Abstract
Kasman:The latest collection from Alice Munro, whose short stories have won her many
literary awards, features a title story about the final days of Sonia Kovalevskaya.
The main source of tension in the story is her love affair with Maxim Kovalevsky,
the Russian playboy who just happened to have the same last name as her late husband,
which was also the focus of the film A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon. In addition,
this story also contains "flashbacks" to the earlier period covered by Beyond the
Limit.Of course, the writing is beautiful. Mathematics is not the central focus of
the story, but neither is it avoided (as in the film) nor is it presented inaccurately.
An appearance by Poincare discussing his prize, many mentions of Weierstrass (her
thesis advisor), and technical terms such as `theta functions' or `partial differential
equations' are used well in this character study of a woman living at a time when
her skills and interests were not fully appreciated by the rest of society.Amazon:And
in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century
Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera,
where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful
meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only
university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
