“Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth” by Apostolos Doxiadis et al.

I’d read about and been interested in Logicomix, a comic-book fictional history of Bertrand Russell and his struggles to clarify the foundations of logic and mathematics. My husband G. Grod is a math geek, and a fan of Russell and Kurt Godel, who is instrumental in the history, as well as Alan Turing, who plays an important role in framing the end of the narrative. I’ve become a fan by association of these great thinkers, so the subject interested me. Then when it was added to The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books I decided to buy it for G. Grod for Christmas, as a not unselfish gift that still wasn’t exactly a bowling ball with “Homer” on it.

Doxiadis seems to be the instigator for the book, but it is certainly a team effort, both in production and in narrative, since all the creators are also included in and commenting on the work, a clever method of self-reference, a logic term that Russell’s Paradox is an example of. Christos Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science and author of a book on Turing. He was consulted and involved both to confirm the broad strokes of Russell’s story and legacy, and to engage the creative team in an effort to better the book. Art and color were done by husband/wife team of Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. Interchanges among the creators frame most chapters, and offer commentary on the ambiguities in the story. Russell mostly narrates his own story through a frame of a lecture, starting with his childhood as an orphan in the severely regulated house of his grandmother and his introduction to mathematics by a charismatic tutor.e

The authors do an admirable job of portraying both the characters involved in the evolution of logic and mathematics, and in the explication of some complex examples of both, which could easily have bogged down the narrative, which instead proceeds at a lively clip. Russell is a typical hero in the classic mode: orphaned, struggling in childhood with overbearing adults, moving on to his quest (for the foundations in logic), struggling with monsters (a streak of mental illness in his family, also found frequently in his colleagues), and, as in the real world, coming to an end that is both happy and sad, depending on how one views it, but certainly complex. It’s because of Russell and his colleague’s heroic narrative that Doxiadis thought to make the story in comic-book form, which works well. The art is clear and easy to read. while also embodying at times more than one level of meaning.

In the end, though, I didn’t find this to rise as high as some exemplars of the comic-book format, like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Persepolis/Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus/Maus II by Art Spiegelman. The story is good, the art is good, both together are better than either alone, yet somehow it never became far more than the sum of its parts, as the above titles did for me. Logicomix is entertaining, provocative, educational and very good, even as I felt it didn’t quite achieve the true greatness of its subjects.

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