A Novel of Paris in the 20th Century

“As one of its characters rightly says, this book is a novel, a work of fiction. Its characters are imaginary. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental or due to the permanence of human behavior. The names of some of these characters have been taken from (or inspired by) various books, including THE LILY OF THE VALLEY (Honoré de Balzac), A GALLERY PORTRAIT and W OR THE MEMORY OF CHILDHOOD (Georges Perec), THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (Alexandre Dumas), and THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (Mikhail Bulgakov).” 

As I read the book One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michele Audin, I sometimes tried to look up the characters as if they were real. The style of the book made me think it was historical rather than a novel. The narrator, who identifies as a researcher, constantly explains where the quoted manuscripts and letters came from, and claims to have received permission to publish them — but after a while the reader is supposed to figure out that it’s all made up. As you see in this nearly-final paragraph, the book is very literary in its approach to the past.

The novel focuses on several intertwined  “lives,” especially of mathematicians and other academic figures, beginning in around 1900. The concern: what the twentieth century — especially the two World Wars — did to the characters in the novel, concentrating on lives led in Paris and the hardships and destruction, both physical and social, that befell them. One character had been a soldier in the trenches in World War I, and came out with a “broken face,” so that for the rest of  his life, he wore a mask to hide his deformity. Shortly after the war, another character went mad and shot his family, though he continued to do mathematical research for the rest of his life in an insane asylum. His psychiatrist was sent to Auschwitz, but died on the way home. There are many vignettes, presented in a variety of ways, supposedly from diaries and letters and other fictional first-person accounts of life at the time.

The reader must face the worst agony of the century as the characters experience the horrors of war, the mutilation of the soldiers in World War I, the persecution of Jews in World War II, deportation and the degradation of  concentration camps, the chilling decisions of collaborate with the occupiers of Paris, and — always — many of these characters’ efforts to pursue mathematical research under horrific conditions.

Here, to illustrate what I see as the nature of this novel,  is just one excerpt from the diary of a German occupier of Paris:

“May 31, 1942 Sunday morning. Thought of Otto Zach again. Where is he exactly, and in what condition? This is a time when many brave men will go through the gates of hell—and many will have seen it even before their own deaths. Walked across Paris to the Abwehr headquarters at the Hotel Lutetia, where Blank, one of my friends from Gymnasium, is assigned, and where they even work on Sundays. Had a drink with him. Then, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, I contemplated the fountain’s archangel while thinking of it as a symbol of our victory and the peace that will follow.”

The author’s own biography seems more than usually relevant to understanding the novel:

“MICHÈLE AUDIN is a mathematician and a professor at l’Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) in Strasbourg, where she does research notably in the area of symplectic geometry. Audin is a member of the Oulipo, and is the author of many works of mathematics and the history of mathematics, She has also published a work of creative nonfiction on the disappearance of her father, Une vie brève (Gallimard, 2013)—Audin is the daughter of mathematician Maurice Audin, who died under torture in 1957 in Algeria, after having been arrested by parachutists of General Jacques Massu.” (Introduction to One Hundred Twenty-One Days)

It's very hard to write a conventional review of this novel and its protean excursions into many types of writing. The principles of Oulipo aren't enough to explain it. Oulipo is an abbreviation for the French "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle"  which means "workshop of potential literature." Founded in 1960, most of the writers and mathematicians who were its original members are no longer alive. However, the  group continues to bring in new members such as Audin, who was born in 1954. I find the experimental and unusual works of these writers to be fascinating, but I'm challenged when I try to explain it.

This post is being shared with the ongoing blog party called "Paris in July." I will return to the interesting yet challenging topic of Oulipo when I write about Georges Perec, one of the founding members, later this month.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

Long ago and far away!

The book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil was published in 2016, only six years ago, but while I was finally reading it this week, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it is vastly outdated, particularly the final chapter about Facebook and its role in the 2016 election. The author is deeply critical of the use of algorithms in Facebook to determine what information is presented to which users — and her points were well-taken. However, many more abuses have been disclosed in the years since then. 

