Incompletezza. Una storia di Kurt Gödel

How do you get rid of a sick love, marked by constant quarrels, manipulations, escapes and returns? By finding another obsession, as if on a higher branch of the same tree: this is what Deborah Gambetta tells us in the astonishing novel you are holding in your hands, in which the encounter with the life and thought of Kurt Gödel – one of the greatest mathematicians in history, author of theorems fundamental to the entire edifice of science and technology – is the trigger for a new life, an initiation into a mysterious and fantastic universe. With the absolute devotion of someone who has to save his life, the author/narrator takes refuge in mathematics and, at the same time, in the personal, almost living knowledge of the man Gödel: only in this way will she find the key to coming to terms with the absence of meaning, the stumbling block of fate, the randomness of human events. Incompletezza is a unique novel in its successful fusion of two great and apparently opposing themes: the search for a final material passion that would deprive us of it forever, on the one hand, and the quest for pure and abstract knowledge that only contemplates itself, on the other. Kurt Gödel’s supernatural and very human genius can then become for the narrator and the reader a new Virgil, a guide to a possible meaning, to a fragile but authentic order of life and the world.