‘Audin plays with codes, numbers and dates to create a fascinating and unsettling story.’—Le Temps
This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter—at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary—locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience.
Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father’s torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.
عن المؤلف
Michèle Audin is a mathematician and a professor at l’Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) in Strasbourg, where she does research notably in the area of symplectic geometry. Audin is a member of the Oulipo, and is the author of many works of mathematics and the history of mathematics, and has also published a work of creative nonfiction on the disappearance of her father,
Une vie brève (Gallimard, 2013), contributed to a collection of short stories,
Georges Perec and the Oulipo: Winter Journeys (Atlas Press, 2013), and edited and annotated an abecedary of Oulipo works,
OULIPO L’Abécédaire provisoirement définitif (Larousse, 2014).
One Hundred Twenty-One Days is her first novel and was published to universal acclaim in 2014 by the prestigious Gallimard publishing house in France.
Christiana Hills is a literary translator who graduated from NYU’s MA program in Literary Translation, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Translation Studies at Binghamton University in New York.