Audrey Hepburn doesn't play herself so well

I can't remember whether I read Breakfast at Tiffany's because I'd just seen Capote, or because I'd just read A Streetcar Named Desire. Must be the former, because I remember thinking of Audrey while reading Streetcar. I had not seen the film.

It was the sort of love story I could relate to - being in awe of a person, cherishing their friendship, not being able to help but love them but knowing that you don't belong together. An interesting, and relatively light read considering the content of In Cold Blood. I found a lot of parallels between the characters Holly Golightly, Sally Bowles (Cabaret) and Blanche from Streetcar. The latter two caught up in the tragedy of not being able to attain that Golightly presence in the world. There is still something sad about Holly - despite how beautiful she is, she seems to understand that everything's not quite as nice as it should be. The book's ending has her fulfilling the role of the undomesticated cat - far far more appropriate than the "you belong to me" ending sequence of the film. Indeed, the strongest them in the book is perhaps focused on the protagonist's longing for the unobtainable Holly, rather than she herself. In life, you just have to realise that some things must be let go.

The story of Blanche, however is more focused on her. Some people seem to ready to dismiss her credibility, getting caught up in her desperation to make an impression as representing her vanity and childishness. I don't know whether any discussions of this book have interpreted her character as one affected by Bipolar disorder (she exhibits most of the classic symptoms - especially leading up to her madness). Sometimes it feels like the difference between how characters like Sally, Blanche and Holly are perceived, merely depends on their success and apparent attractiveness. A Holly Golightly with a few more setbacks and disappointments could easily wind up like Blanche. In all characters there's a determined independence and a trend of compensating for unfulfilling emotional relationships with economic stability and excess. It's easy to admire and pity them all. For obvious reasons, I pictured Audrey Hepburn while reading Tiffany's - but then in the movie she didn't really seem to deliver with the same grace. And yet the part is her all over - so it's as if she doesn't play Audrey Hepburn as well as she might.

I do particularly like the titles of these books, and the framework they give for interpretation of the characters.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

I was oblivious to the historical event that is the Sarin Gas attacks before I started reading Underground. The book is a collection of interviews with survivors of the attacks, some only indirectly affected by it, as well as interviews with members of the cult that perpetrated the terrorist act.

Although I read some of it wanting to understand a little bit more about what happened, I feel like this is the most authentic way to write about such an important event in the Japanese psyche. Murakami makes only a few side-comments, concerning features of the individual he is interviewing rather than any commentary or judgment. I found some of the accounts terrifying (reading it, as I was, on the train), and some of them bizarre (admin workers dying of gas poisoning, just trying to get to work on time).

The book was released initially in Japanese without the accounts of cult-members, however I think the version published here, with these included, adds something important. Rather than detract from the victimhood of those involved, these latter interviews allow some kind of explanation to be cast over such a disturbing event - not explanation via excuse, but rather a deeper look into how things could go wrong.

I can't help but admire Murakami for collecting these essays. I don't know whether he has been criticised at all for glory-seeking or anything like that, but I think the book shows enough integrity to descredit any such attacks.

A History of mathematics

As part of a feeling that I "should" read more about the subject I seem to be dedicating my life to, I read A History of Mathematics. As there is a lot of history, the book is quite big and thick. It looks quite nice on my shelf - although I must admit that I did, in a way, steal it from the friend who I borrowed it from.

The telling of a mathematics story gives rise to a dilemma: how much maths does one need to explain? How interesting is a story about maths if you don't understand the maths? How uninteresting is a mathematics story when you remove any technical details?

I must say, that really getting into this book, for me, meant stopping every now and again to scribble some stuff down on the back of an envelope ("can that be right?"). Furthermore, some of the impressive achievements in mathematics are only impressive if you realise how difficult it was for them to come about (does it mean much to anyone that there's no general formula for solving cubics?). So whilst I found this book really interesting, widening my knowledge and allowing me to place myself in the mathematical realm, I do not think I will force anyone to read it. I do try, as often as I can, to retell the stories during my mathematics tutes - as you can imagine, this is often received with a standing applause.

Some of my favourite bits are the exceptional mathematics of the Babylonians, the romantic story of Galois (shot in a duel at age 21... cos of a girl... his theories were proved later), and the Alexandrian maps that didn't include the calculations of Eratosthenes.