Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 12 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
The author Malba Tahan is a fictional character, a pen name, and the book is set in Arabia as a mixture of One Thousand and One Nights and a maths book. It is composed of lovely little stories and, with each chapter of a few pages, it introduces a mathematical idea along with a story about travelling through the Arab world.
Your first choice is in Portuguese.
A fascinating property of maths is that it is totally international and never goes out of date. So if you write a maths classic it is a classic for ever, everywhere. This Brazilian book links my past life in Brazil with maths. The literal translation of the Portuguese title is ‘The Man Who Calculated’ but the English version is called The Man Who Counted. There are editions in many other languages too.
The author Malba Tahan is a fictional character, the pen name of Júlio César de Mello e Sousa, and the book is set in Arabia as a mixture of One Thousand and One Nights and a maths book – it’s coming out of the most populous Catholic country in the world and yet it’s as much a love story to Arab culture as to maths itself. There were lots of Arab immigrants in Brazil and they love Arab culture – one of the most popular fast food chains is called Habib’s. The story here is presented as if the author, whom I believe only went to Lisbon once and virtually never left Brazil, has just stumbled upon or discovered this Arab text.
A bit like the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?
Exactly. It is composed of lovely little stories and, with each chapter of a few pages, it introduces a mathematical idea along with a story about travelling through the Arab world. For example, one chapter shows you how to make every number between one and ten just using four fours because the narrator meets someone who shows him this trick.
This is also a brilliant piece of international cultural history because Brazil is a country in which very few people read books, in which everyone is obsessed with sport. Yet when this book came out in the 1950s, Malba Tahan, which is a pen name, became as famous as any of the footballers. He was huge. So in Brazil when I told friends, ‘I’m now working on maths,’ they all said, ‘Oh, you must read Malba Tahan.’ And friends who were kids during that era said, ‘Oh, I remember my parents reading it to me’ – it’s almost like Alice in Wonderland in that it is one of the things that makes people feel nostalgic about their childhood. My Brazilian copy is the 74th edition.
It’s easy and it’s fun but any adult would love it. An international classic.
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Alex Bellos is a journalist. He lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1998-2003 writing about Brazil for The Guardian, where he wrote Futebol, a book about Brazilian culture and the country’s obsession with the world’s most popular sport. His latest book, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (published in the US as Here’s Looking at Euclid), has just been awarded the first ever special commendation in the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.
