A book by David Leavitt and my cousins' visit managed to accomplish the impossible: they made me miss Cambridge (though a Cambridge that I've never witnessed, with Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, fancy rooms in Trinity and semi-secret societies meeting to drink and discuss the meaning of life and the future of mankind).
But the story of Ramanujan is obviously more than the tale of a genius and his life in Cambridge. It's the tale of his emigration, of his unfulfilled hopes and desires, of personal and institutional racism and, ultimately, of deep and profound unhappiness.
It obviously also helps that, even after hundreds of pages of this fictionalized biography, his figure remains shrouded in mystery (actually, arguably this book adds to the mythical aura of the mathematician).
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