The Pythagorean murders

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The Pythagoras murders (in the Spanish original Crímenes imperceptibles ) is a 2003 crime novel by the Argentine writer and mathematician Guillermo Martínez . The novel, which was awarded the Premio Planeta for Argentina, is about a series of mysterious "invisible murders" (so the original title) in the English university city of Oxford . The English book edition and the film version from 2008 were based on the setting ( The Oxford Murders ). This was followed by the new German edition entitled The Oxford Murders , which came on the book market in 2020 together with the follow-up volume The Alice in Wonderland case .

action

The protagonist and first-person narrator , a 22-year-old Argentinian math student, is coming to Oxford University on a scholarship . The four weeks of carefree settling-in ended abruptly when he, together with the mathematician Arthur Seldom, whom he admired, found his landlady dead - murdered. Inspector Petersen's suspicions initially fall on Beth, her granddaughter and sole heir. Seldom, however, a family friend, testifies that he received a message announcing the deed - as "number one in a row" - at a time when Beth was already at an orchestra rehearsal.

Henceforth, a potential serial killer is in the focus of the investigative trio that the inspector and both mathematicians temporarily form. In fact, “numbers two and three” are not long in coming; As in the first case, victims are elderly and frail people. First it hits, almost unnoticed, a bedridden patient in the local hospital, and then in public the percussionist from Beth's orchestra during a concert at which the “trio” is also present. Strangely enough, these are again almost "invisible murders" (the title of the novel in the original); One might not have looked for unnatural causes of death if Seldom had not received additional correspondence.

The tetraktys in geometric representation

At least a pattern is now emerging. The previous three symbols - circle, fish, triangle - refer to the Pythagoreans and the fourth suggest a Tetraktys . Petersen then decides, together with the police psychologist, on a new strategy. Since they imagine the perpetrator as a mathematician who feels himself to be a misunderstood genius and who challenges a universally recognized luminary (Seldom) with his series of murders , they want to give him the "triumph" through a prominently placed newspaper article attesting to his outstanding intelligence that he supposedly longs for, in the hope of pacifying him and stopping the series of murders. That fails. Just a few days later, ten dead children were mourned when a school bus fell from a bridge - deliberately brought about by the driver, who was also clearly identified as the sender of a warning message with a Tetraktys.

His intention to kill is explained by his obvious motive: He wants to help his terminally ill daughter to get a donor lung. That works. Since he also dies in the "accident", whether intentionally or not, the case for the police is closed at this point. Not so for the protagonist. He suspects that there could be something completely different behind the first three cases. Seldom confirms this to him: only the first death was murder, committed by Beth, who had turned to him, Seldom, as her possible biological father, seeking help; in order to build up the fiction of a serial offender, he then faked two murders that weren't at all, but now has to live with the fact that he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of eleven people caused by a free rider. - The protagonist keeps Seldom's confession to himself; only after his death, according to the opening words of the novel, does he reveal it.

Leitmotif and action

Parents who are ready to do anything to protect their children - that is both the central literary leitmotif of the novel and the most important criminal motive. In the case of the child murderer, the criminal energy triggered by his protective instinct undoubtedly reaches monstrous proportions: he lets ten (strange) children die in order to save one (his own). There are therefore good reasons to also portray it as a monster. The author doesn't do that. He constructs - in order to authenticate, not justify his actions - an indeed extraordinary constellation: the father only has this one daughter who is terminally ill and needs a donor lung, which has already been refused twice, and whose clock is now running out dramatically; He is also a widower, apparently completely isolated, desperate and fixated on her salvation, and Martínez exacerbates this already extreme situation: In the course of his reading of antiquity, the man falls under the spell of the theories and practices allegedly represented by the Pythagoreans in relation to children with Down syndrome and, as a driver of a school bus with such children (!), into a daily temptation - a temptation to which he finally succumbs when he reads in the newspaper that a serial killer is at work, in his Muster exactly fits the deed he has in mind ...

In view of this, it is understandable that even the inspector tends to make a mild judgment about the (alleged) serial killer and, as the father of a daughter, admits that one can never know "what one is capable of for a child". Little does he suspect that his counterpart - Seldom - is who he is actually looking for and who has committed a criminal offense for the same motive. Its offense consists in covering up a murder; he doesn't become a serial killer, he just fakes one. His two “victims” die a natural death before he becomes active: with the hospital patient by faking an injection, and with the musician by improvising - he uses, like the bus driver after him, a surprising opportunity, because one of the dead percussionist's instruments is the triangle , a perfect match for the triangle that is its turn as a mathematical symbol . The motive that drives Seldom to cover up Beth's murder seems in the same way "simple" as that of the bus driver, but is no less difficult in its own way. Seldom's attachment to Beth's parents stems from the fact that he and his first wife were close friends with them from a young age. A car accident, which Seldom was the only one of the four to survive, put an end to this. It is obvious that from this alone a kind of father-daughter relationship developed between him and Beth. Interestingly, it may even be biological; Beth seems to interpret certain signals from her mother in this way; however, according to Seldom, none of the participants ever said a word about it - until the moment when Beth pleaded with him in writing for help, with the final word "Papa", played by her as a "trump card" and taken up by him.