Little did anyone dream of the vast conspiratorial misdeeds of the Russian hackers and propagandists, who took advantage of the Facebook algorithms and created an entirely false picture to assist the election of Donald Trump! How painful to read the partial and incomplete insights in O’Neil’s analysis that might have helped if taken a bit further. (Again, I’m happy that one day a few years ago, I decided that I would never look at FB again, and I never did.)

The overall focus of O'Neil's book is on mathematical models, including those that enabled the Facebook horror show. One of the prior jobs of the author had been in the field of data science, particularly as a “quant” who worked on financial models. Before the 2009 economic crash, this area was very trendy. Beyond the financial applications, mathematical computer modeling was growing in power and effectiveness in social, business, and political manipulation in our society. Ultimately, the net result of these Weapons of Math Destruction or WMDs (as she names them) was to make Americans’ lives worse in many ways. O'Neil shows how the combination of irresponsible data collection about individuals and bigoted assumptions built into the software has caused a great deal of harm to the most helpless members of society.

The net effect of WMDs was to grind down poor people by refusing them jobs and insurance policies, to trick people into enrolling in useless private college programs with government loans (coming out with nothing but huge debts), to ensnare people with disastrous mortgages that they could never afford, to cause teachers to lose their jobs because the measures of success were based on false data, and to engage in a terrifying variety of other injustices. And ultimately to concentrate more wealth in the already wealthy sectors of the population. Racial minorities and poor people were the most viciously affected by the secretive computer programs and data-gathering mechanisms that determined their creditworthiness, their voting behavior, their job offers, and more. For victims, even if they knew that these programs were responsible for their suffering, there was often no recourse.

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic, which began a few years after the book’s publication, was not caused by data modeling. However, many of the social structures and features of American society that figure in O'Neil's book have been changed and disrupted amazingly by the last two years of isolation, impoverishment, hunger, and ultimately close to 1,000,000 deaths. Of particular relevance to the pandemic disruption is O'Neil's description of computer-based job scheduling that meant workers at enterprises like Starbucks would often have only a few hours of sleep between work shifts, or would be unable to plan essential activities such as going to school or organizing child care. The pandemic caused many people to abandon such jobs. 

People can become victims in so many ways! Employer "wellness" programs are a good example. These ostensibly beneficial incentives to lose weight, stop smoking, or adopt other supposedly healthy behaviors were foisted on employees by health insurance companies in collusion with employers. They illustrate another seeming accomplishment of manipulative data science. O'Neil writes: "In fact, the greatest savings from wellness programs come from the penalties assessed on the workers. In other words, like scheduling algorithms, they provide corporations with yet another tool to raid their employees’ paychecks." (p. 178). 

Have things changed now? I’m not sure, but a lot of people who were praised as “essential workers” or even as “heroes” in the spring of 2020 have been questioning the way they are treated by employers and by the computer programs that in a sense enslave them. I found myself wondering over and over -- how did O'Neil's examples function in the changing workplace environment of the pandemic, as people either worked from home or had to take extreme risks with their health. What became of the "wellness" programs when so many people were so unwell? I am also curious about how the big data science-based businesses like Uber, Air B&B, Grub Hub, and others used or misused the vast computer programs and their dubious data sets that O'Neil describes.

I meant to read this book when it was new and widely praised. I guess I waited too long! I’d like to see an updated version — O’Neil’s new book The Shame Machine, published last month, may be that book. According to the New York Times reviewer:

"O’Neil’s previous book, Weapons of Math Destruction, explored how algorithms encode and exacerbate inequality; the “shame machines” in her new book, which include the weight loss and wellness industries, function similarly — fueling bad feeling in order to buoy profits while maintaining an unfair status quo." (source)

Review © 2022 mae sander.