his friend’s involvement in the Von Stauffenberg “Valkyrie” plot). As someone who loves both science and history, these aspects of the book really appealed to me, as was the central mystery of the identity of Klingsor. It thought it was a really cool concept.

However, a substantial amount of the book is also about these men’s sordid love lives- which fascinated me so much less. Additionally, there are parts where the author kind of mismanages the science to make it a simile for love and life and that annoyed me a little bit. I also wasn’t obsessed with the ending- it plays like a twist, but one that is kind of spoiled part way through and somehow also not really explaining if they get it right or not. The lack of stakes also becomes a bit more apparent as the book goes on, as no one is really ever in danger, and the Reich has already fallen by the time the story opens.

[Gail]

Not unlike Amanda, I enjoyed the book's focus on physicists and scientists that were attempting to explain the natural laws of the universe and all but stumbled upon the concept of nuclear fission. This lead to an arms race for nuclear bombs that was largely hidden from the public during the last stages of the second World War. Each of the very well known scientists, such as Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg are presented as real people with real egos, and yet fears and personal problems. The physics was very well explained for a non scientific reader. I was also intrigued by both Gustav Links and Francis Bacon, our two key characters throughout the first half of the book. I thought Volpi did a good job of integrating the physics with his "search" and his play on game theory and uncertainty. He made both of these concepts interact with both scientific and human interactions and I thought it worked well, again throughout the first half of the book.
However, strangely, we really don't find out why Bacon was looking for Klingsor (to punish, just to understand, it was his job but his supervisors didn't seem to care?) We don't, after awhile, even care who Klingsor is because nothing pivots on him anymore. The outline of the final moments of the war and the race to the bomb was added close to the end. The summing up for the two love stories didn't help the love stories or the characters. Although others have compared this book to Name of the Rose or Vonnegut, there ultimately was no mystery solved. We are left with a very unreliable narrator and a guess that didn't conform to any of the clues or suspicions generated throughout the book. I was tickled by the fact that Volpi, a well known Mexican writer, did not feel the need to mention Mexico once during the whole book. I would give it 3.5 for its well done complicated plot structure and its historical and scientific integration. I am not a reader that needs every ending to be a neatly tied bow but in this case I felt that Volpi didn't quite deliver on all his ambitious objectives.