The Maniac

The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut (2023) 354 pages

This is a fictional memoir of renowned Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann. Overall, this is a dark read – Neumann scorched everyone he interacted with and was as complicated as his arcane areas of study. Labatut plays it loose with a cast of historical characters who interacted with the brilliant polymath. Borrowing heavily from secondary sources and his imagination the author weaves a tale of ambition, hubris and brilliance. I enjoyed the literary device of letting contemporaries tell the saga. Labatut has an uncanny ability to assume the voice of the narrator, including context. My favorite example is physicist Richard Feynman describing his limited interactions with Neumann. The chapter reads like a mini-biography of Feynman and describes the frenetic atmosphere of the WWII Manhattan project -- constructing the first atomic bombs (did I mention dark?).  The tragic nature of Neumann’s legacy – he died at age 53 – is strewn across the pages like radiation from a nuclear explosion.