C’est la première fois où j’écris la critique d’un livre en
anglais. Je ne sais pas où la publier, alors je poste sur mon blog français
parmi mes autres articles en français. C’est un bon livre et je recommande.
The devotion of Suspect X
One of the
things which satisfy me recently is the decision to read this book. And it’s
the very first time I want to write a book review in English, so I don’t know
where to publish it, so I just post on my French blog among my other articles
in French.
The author
is Japanese, and I admit that the translation from Japanese into English was
well done. Partly because of the writing style of the author, the story is easy
to understand, simple but, as always, the simplest thing touches the heart more
easily. He uses the murder as the background, to talk about deeper things,
about slices of life, about human, and about a lot of conflicts that everybody
faces. The conflict is that, nothing, no one, is extremely good or extremely
bad. He uses math as the core to build the crime, it’s surprising enough, and
absolutely logical !
“Things
would be different if there were even one piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit,
but there’s nothing. It’s perfect.”
Finally,
the story ending is obsessing, as many readers comment. Because, I think it
happens in everyone’s life, many choices, many decisions are really, really,
really hard to be made. It’s just, so hard.
Below are
some quotes from the book.
“He was like the thin crack in her apartment
wall. She knew it was there, but she had never paid it that much attention. It
just wasn’t worth paying attention to.”
(I like
the way the author compares the thought on someone with the crack in the wall)
“Murder is
murder. Everything else is just details.”
“Trust me.
Logical thinking will get us through this.”
“even when
you were at the top, there was always something higher.”
“He shouldn’t
have told her it would be over soon. Just how long was “soon”? He shouldn’t be
saying things that couldn’t be quantified like that.”
“You should
know that what I’m teaching here is only the tip of the iceberg – the doorway
into the world of mathematics. If you don’t even know where the door is, how
can you ever expect to be able to walk through it? Of course, you don’t have to
walk through it unless you want to. All I’m testing here is whether or not you
know where the doorway is. I’m giving you choices.”
“Every year
there was someone who asked why they had to study math.” (so trueeee)
“Theories
and logic are all very well, but intuition’s one of the best weapons in a
detective’s arsenal.”
“The
solutions he looks for in his work are always the simplest. He doesn’t start a
problem by looking for many answers at once. And he always chooses a simple
approach to get where he’s going. That’s why he is so good at what he does.
There’s no indecision, and he doesn’t give up over trifling obstacles. It’s
great for mathematics, but not so great for day-to-day life. You can’t always
shoot for one result, for all or nothing.”
“Giving
students tests just so they could earn points had nothing to do with the true
meaning of mathematics. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t math, and it wasn’t
even education.”
“Too bad
it’s impossible for you and me ever to be off the clock. Like it or not, we’re
stuck in the cogs of society. Take them away, and our clocks spin out of
control. Or rather, we are the cogs in the clockworks. No matter how much we
might think we are off standing on our own, we’re not. It gives us a certain
measure of security, to be sure, but it also means we’re not entirely fre.”
“which was
more difficult, formulating an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem.”
“The
question of whether or not it’s as easy to determine the accuracy of another
person’s result as it is to solve the problem yourself.”
“Killing a
person to hide a murder – who would think of something like that?”
