ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse is a rare example of a bestseller that I liked and one that transcends its clichéd back-of-a-female cover design.

The novel features an American mathematician who, during the era of the Vietnam War, goes to Bonn in Germany to take up post graduate opportunities.  She has two good reasons for doing this: she needs to leave behind her lover and PhD supervisor Peter and the ‘help’ he gives her with her thesis… and she needs to try and sort out her identity.

She is Asian American, but as it turns out, her parents are not the people who raised her.  Hers is a complex personal history because even had it been available then, she couldn’t buy a subscription to Ancestry and discover a whole genealogy.  Like many who are orphaned by war, she cannot trace even her parents, much less a family history with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The setting in the Vietnam era allows Chung to go back in time to when people fled WW2 Germany or ‘disappeared’ to become untraceable, and also, via escape routes through to Shanghai, to include events in the Pacific War as well. Refugees took this route after western nations closed the door to people fleeing the Nazis… I have a friend born in Shanghai of Norwegian heritage whose family fled after his aunt was tortured by the Nazis. (He still experiences ‘an interesting time’ whenever his birth certificate is required by bureaucracies.)

The author is a mathematician herself, and without being too heavy-handed about it, she depicts the experience of sexism and racism for an American Asian woman working in a male-dominated field.  Chung has a light touch which does not diminish the impact of her profiles of eminent women.

The Nobel Prize winner Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972) is a guest at a dinner party in Boston:

Maria Mayer had been born and raised in Germany and started out studying mathematics at the University of Göttingen, where she met her husband.  But she was seduced by the nascent field of quantum mechanics, and switched her focus to physics.  When she and her husband moved to the United States, first to Johns Hopkins, where she was introduced to chemical physics, and then to Columbia, neither of these two universities would consider hiring her as a faculty member, so she took what she could — a modest assistantship at one and an office space at the other.  When her husband moved to Chicago, she was again denied a paid position so she worked as a volunteer professor for the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, and eventually as a half-time Senior Physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory.  Here, she learned nuclear physics, and like a fairy story, where all the elements come together in the unlikeliest way at the end, this is how Maria Mayer would end up winning the Nobel Prize: the combination of mathematics and physics and chemistry that she acquired led to the discovery of the subatomic structure of an atom.  “San Diego Housewife Wins Nobel Prize” her local newspaper read.  (p.117)

Chung doesn’t mention that Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner — but let’s not get picky, eh?

The Tenth Muse was a finalist in the 2019 National Jewish Book Award, and I think this is because — while the novel does include Good Germans who are more ubiquitous in contemporary fiction than they were in real life in the Nazi era — doesn’t flinch from acknowledging that they were a minority in a culture which enabled the Holocaust through indifference, greed, or blatant support for Anti-Semitism and genocide.  The timing of the novel in the 1960s shows also that remorse for what was done was not universal in Germany, and that the theft of Jewish property included intellectual property.

Theresa Smith reviewed it too. 

Author: Catherine Chung
Title: The Tenth Muse
Publisher: Little, Brown, 2019
Cover design: Novel Creative / Bekki Guyatt
ISBN: 9781408709573, pbk., 290 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Ulysses Bookstore