“In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day.” There’s a few moments in this novel where the shape of the idea comes through most clearly. One moment comes when the reclusive mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck, is described with his shaved head as a lookalike for Michel Foucault. In […]