A Review of Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019).

[xiomara]

A Review of Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ve been spending a lot of nights in hospitals lately, doing the thing of eldercare work. One of the fortunate by-products of this time is more chances to read, especially later at evening when I’ve hit an insomnia snag. Thankfully, I have books like Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019) to keep me company. For those of you not familiar with Chung’s work, you should immediately read this novel and her prior publication, the critically overlooked Forgotten Country. Chung’s at her first person best in this particular narrative, giving us an absolutely immersive perspective with an indelible character whose background is unlike perhaps any other we’ve seen in fiction before. We’ll let B&N take it away from here:

“An exhilarating, moving novel about a trailblazing mathematician whose research unearths her own extraordinary family story and its roots in World War II From the days of her childhood in the 1950s Midwest, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem. As she matures from a girl of rare intelligence into an exceptional mathematician, traveling to Europe to further her studies, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? These questions grow ever more entangled as Katherine strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and becomes involved with a brilliant and charismatic professor. When she embarks on a quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that may hold both the lock and the key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her, and discovers how seemingly distant stories, lives, and ideas are inextricably linked to her own. The Tenth Muse is a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.”

The most compelling thing about this particular novel is the protagonist-narrator and her life as a mathematics scholar. Chung gives her a very elaborate backstory, which ultimately takes this character to Europe seeking out her complicated parentage, but the foundation of this novel is always the grit and visionary attitude that Katherine possesses as an independent minded and brilliant mathematics thinker and theorist. I’ll provide some requisite spoiler warnings here, as I’m going to discuss some of the major plot reveals concerning her ancestry. Readers discover about halfway through the novel that her adoptive parents were never even an actual couple. Her adoptive mother, we find out, was a comfort woman, and was brought into Katherine’s life due to the fact that this woman sought out a potential new start for her life through the chance to mother Katherine. This plan does not end up working, and Katherine is raised by her adoptive father. When Katherine embarks on a career in mathematics in a time when women are not seriously regarded in the field, she also begins to open the door to finding out more about her genealogy. She ends up falling in love with her dissertation advisor, an equally brilliant mathematician named Peter Hall, but as she struggles to carve out her own career, she ends up leaving him for a fellowship in Europe. The time in Europe also enables her to seek out contacts that might hold more clues to her biological parentage. Eventually she discovers that both her parents were aspiring and talented math theorists; her mother is Jewish, while her father (of Chinese descent), due to his romance with Katherine’s mother, is inextricably tangled with the problematic milieu of the World War II period. While the novel is concerned so much with this genealogical background, what sometimes loses some clarity is the incredible talents of Katherine as a career-oriented woman and exceptional scholar. The concluding arc sees Chung choose to compress decades of Katherine’s life, the very decades that I, as a reader, was perhaps most interested in. Despite this one minor quibble, Chung’s feat of imagination must be well applauded: this character is fully realized, multidimensional and certainly one we can be inspired by in these turbulent times.

 Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-tenth-muse-catherine-chung/1128811666#/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu