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A Novel
by Klara Hveberg
A remarkable and heartbreaking debut novel with the lyrical beauty and emotional resonance of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the thematic complexity of Asymmetry, that combines fractal mathematics and classical music to explore the infinitely complex patterns of love and the thin border between great passion and great loneliness.
Rakel has always been more comfortable with numbers than with people. A gifted woman with a rare talent for math, she has never mastered the art of making friends. At nineteen, she moves to Oslo to attend university. There she meets Jakob, a brilliant older teacher who becomes fascinated by Rakel's quick mind.
Jakob is struck by the similarities between Rakel and Sofja Kovalevskaja, the first woman to become a professor of mathematics, and the subject of the novel he is writing. Just as Kovalevskaja was close to her much older advisor, Rakel and Jakob are drawn to each other and eventually become lovers, although he is already married.
In the years to come, Rakel's academic career soars, but her health declines, and from her bedside she spends hours imagining Sofja's life while trying to understand her own. With a gaze both naive and mercilessly sharp, she examines what may be her life's only love story, looking for patterns and answers in numbers, music, and literature.
Extraordinarily wise and penetrating, Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine explores the intricacies of the human heart, the complicated equation that is love, and the search to find meaning and connections when you need them most.
Translated from the Norwegian by Alison McCullough.
"Hveberg's rich, philosophical debut runs on ruminations about love, loss, and loneliness with two love stories, each involving a math professor and a brilliant student...[a] cerebral narrative, which treats knotty subjects—the Mandelbrot set, the Sierpinski gadget, the snake lemma, and the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator—in a playful way, often using clever puns ("mi-Rakel"), puzzles and anagrams. Hveberg gives proof to a provocative equation for elegant fiction." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"For Hveberg, the imbalance between Rakel's richly evoked interior life and the lack of agency she wields in her experiences provides an opportunity to delve into the character's vibrant intellect without diluting the reader's sense of Rakel as a character whose joys and sorrows reflect our own. A novel of interior spaces that plumbs the depths of loneliness in order to find within it the origins of love." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Klara Hveberg was born in 1974 and grew up in Molde, Norway. Initially planning to study music and literature, she ended up obtaining a PhD in mathematics, writing her thesis on fractal geometry. Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine is her first novel.
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