The procedure, which Seldom perceived as a tactical move, shows that there are also cases in which it depends heavily on the children what parents are willing to do for them; the greater or more subtle the pressure, the greater the potential willingness to act, even criminal. At the same time, this takes responsibility for the children, at least morally; this is even more true when, like Beth, they are adults themselves. The fact that at 28 years of age she seems rather immature in this regard is shown by a statement from her that ultimately becomes a key phrase for the protagonist for his understanding of the whole. It concerns a monstrously disfigured creature who has had an accident on the street and who he suspects is a parent and a cub. When he passed him again, this time accompanied by Beth and her boyfriend, he said it was an opossum , and Beth added that the boy had probably fallen out of the bag and the mother instinctively jumped after him: “An opossum does everything to save his young. ”Her companions do not question her assertion. But that would be entirely justified. All the more reason to believe that Beth likes to interpret reality as she sees fit. Ultimately, this could also illuminate the motive for the crime. You only learn from him that she hated her grandmother, the "witch". This is not authenticated narrative. This can be an omission on the part of the author, but it can also be on purpose. If the latter is the case, it turns it into a completely contrasting figure: unlike the two mathematicians, for them finding the truth is an act of personal arbitrariness.

Reality and fiction

The Oxford murders are definitely a novel; the plot is fictitious, as is almost all of the characters. Most of the scenes, however, are borrowed from reality, as is, for example, the figure of the one-handed Argentine magician René Lavand , whose appearance is devoted to an entire chapter. Real history also includes June 23, 1993, when Andrew Wiles first presented his proof of Fermat's Great Theorem in neighboring Cambridge - a major scientific event that Martínez does not describe directly, but knows how to use it meaningfully and effectively for his plot. It is quite possible that this was also one of the main reasons why he did not send his protagonist to Oxford ten years earlier , namely at the same time as he was there himself. Apart from that, the key biographical data of the author and first-person narrator are so largely identical that he can very well be considered his alter ego .

If the criticism of Martínez certifies a “successful mixture of mathematics and mysterious murders”, this is also due in large part to the successful symbiosis of reality and fiction. An example of this is his figure of the mathematics and logic professor Arthur Seldom. Unlike his professional colleagues from the real world - from Pythagoras and Fermat to Heisenberg , Gödel , Wittgenstein , Turing and Wiles - who all play a more or less important role in the book, Seldom is of course an imaginary person. His work is also fictional. But it is based on that of its predecessors. And above all, it organically connects to the crime story told. Fiction thus helps to gain a deeper understanding of reality, even if it is "only" that of the mathematical, natural and philosophical sciences.

The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters : When describing his “primal fear”, Seldom quotes Goya almost literally.

More than once, Seldom confesses to the protagonist what he calls his "primal fear". Since his youth he has feared that his ideas and considerations could become reality. That's why he dedicated himself to mathematics. But even the refuge in a "world that has nothing to do with reality" did not permanently save him from misfortune. His constantly recurring dilemma is this: "If you make a hypothesis about the real world, you involuntarily and irreversibly introduce an active element into it that will always have its consequences." Martínez leaves it to the reader at this point to make references to it World of science. The role of the “ observer ”, which was newly understood and defined , especially with the development of quantum physics , and who cannot describe reality with sufficient accuracy without changing it, offers itself here formally.

Seldom's “hypothesis about the real world”, which “actively” implicates him in the present criminal case, begins with a very specific chapter of his magnum opus , a work on logic: the one in which he deals with criminalistics, especially serial murders. That has "its consequences". First of all, in the public perception, which is capitalized on this chapter . Then when he uses his own theories to avert evil from one person - without at the same time harming another. But in the long run, realistically, he cannot control the real world. He cannot tell the inspector what to do and what not to do without running the risk of betraying himself, nor can he prevent someone else from using his theories as a blueprint, and that without the moral standards that he himself imposed ... In the epilogue , which finally puts an ironic final point, the protagonist also has to experience that a sentence that is really harmless in his case can have "its consequences" in reality.

reception

As Marcus du Sautoy said after the English edition appeared in The Guardian :

“The mix of math and mysterious murders makes a strong cocktail. The Oxford murders are not the first thriller to combine both, but one of the first to succeed. "

- The Guardian

From today's perspective, Marcus Müntefering judges Spiegel online as follows:

“ The Oxford murders [...] was both a mystery and a meta- thriller that short-circuited mathematical theories with investigative work and ended with a punch line that is one of the most daring in literary history. It was based at the same time on  Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and on  Wittgenstein's investigations into the problem of rule-following . If you will, Martínez transformed Wittgenstein's famous sentence "What you cannot talk about, you have to be silent about it" into "If you shouldn't talk, you have to be silenced". "

- mirror online

Awards

expenditure

  • Guillermo Martínez: Crímenes imperceptibles. Booket 2006. ISBN 978-9875801578 (Spanish)
  • Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Abacus 2006. ISBN 978-0349117232 (English)
  • Guillermo Martínez: The Pythagorean Murders . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ISBN 3-8218-0950-7
  • Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020. ISBN 978-3847900474

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Since it is to be expected that the new title will establish itself in the German-speaking book market, it will also be given preference over the old one within the article.
  2. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 197
  3. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 124
  4. ↑ Marcus du Sautoy : Murder by Numbers. In: The Guardian , February 5, 2005 (English, own translation), accessed on July 13, 2020
  5. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 211
  6. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 103
  7. ↑ Marcus du Sautoy : Murder by Numbers . In: The Guardian . February 5, 2005 ( [1] ).
  8. ↑ Marcus Müntefering: Horrible void . In: Spiegel online . June 9, 2020 ( [2] ).