Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine

September 15, 2021
A debut novel, translated from Norwegian, that explores love as an infinite fractal set, bound only by the dimensions that it invents. Rakel is the only child of two devoted but unhappy parents. Her mother emigrated from Asia--leaving behind her work, her culture, and her language--in order to marry her father but has found it nearly impossible to acclimate to Norway's racially homogenous culture. Her father dotes on Rakel but doesn't understand the pressure she feels to keep her fearful mother safe. As Rakel grows, her propensity for logic puzzles and natural affinity for the patterns of music resolve themselves into a near virtuoso talent for conceptual mathematics. She moves to Oslo to attend the university and quickly meets Jakob Krogstad, a professor who has captured her attention through an article he wrote about the 19th-century Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya. Jakob is quick to appreciate the uniqueness of Rakel's mind, and what begins as a mentorship slowly develops into a consuming romance. In spite of the fact that Jakob is married and has two small daughters, Rakel persuades herself that their relationship cannot be immoral because it is being undertaken in the service of true love. She agrees to wait eight years, at which point Jakob's children will be older and they will be able to love each other openly. As time passes, Rakel's career soars and her love for Jakob solidifies, but her health declines precipitously from an undiagnosable illness that leaves her frequently bedridden. She is forced to spend more and more time in isolation, too exhausted to live a life outside of the rich one found in her naturally inquisitive mind. The novel progresses in fragments of thought and impression. Small scenes become the gateways for passages of philosophy that stake their existential discourse about identity, space, time, and individuality on the mathematical theories that are Rakel's solace as her autonomous life grounds to a halt in the grip of her illness. In another author's hands, Rakel's stasis--her physical and emotional inability to move beyond the intensity of her feelings for Jakob--might be frustrating. 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.

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Starred review from September 27, 2021
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. In contemporary Oslo, there’s 19-year-old Rakel Havberg and her married, 50-something mentor, Jakob Krogstad. The other couple is Sofia Kovalevskaya, a trailblazing female professor who earns her doctorate in 1874, and her adviser, Karl Weiserstrass. All four are obsessed with numbers and formulas, and their passions are stirred by music and literature. Rakel is moved by Christoph Gluck’s melancholy Orpheus and Eurydice and the “joy and sorrow” in Cesar Franck’s violin sonata, and Jakob introduces Rakel to the agony of literary figures via Thomas Hardy’s romantic poetry and stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s rejected marriage proposal. Rakel’s academic achievements are subsumed by a lifelong incapacitating illness, and she also dreams of writing a novel that “carries something of the eternal beauty of music and mathematics within it.” Rakel’s aspirations are not unlike Hveberg’s 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.