Publisher's Synopsis
In the spring of 2009, New York University's journal of creative writing, Washington Square Review, published a selection from Euler's Conjecture to much critical acclaim, featuring it at the issue's launching party. This novel constitutes an apocryphal diary of the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, tracing his reflections from the time of his imprisonment at Vincennes to his legendary confrontation with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler at the court of Catherine the Great. Devotees of historical fiction will not find satisfaction in these pages. Instead, a furiously strange mind, prone to fits of merciless humor and anachronistic embellishments, has constructed a delightful maze for his readers around the problem of humanity's simultaneous fear of and attraction toward the problem of the infinite. Human beings may be blind when it comes to life's ultimate questions, yet Bruno Estañol hints that the greatest legacy of the Enlightenment resides in how its most ingenious figures managed to accustom their eyes to the dark. Bruno Estañol has received two national prizes for literature in Mexico, having authored numerous strange and tragicomic novels and short story collections, among them Fata Morgana and Passiflora Incarnata. A congenital writer of fiction, he also holds degrees in medicine and neuroscience from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Johns Hopkins Medical School, which explains his parallel dedication to scientific research.
